By now, regular readers know that most of my writing presses people to take the measure of the word us. It is an enormously powerful term, but the perennial question is whether it acquires meaning only if it also implies its opposite. I don’t think so; I don’t believe us necessarily implies them, and in my writing, I challenge readers to take this moral possibility seriously. Among other things, I expose the ubiquity of us-them thinking in daily life, and trace its connection and contribution to so many things that we (a close cousin of us) wish were otherwise.
Lately, there have been a lot of calls for unity. Unity is just us in Sunday-go-to-meetin’ clothes, so I’m all for it. In fact, I was all for it before it was a thing. But because I take the idea seriously, I also wonder what people mean when they call for unity. What does unity look like? Who should unite and how will we know when it’s happened? Turns out these are harder questions than people think.
Let’s ask first what unity is supposed to do. What is it meant to achieve? Invariably, calls for unity arise after some tragedy. Something bad happened because we are not united, and if we unite, things like this won’t happen again or will happen less often, or something like that. Here, the suspicion is that the young man who nearly blew the former President’s head off was radicalized or driven or inspired or somehow pushed to act (the mechanism is never really made clear) by our vicious cultural climate. If we “come together as a people,” 20-year-old men will no longer climb to the roof of a building and try to shoot their way into history. At least, that’s the implicit claim.
As you can see, it’s really two claims—one is a contention about the past, another is a prediction about the future. The first is that national disunity caused or at least meaningfully contributed to the attempt on Trump’s life; the second is that unity will prevent similar behavior going forward. Yet, we have no idea whether either of these claims is true. Scores of diligent journalists, along with uncountable numbers of law enforcement personnel, have scoured the available record for evidence of Crooks’s motivation, to no avail. They have collected a handful of seemingly discordant life experiences that point in confusing directions, which may say nothing more than he was young and still figuring out his place in the world. We do not know why he acted, and may never know.
And if the first claim is unknowable, the second is downright improbable. As David Wallace-Wells noted recently, “[e]leven of the last 12 presidents have endured an assassination attempt or a plot against their lives.” John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. Ronald Reagan was shot. Two different would-be assassins tried to shoot Gerald Ford in a single month. A man threw a live grenade at George W. Bush. As historians Matthew and Robert Dallek recently pointed out, at least one in four American presidents have been killed or nearly killed by assassins. At the time, no one thought these attempts signaled a crisis of national disunity, but more to the point, history supplies no reason to think that unity—whatever it means—will prevent another attempt in the future.
So much for what unity is meant to achieve. But maybe instead we should ask what unity looks like? What makes a country united? Ordinarily, when we talk about a group being united or unified, we mean sharing a common purpose or acting with a single mind. We say, “We are united in wanting to achieve X; we are unified in our desire for Y.” But what does a statement like this even mean? I think most people would agree it would be nice if we magically achieved particular outcomes. For instance, I think it would be swell if there were less gun violence, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say damn near everyone would agree with me. In fact, I can think of a lot of outcomes we’d almost all agree would be nice to achieve.
But so what? The question is whether we agree on how to achieve these outcomes. People like to say that after the attacks of September 11, the country was broadly united behind President Bush, and it is fair to say we shared a common desire to end the threat of transnational terrorism. But the unity quickly collapsed as his policies took shape, especially the disastrous war in Iraq, torture in CIA black sites, and indefinite detention without trial at Guantanamo.
Unity on ends, in other words, is meaningless without unity on means. But in a complex society, it’s silly to expect that we’ll agree on means, and disagreement is not evidence of a crisis. Sure, everyone agrees it would be nice if we had fewer shootings, but we manifestly do not have agreement on how to reach this happy state. And diversity on means is particularly to be expected in a federal system. I don’t think Montana needs to look like Maryland, and I don’t think the municipal code in Savannah, Georgia, needs to be the same as the municipal code in Santa Monica, California.
There are limits to this, of course. The Constitution guarantees that every state will maintain “a Republican form of Government,” which means New Hampshire can’t appoint a king, and the Bill of Rights guarantees certain individual liberties that transcend state boundaries. The Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel in a criminal case, for instance, means the same thing in South Carolina as it does in South Dakota. Likewise, the Commerce Clause and the congressional power to tax and spend allow the federal government to achieve some level of national uniformity. The federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, for instance, which brought a legal end to Jim Crow laws across the country, was upheld under the Commerce Clause, and the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was upheld under the power to tax.
We should fight like hell over the reach of the Constitution, which is merely another way that we disagree on means. I might think the Constitution should reach more of national life than another person; I think the Court was wrong, for instance, to overrule Roe v. Wade. But I think most people would agree that there are broad swaths of national life that are and should remain completely untouched by the Constitution. Florida doesn’t have an income tax, for example. I think that’s bad policy, but who cares what I think? If I don’t like it, I don’t have to live in Florida. Or I can move to Florida and try to change it. In a federal system, people get to vote with their feet. That, by the way, is why Texas cannot block women from leaving the state to get an abortion. Texas can no more block women from going to California for an abortion than California can block Elon Musk from taking his business to Texas. Federalism is both sword and shield.
In short, when it comes to means, disunity in a democracy is not a flaw, it’s a feature. In fact, I think the sharper the disagreement on policy choices between the major parties, the better. Sharp disagreement over policy gives voters a clear, easily understandable choice. Democracy is well-served by clearly contrasting political positions.
So, what is this thing, unity? In light of the announcement by President Biden to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the question seems more urgent than ever. Unity won’t do what it’s supposed to do, and at least as it is commonly understood, is not a desirable outcome for our democracy. Then why on earth am I so strongly in favor of it? That’s the subject of my next essay.
