Biden’s quixotic and problematic quest for American unity

In his inaugural address, exactly two weeks removed from an attempted coup by violent insurgents, U.S. President Joe Biden called for an end to the “uncivil war that pits red against blue.” “Unity,” he told the nation “is the path forward.”

Biden has sung the same tune throughout his campaign, repeatedly stating his intention to heal the divisions plaguing American politics and life.

Although soothing on the surface, Biden’s calls for unity are damaging to both Democratic aspirations and a healthy political culture. This is because they are feeding one of the most persistent and pernicious myths in American politics: the existence of a national consensus.

This myth holds that most Americans share a basic unanimity of sentiment. Divisions occur when ambitious politicians and their supporters deliberately disrupt that unanimity. By artificially dividing public opinion, politicians can win and hold power.

The myth of American consensus is as old as the nation itself. It originated with the first citizens of the United States, who viewed political parties as evil and rejected the concept of a loyal opposition. Rather than understanding party conflict as a competition in which each side vied for power in a series of elections, Americans saw their political opponents as enemies who inflamed public opinion for their own gain. Each party aimed to destroy the other and restore the national consensus.

While Americans eventually warmed to the legitimacy of political parties, the notion that partisanship sows unnecessary division has, of course, persisted.

But partisanship does not create division, it channels it. And that can be a good thing. Honest and substantive partisan debate ensures that multiple viewpoints are heard and that compromise is attainable. Partisan conflict is how nations build consensus, not destroy it.

The problem is that the myth of American consensus has turned partisanship into tribalism. By casting the opposing party as a disruptive and illegitimate fringe, Americans make meaningful debate and compromise all but impossible. The solution is not a Sisyphean search for unity, a truce in the “war that pits red against blue,” but an embrace of partisanship as an integral part of the political process.

American consensus has proved elusive to all who have sought it because it is not real.

And Democrats’ insistence that unity is both achievable and worth pursuing has only weakened them. It is why calls for bipartisanship are always about Democrats appeasing Republicans and not the other way around. It is why the Republican rejoinder to almost any Democratic action is that it is divisive.

If Biden and the Democrats hold any hope of enacting the progressive changes and structural reforms the nation so badly needs, they must abandon the fallacy of national unity. Imagine the things Sisyphus could have accomplished had he not been condemned to fruitlessly push a boulder up a hill. Shira Lurie