Most Political Calls for "Unity" in the U.S.
Are Hallow
I was a sophomore in college when the 2004 U.S. presidential election finalized. My roommate at the time was a political science major (like me) and an intern at Mike Pence’s local congressional office. As such, he (my roommate) was able to finagle two tickets for the President George W. Bush’s second Inauguration in January. Much to the dismay of his girlfriend-at-the-time (and now wife), he asked me to go with him. And off we went, skipping class for a 36-hour excursion that included a snowstorm through West Virginia, a night spent in a dorm room at Georgetown with a friend of mine, and an opportunity to stand in the huge crowd for Bush’s second swearing-in.
Most people can acknowledge that Bush wasn’t a great speaker, though in my opinion he was better than usual that day. He spoke in universals; he made broad appeals. One thing that was true about his speech in general was that it tended to have conviction, if not exactly clear articulation. He seemed to believe what he said, even when he was wrong, which was often enough. His words that day included the word “unity” a couple of times, as well as his thoughts on the “union.” These pleas coming, of course, after a 35-point electoral win that included victories in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, but after losing in places like New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
I know, now, that unity is a common-enough theme to include in your political speeches during a couple specific times on the campaign trail and one that may or may not have anything to do with a campaign: 1) after you win your party’s primary election, 2) after you win the general election, and/or 3) after there’s some sort of “attack” or tragedy. In the first instance, this language trope attempts to gather in party insiders who may have preferred another candidate, in the second it tries to assure those who didn’t vote for the winner that the governance that’s about to happen will keep them in mind anyway, and in the third it plants a supposed obligation of our own loyalty toward the regime in whatever it’s about to do (sometimes an act of war).
We’ve seen this unity talk from both political parties lately. On the Friday after the assassination attempt on the former president’s life, I happened to catch part of his RNC convention speech, which described Trump’s own experience of the shooting in Butler, PA, and, yes, his appeals to so-called “unity.” He seemed more emotional than I’ve maybe ever heard or seen him, and while I trusted some of that emotion (he could have died!), I trusted less this attempt to use such an important event to draw loyalty unto himself.
The Democrats, meanwhile, have been making their own appeal as they switch candidates at the last minute and wisely anticipate the prospect of conflict and hurt feelings about who gets put forward and who doesn’t. It looks like it’s probably all but a done deal in favor of the current vice president, but there are plenty of ways this could go badly. And just like with Trump and the assassination attempt, I trust some of the emotion around the event itself (Biden’s withdrawal largely because of his age and health) while holding up my guard about how the event itself will be used in relationship to the rest of us.
Maybe the appeals themselves would mean more if they were ever made in a way that wasn’t so blatantly an attempt at appeasing those who are outside the realm of political decision-making. Or if they were made, for example, while the candidates were up there duking it out over differences in priorities and values and political goals. It is possible, of course, to criticize constructively from a place of love, though that’s hardly our norm in politics.
Many of our differences are here to say, and they’re more to-be-expected in this weird, chaotic world than we’d like to admit. There are competing conceptions of why and how we got here, there are different ideas about how how we ought to spend our lives and use our resources, and there are unlimited ideas about how we ought to go about accomplishing the solving of a particular problem or the building up of a program, and that’s if we can agree on the identification of a particular problem. These differences in outlook and priorities often stem from differences in life experience and the culture of what immediately surrounds a person. Our tensions, it should be little surprise, then, often manifest as democratic stagnation. This is the situation we usually find ourselves in, though our us-versus-them, in/out framings love to believe otherwise.
I do believe in good and evil and that there is a time to fight (i.e. Hitler, slavery, etc.), but just as often we are dealing with preferences, competing visions of the good. Given such a world, we ought to spend our political energies looking for middles of Venn diagrams, little bursts of enough consensus to improve lives where we can. Thinking win-win rather than win-loss to borrow from Stephen Covey. Or “proximate justice” as another good phrase that Dr. Steven Garber has used to describe this vastly different way of doing politics than what mostly unfolds in front of us.