After President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 presidential race, the Democratic Party wasted no time rallying behind Vice President Kamala Harris. Within hours, she had secured endorsements from scores of elected officials, party elites, and democratic donors, and within barely a day, she had won the support of enough Democratic delegates to guarantee her nomination on the first ballot at the Democratic Convention. In 24 hours, she raised a record $81 million. In a week, she raised $200 million.
This is what political unity looks like.
Then there is former President Donald Trump. Since Vice President Harris entered the race, he has abandoned his very brief flirtation with a different campaign style and reverted to the personal attacks for which he is so well known. At a rally in Minnesota, he called the Vice President “evil,” “unhinged,” and “sick,” and mocked her laugh and demeanor. At a speech in North Carolina, he said she was “a radical left lunatic.” Among other personal slanders, he has insulted her as “crazy,” “nuts,” and “dumb as a rock,” and implied that she would be a weak negotiator on the world stage because of her appearance.
This is what political disunity looks like.
Of the two, which is better for democracy?
***
Some of the recent support for Harris no doubt represents genuine enthusiasm for the Vice President and her candidacy. I count myself in this camp; I have been a fan since long before she was on the national scene, though some of her positions on criminal justice have given me pause. But some of the support she enjoys probably represents a capitulation to crisis and a commentary on the sense of urgency within the Democratic Party. With the election barely 100 days away, many Democrats rightly feel the Party does not have the luxury of a protracted and divisive nominating process and Convention.
So, if you’re a Democrat, this unity looks like a great thing. Democrats across the country are breathing a collective sigh of relief, both that President Biden has withdrawn and that the Party has quickly united behind Vice President Harris. And maybe this sort of unity is a good thing for the country as a whole. The last time we saw it on a national scale was immediately after 9/11, and Americans of a certain age look back wistfully on the post-9/11 moment and ask why that unity disappeared so quickly and how it might be restored. Respondents routinely tell pollsters they want to see more bipartisan political cooperation and less inter-party squabbling and bickering. In fact, the apparent inability of Congress to achieve this sort of unity and “get things done” is one of the reasons politicians are held in such low regard.
Still, though this lightning-fast display of consensus might serve the immediate interests of the Democratic Party, I hope you can see it is not something we should want to see very often, either for a party or the country. Unity of this sort emerges only when there is an emergency that all but compels group members to bite their tongue and work shoulder-to-shoulder. But in a healthy democracy, people ought not bite their tongue. Quite the opposite, they ought to air their differences. They should reflect deeply on what matters to them, and express themselves freely and without fear of official reprisal. That’s what the First Amendment is for, and none of us wants to live in a world where this liberty does not exist. Unity that emerges only from the looming threat of catastrophe is not good for us. Yes, it happened very briefly after September 11, but it hardly needs saying that crises like that are not a good thing.
If democracy is not well-served by the sort of unity now present in the Democratic Party, at least not in the long run, are we stuck with the sort of disunity represented by Trump’s particularly personal attacks? Absolutely not.
We are all familiar with the rise of polarization, but I want to draw attention to an aspect of it that is distinctly dangerous. Especially since 2016, there has been a dramatic rise in the percent of Americans who now view their partisan opposites as morally defective. In 2016, fewer than half of Republicans described Democrats as immoral. Yet only six years later, the number had climbed to nearly three in four. Over the same period, the percentage of Democrats who viewed Republicans as immoral jumped from 35% to 63%.
And the negative polarization is not just about immorality. A majority of both parties say their partisan opposites are unintelligent, and large majorities say they are close-minded and dishonest. In short, and across the board, the extent to which Americans view their partisan opposites as not just mistaken on matters of policy, but as bad people has skyrocketed.
Contrast this with a now iconic moment in October 2008, a month before the election between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. At a campaign rally in Minnesota, a woman told McCain she couldn’t trust Obama because he was “an Arab.” McCain took the microphone from her, shook his head, and said, “No ma’am, he’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”
A healthy democracy ought to welcome “disagreements on fundamental issues.” In fact, as I said in a previous essay, the sharper the disagreement the better, so that democratic participants have clear and distinct policy choices. But at all costs, we must focus our political energy on the policy and resist the temptation to also level personal attacks on the person or people behind it, which makes collaborative deliberation and compromise—the lifeblood of a healthy democracy—all but impossible.
I believe, for instance, that we would all be better off with much stricter gun control. But I also recognize that tens of millions of people are responsible gun owners who have never misused a firearm in their life, and who get great personal satisfaction out of owning a gun. For me, debate about gun control begins from the premise that when a person stakes out a position in favor of gun rights, the response must be to the policy and not the person.
And frankly, I can’t think of any mainstream policy position for which my view would be different. I disagree strongly with countless conservative positions. Abortion. Trans rights. National security. Criminal justice. Housing policy. Climate policy. Economic policy. Voting rights. Support for public education. Views on the national debt. Immigration reform. Policing. Funding for innovation. Regulation of Wall Street. The list goes on and on. But in all of these, the fact that I disagree with someone who takes the diametrically opposite policy position tells me nothing about their personal morality.
In fact, if I’m completely honest, I would say I don’t really care about their personal morality and don’t see why anyone should.
Notably, this is true even when I am attacked personally for my views. I am often criticized in very personal terms for my civil rights work, especially my work defending detainees at Guantanamo. But the existence of Guantanamo is simply bad policy, and I can criticize that policy without resorting to tit-for-tat toward misguided folks who think my work makes me an agent of the devil.
If I am right about all this, then we can readily see the proper place for unity in a healthy democracy. It is not the artificial unity that we now see in the Democratic Party and that we saw in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Instead, it is the unity implicit in Senator McCain’s remarks at the rally in Minnesota. It is a unity that renders personal morality irrelevant. The person opposite us might be a cretin or they might be a saint. But do not complain to me of their personal morality. In a healthy democracy, none of that matters.