Unity eludes Americans because we have forgotten what it means.
Unity eludes Americans because we have forgotten what it means.
A mericans in our time feel divided and estranged, and yearn to be more unified. Yet we have lost sight of what unity involves in a complex free society. We think it’s both easier and harder than it really is — imagining that greater cohesion could quickly solve our biggest problems, but that it would require us to put aside our disagreements. This is wrong on both counts. Unity requires constant work toward negotiated common action across lines of difference. It isn’t a peaceful state of bliss, but a demanding way of life. And our political tradition and its institutions could teach us how to live it, if we let them.
American leaders now routinely give vent to simplistic misconceptions of togetherness. In his inaugural address, in 2017, Donald Trump said, “When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.” Four years later, at his own inauguration, Joe Biden agreed. “We must meet this moment as the United States of America,” Biden said. “If we do that, I guarantee you we will not fail.” This is what the rhetoric of a divided society sounds like: vague, impossible notions of unity as a silver bullet. If everyone agreed with me, there would be nothing in our way.
To address our divisions more effectively, we should start from a more realistic understanding of cohesion in a diverse democracy. And we don’t have to look far. There is a profound and practical idea of unity implicit in our constitutional system, which we should work to recover: In a free and therefore diverse society, unity does not mean thinking alike; unity means acting together. The difference is crucial.
The U.S. Constitution was crafted by a group of politicians keenly aware of the dangers of faction and division. James Madison, one of its foremost architects, understood particularly well the tension at the heart of the American quest for solidarity. He could see that simple agreement was not how free societies could ever work. “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” he wrote in Federalist No.10.
Americans do have some basic principles in common, especially those articulated in the Declaration of Independence. But while those widely espoused ideals impose some moral boundaries on our political life, there is enormous room for disagreement within those boundaries — including disagreement about exactly what the Declaration’s principles actually mean. And our politics is unavoidably organized around our disputes.
But just a week later, in Federalist No. 14, Madison pleaded with Americans to “hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness.” Disagreement is unavoidable, but it need not keep us apart.
How could that work? How can we act together when we don’t think alike? This is the core question to which our Constitution is an answer. Again and again, in its various institutional forms, and especially in some of those we now find most frustrating, the Constitution offers ways of compelling competition and negotiation among divergent factions and driving them toward common action.
That kind of common action is not always cordial. It is contentious, arduous, and confrontational. It requires dealing with people we disagree with, which can be slow and unpleasant. But it is directed to finding mutually acceptable accommodations precisely by recognizing that we disagree yet belong together.
Some contemporary critics of the Constitution insist that factional divisions should just be resolved by simple majority votes, and dismiss our system’s complex arrangement of overlapping institutions as undemocratic. But the Constitution is more sensitive than they are to the dangers of social division. It accepts the premise that only majority rule can legitimate public action, but also embodies the countervailing insight — unavoidable to anyone familiar with the history of democracy, and of the United States — that majorities can sometimes act oppressively, too. And it recognizes that narrow majorities, in particular, are often just ephemeral artifacts of the election systems that created them. So it demands that popular consensus be demonstrated by multiple, durable, and reasonably broad majorities that present themselves in institutions elected by different constituencies in different ways.
Those institutions are purposely put in one another’s paths. Winning the presidency or a congressional majority in America does not mean winning all the power of our government but winning a seat at the bargaining table. Our different states are also permitted to address some divisive questions in different ways at the same time. And courts are expected not so much to resolve the disagreements that divide us as to constrain everyone to their proper roles, so that elected officials can hammer out differences while basic rights are protected.
A key insight underlying this approach is that facilitating broad majorities requires frustrating narrow ones. That’s why our system can be so infuriating in an era when narrow majorities are all we have. That frustration drives too many to reject the Constitution as a useless relic, unsuited to our times.
But in reality, the Constitution was designed for exactly the kind of problem we face. The frustration it produces should spur us to reacquaint ourselves with the lost art of coalition-building, which lays at the heart of the Constitution’s vision of American political life.
Coalition-building is how majorities emerge and grow, and how people act together when they don’t think alike. It requires a willingness to work with fellow citizens with whom you share some common need or commitment even if you don’t share other views. Our culture-war politics implicitly finds such cooperation across difference illegitimate or even morally unserious. Each party’s primary voters want their politicians to remain firm and vehement in disagreement. Even in Congress, an institution plainly intended for coalition-building, many members now recoil from this basic purpose of their jobs.
Our constitutional system stands as a rebuke to such shallow obstinacy, and our very desire for unity should move us to rediscover its logic. It should remind politicians that productive negotiation, not performative sloganeering, is the way to effectively fight for their constituents.
And it suggests that contemporary America’s problem is not that we have forgotten how to agree, but that we have forgotten how to disagree. Even the most politically active Americans today spend very little time engaged in any way with people of opposing views. Instead, we spend all our time with people we agree with talking about the people on the other side. Our elected leaders too rarely see themselves as empowered to negotiate. Instead, they show open contempt for their political opponents, and even for the constitutional order itself, and are rewarded for it by their voters.
That means our system is falling short. It requires reform. And pointing to the Constitution’s aims and insights is not an alternative to such reform, but a way to make it more effective. It can show us what problem needs solving.
Many political reformers today, especially on the left, want to make our system less dependent on bargaining and negotiation, and more pliable by narrow, momentary majorities. They want to make Congress more like a European parliament, to consolidate more power in the presidency, and even to make courts more amenable to public pressure. They often argue that such reforms would serve democracy by making public officials more accountable to majorities.
But the fact is that we are living in an era of deadlock. We have not had a durable majority party in three decades. We need help from our system of government not so much in empowering majorities as in creating and broadening them. Reforms of our system should therefore strive to make factional competition, negotiation, and coalition-building more likely, not less necessary.
They should, for instance, look to alter some of the incentives that confront elected officials by experimenting with reforms to primary elections that could encourage a more coalitional mindset. They should channel the ambitions of members of Congress toward legislative bargaining and not political performance art, by empowering congressional committees over party leaders and reforming budget rules. They should strengthen American federalism by disentangling state and national authorities, not further intermixing them. They should emphasize the president’s role in providing stability for our system of government, rather than treating the chief executive as the tribune of the people or the partisan in chief. And they should look to courts to enforce the rules of the game, not to stand in for the players.
Such reforms would not require us to amend the Constitution. On the contrary, they would let the Constitution amend our civic vices and correct the corrosive habits into which our political culture has fallen.
None of this would make America unstoppable, or guarantee that we would never fail. But understanding what unity actually involves and how our Constitution could help us achieve it could offer a path out of the fatalism and despair of this moment in our politics. It would help us grasp that solidarity requires not unanimity but a constitutional politics of bargaining and accommodation — of acting together even when we do not think alike.