The presidential election campaign season has reached full momentum which means candidates for every level of office are promising, once again, to be unifiers, not dividers. The illusive goal of a unified nation has taken on the mythic importance of the Holy Grail, which as legend has it, has never been found.
I’ve always questioned what national unity would look like. Some have said it would look like what we displayed after 9/11. If I recall, we were unified in shock, outrage, grief, and desire for revenge. That event unified the collective us with shared emotions that quickly dissipated. The shared emotions were not the same as unifying behind a national purpose to face hard times at great cost. That kind of national unity requires silencing opposition and enforcing conformity. It’s the sort of unity favored by the MAGA movement. We see an example of it played out in real time in the current House of Representatives.
Democratic nations need cohesion not unity. Political cohesion creates space where competing voices can willingly find a workable way to a common cause in spite of rancorous voices from the fringe. We’ve seen examples of national cohesion in the Union of Civil War times, Britain in WWII, and the FDR, HST and DDE era. There may be others but these are the most well known.
National cohesion working toward coherent national purpose is what the Constitution, as amended, tried to define as the unique mark of American democracy. It’s a work in progress that has admitted by incremental measure the voices of those entitled to have seat, voice and vote in the public debate. The tendency has been to privilege wealth, social status, power, and the well organized. It’s not unique to the U.S. I don’t know of any truly egalitarian civilization in human history, but we have done better, and against greater odds, than most others. The U.S. is a heterogeneous not homogeneous society. We have engaged in battle with every form of prejudice and racism, sometimes violently to forge a better understanding of what it is to be American. It’s an unstable understanding. Each wave of “people not like us” has threatened the image of who we thought we were. Indeed, those “waves of others” have changed for the better who we are becoming.
The MAGA march toward national unity promises to put a stop to unwanted change, and restore power to the elect few who believe their rightful place is dominance over others. The struggle for cohesion works for the ever evolving coherency of national purpose. Cohesion does not demonize others whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless, organized or not. It does not aspire to social or economic equality but it does demand accountability from the wealthy and powerful. It is intent on demolishing barriers to social, political and economic mobility.
There is a biblical injunction to bear one another’s burdens. It means not only to help bear the burdens of those who need help, but to receive from them the help needed to bear our own. The difficulty is that we too easily see the help we think another needs and too often impose it on them. At the same time, our mental myopia cannot recognize the help we need and to see the other as the source of that help. It’s a difficulty resolved only in mutually honest conversation that sets assumptions aside in favor of discovery. When that measure becomes a coherent national purpose then the way to a truly democratic egalitarian society will be opened.
It is a fool’s errand to think the MAGA movement can become a participant in making national cohesion workable. The movement is constructed on a foundation of imaginary and real social anxieties deliberately stoked toward violence. The forces of cohesion recognize and address the anxieties but reject in their entirety MAGA demands for coercively enforced unity. Let them rant and rage from the sidelines, but do not let them gain the power to demolish our democracy.
Note: You are correct if you detect echoes of Rowan Williams in this column.