February 8, 2008
In Praise of Political Disunity
Barack Obama has made the promise of national unity the focal point of his campaign. That is not a particularly novel campaign theme. As Ilya Somin reminds us, George W. Bush also promised that he would be a "uniter, not a divider." And there are more sinister uses of unity to consider. "Nationalists, socialists, fascists, and communists" have all made effective use of unity. "Remember 'One People, One Fuehrer, One Reich?'" asks Somin, a professor of law at George Mason University. In other words, the ideal of unity has a long and sordid history.
But what explains the seemingly timeless allure of unity? "The popularity of unity themes is in part related to rational political ignorance and voters' lack of incentive to consider the issues carefully and systematically," Somin surmises. "Because voters don't have much incentive to consider policy issues in detail, they often fail to get beyond the warm, fuzzy feelings that appeals to unity inspire. If voters were more sophisticated in their thinking, they would not yield so easily to this temptation."
And as Somin explains in a post at the Volokh Conspiracy, it is a dangerous temptation.
The ideal of unity is antithetical to democracy itself, which relies on constant competition and division between parties. When democracy works well, it is precisely because of our divisions, which check the power of incumbents and ensure their replacement by their opponents if the voters decide they have screwed up badly enough. If we really value unity for its own sake, perhaps dictatorship or one-party oligarchy would be a better form of government.
Evan Goldstein | Posted on Friday February 8, 2008 | Permalink
This is an example of absurd conflation. National unity that is ethnocentric and nativist, used to intimidate and control, and to squash dissent, as in Nazism and fascism, is one thing, but it is not what Obama proposes.
I have not heard Obama use the term “national unity.” He speaks of “one America,” by which he means having civil discourse that transcends sociological categories and promotes a national purpose. This is substantially different from the totalitarian model (which, in fact, resembles more what the Republicans do when they question the patriotism of war dissenters, or exhibit ethnocentrism in their approach to immigration).
— /case hardened Feb 8, 03:27 PM #
If enough people vote for Obama, then we can pass a law outlawing Republicans, put ‘em on a train, and send them to Poland.
— marci Feb 8, 04:15 PM #
Jim Wright, a fine fine man, was targeted by Newt Gingrich, who destroyed his career, as part of getting Republicans mean enough to get into power and stay there. Newt pioneered impeachment for sexual pecadillo, in Clinton’s case, for identical reasons. Newt pioneered “let the old timers eat dirt” as a tactic to shut down government to limit spending by democrats. In all these cases, a Newt campaign, premised on a new aggressive style to “conservatism” fought mean spirited battles over principle, with collateral harm to mere people, part of the price of power and victory.
My best friend in high school found Newt in a parking lot in Georgia and turned him into a candidate, along with a 20 year plan to take over the US by turning the South republican in a generation. He did that and the US did get turned Republican largely via anti-black-ness in southerners being transmuted into Republicans-share-my-(anti-black)-values tactics.
We have all witnessed this in the news these past 20 years.
So the unity Obama is talking about is undoing this 40 year old trend—this aggressive “conservatism” that destroys whatever collaterally it happens to destroy for the “greater good” of triumph and power.
I think most readers of this publication personally witnessed the triumphalism of their own little bands of surrounding relatives and acquaintances of “conservatism” persuasion, when Bush triumphed in the last 2 elections. Many of us were taken aback as “the little people” vented their deeply felt resentments on the Northeast’s elites and the “well educated people who bossed us around in America for decades with their effete ideas stuff”.
The little people—religious bigots, anti-black southerners, super rich business people—those targeted by publishers of mass market paperbacks—have gotten their triumph, have learned how to play mean, have learned to accept collateral damage as the price of power.
Obama wants to turn the page back on all that. He cannot do that. But there are lots of people sick of what Newt Gingrich did to the US, empowering the least educated segments, so that having had pure power, under Bush, and having witnessed a small part of the consequences of “their ways” being installed in world affairs, somewhat chastened by super-republican-deficits, super-republican-unwinable-wars, super-republican-tax/regulation-cuts-for-the-rich, super-republican-no-rich-child-left-behind, they all might, we vainly hope, become a little “educated” themselves. Vain hope, vain Obama, vain democrats for tolerating these hopes. It will not happen. Bad currency drives out good. America is no longer worthy of our respect. It is a city in a dump, not on a hill and it is not the leaders who betray her, it is the people who install wicked rulers. America is the world’s problem not the world’s solution. She is a personal embarrassment to us all.The American idea is still there—as a vantage point and critique on American reality. In that there is some small measure of hope. But the measure of hope there shrank immeasurably in the last 8 years.
— Richard Tabor Greene Feb 8, 04:41 PM #
Of course we need political diversity. We need open oppositional parties in the U. S., Europe, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, North Korea, and every country in the world. That is obvious.
Along with this essential idea, democracy must mean more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. In other words, the sheep must have the open opportunity to challenge the majority and the entrenched power elite and, failing to succeed, freely leave the scene.
— for political diversity Feb 9, 09:01 AM #
It is the left wing of the democratic party that is anti-semitic and would therefore be quite comfortable in Poland.
— Marty Feb 11, 08:34 AM #