“Unity is great, but freedom is better”
The way to bring America together is to fix it
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In his simple yet sonorous victory speech, Joe Biden — America’s Pop Pop and now president-elect — made a plea for healing. “Let’s give each other a chance,” he said.
That line stood out to me. Let’s give each other a chance. It is a reminder that the violence, the abuse, of the Trump years wasn’t only one-to-many, flowing from the top down. It was also all-against-all, ricocheting horizontally, touching us all. I will admit if you will admit that many of us changed for the worse in these years, if not by choice. We became harsher, shorter with those we disagreed with, more prone to bad faith, more suspicious, more stressed, less magnanimous even to those who are allies.
This was the vortex of Trumpism. In fighting him, you risked becoming like him. You couldn’t beat him without stepping onto his field.
And so a question that will dawn with the Biden years is whether, in addition to this change of high leadership, we will change.
Will we argue differently? Will we succumb less often to bad faith? Will we assume better of those who share fundamental values with us but take different routes?
Already, on cue, there have been public, and controversial, calls for gestures of unity.
“Now is the time for every Biden supporter to reach out to one person who voted for Trump,” the political scientist Ian Bremmer wrote in a (much-maligned) tweet:
Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and a possible appointee in the incoming administration, took a more omnidirectional approach:
There have also been the inevitable skirmishes within the Democratic Party’s ranks. In a so-called “family meeting” after the election, some party moderates lashed out at their progressive colleagues for, in their view, pushing the party too far to the left. And one of the party’s brightest stars, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, argued back that it was the moderates senselessly stoking division: “When we kind of come out swinging not 48 hours after Tuesday, when we don’t even have solid data yet, pointing fingers and telling each other what to do, it deepens the division in the party, and it’s irresponsible,” she told Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “It’s irresponsible to pour gasoline on these already very delicate tensions in the party.”
Here are questions all this talk left me with: Is unity even the proper goal right now? Or is unity more properly understood as something that will emerge if the new administration sets about measurably improving people’s lives and repairing the country’s perilously weak institutions? Is unity in the face of an ongoing autocratic attempt foolishness?
Yvette Simpson, chief executive of the Democracy for America political action committee and an ABC News political commentator, offered an eloquent counterpoint to the current unity fetish: “Unity is great, but freedom is better,” she said. “And there’s a part of this population that has sacrificed their freedom time and time again for unity, and they’re tired of it. Yes, we want to have compromise. Yes, we want bipartisanship. But it shouldn’t cost people wages and healthcare and education. And so if you’re asking us to come together and that means my world doesn’t change, the people whose world needs to change doesn’t change, I don’t want that kind of unity.”
Many of the present discussions presume disunity to be a cause of our democratic decay. But disunity may be better understood as a symptom of a diseased body politic. We should treat the underlying disease.
Yesterday the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to acknowledge the election results and actually boosted Trump’s conspiracy theorizing. These are not people you need to reach out to. These are people you need to constrain through law, as much as possible, and beat overwhelmingly.
Perhaps the way to bring the country together is not to bring the country together but to fix it. Perhaps the way to heal divisions is not to heal divisions but to get the government working again. Perhaps the way to get people to believe in science isn’t to get people to believe in science but to roll out a vaccine successfully, fairly, and efficiently. Perhaps the antidote to the poison of this era isn’t the active pursuit of kumbaya but good, old-fashioned progress: steady and palpable life betterment, and the repair of institutions so they can’t be hijacked again.
When I asked Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian and author of “These Truths: A History of the United States,” about her vision for a Biden administration, she answered at two opposite ends of the spectrum of ambition. First, she told me about a project her students had done to draft new constitutional amendments — a new voting-rights law being their most popular idea. And then she brought up the need for immediate assistance amid the pandemic. She said that, if she were in a Biden administration, that would be her focus: answering the crisis, and using those answers to buy space for bigger things, and using those bigger things to buy space for even bigger ones.
“The good government and civil discourse reforms ought to come out of the doing of something, doing it right, and doing it well,” she told me. “F.D.R., days after he was inaugurated, undertook to address the banking emergency, beginning with that first fireside chat. The good government stuff: you have to get to that, you have to, have to, have to, but you also have to earn it, and, meanwhile, you have to address the emergency.”
Our political leaders and pundits ought to heed examples like that one — and, equally, the advice that every young writer receives again and again: Don’t tell — show.
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Photo: Pool/Getty
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Everybody wants to "heal." The mainstream media tells us to "heal." The politicians who have hurt us from either side of the aisle have told us to "heal." Hell, we've been told to "heal" since Gerald Ford mandated it when he pardoned Nixon. Even elites, themselves, tell us to "heal." Even though elites are the prime candidates for villain in this country, whether it be with their dark money being funnelled to their candidate of choice or their influence over the public discourse that Anand so eloquently writes in his latest book, "Winners Take All."
No, now's not the time to heal. Now's the time to take stock, look around you at all this crap that's been happening for four years (fifty years if you take into account the gradual erosion of our rights, the prolific growth of the federal government and its power, and the general stagnation of progress that more or less stopped with everything that happened in 1968), and start making a plan for yourself and your family on how you're not going to go through this anymore.
The time is up for us to rely on our elected "leaders" to ensure the country is on the right track. Get involved somewhere in the spectrum of aid and support to our general welfare. If politics is your thing, go for it. Community assistance and support? That's good too. Me, I've been a Big Brother to underprivileged BOC (boys of color) for more than 40 years, and I work with autistic kids. That's my thing...not only because it's helpful and I'm good at it, but because I care enough to want to. But FFS, do SOMETHING other than complain and argue.
Most importantly, educate yourself and those around you, if you can or have the capability to. This incessant airing of conspiracy theories and the mainstream media reporting all this as if it's news is infuriating. For example, being told by someone at the Washington Post that there is a nest of toothless, but armed, white nationalist imbeciles in Bumfuk, Georgia who believe Anthony Fauci is Beelzebub (a shorter, older, more Italian model though) is absolutely a factor in abusing what little credibility they have left.
So, America...start reading. Start learning. Start critically thinking. Start the reasoning process. If you don't know how, ffs ask someone who knows. Let's everybody "get up to speed" to break this bottom-feeder inertia that's gripped us for so long.
And save the "healing" for later. If at all.
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The problem with discussions of 'unity' is that there must be common values, principles, and laws that we unite around. If the last 4 years have taught us anything, it's that the country is not unified around any of these elements. A third of those who voted for Trump did so because they value their stock portfolio or 401K above the sanctity of human life, equality, and justice. A third of Trump voters did so because they fear a changing world and are committed to the destruction of any progress that would lift up non-White men and women, refugees, or those born with different sexual orientations. The final third of Trump voters are those who enjoy being part of a 'rebel group' more than they identify with being an American. They span every age, sex, economic, and racial spectrum of society. They chose Trump and I've read every rationalization possible for their choice...all are unconnected to the facts. Unity is possible with people of different beliefs where such beliefs are rooted in good faith disagreements, but not where such beliefs exist in a different reality or in simple callousness and indifference to others. I don't know where this ends, but unity requires compromise, a quality that the GOP has rejected from the top down. The GOP isn't seeking understanding or unity, McConnell is inciting the base to win Georgia's 2 Senate seats, Trump and his administration want to remain in power, GOP Senators know their base would rather destroy democracy than pursue greater equality for all. Unity is a mirage.
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