American Unity Needs a New Approach

TREY DI BONA: As the chaos surrounding American politics since November 9, 2016, reaches a fever pitch, pleas for political unity across the spectrum have become something of a refrain. Be it talking heads writing policy prescriptions on cable news, Amy Klobuchar trying to tread water, or Donald Trump’s State of the Union address (of all things), leaders from all across the country and from all walks of life seem to have recognized a glaring problem. The list of things they are doing about it, however, remains depressingly short.

The idea that calls for national unity could be turned into a partisan bludgeon seems like a bad joke, but that is exactly what is happening. The bewildering array of skirmishes that accompany national primaries, especially those as hotly contested as that of the Democrats, has been of late marked by accusations that one candidate or another is not sufficiently palatable to this or that segment of the population. These objections may be fair, and they certainly play a part in political strategy. Nevertheless, one feels a certain sense of farce when watching candidates get into fights over who is the least divisive. The practice of mining the general sense of unease swirling around the partisan gap has crept into policy, too: analysts, pundits and lawmakers of every stripe are constantly pondering what the best way to bring the country together is and, invariably, discovering that it so happens to be exactly what they always thought was right. Indeed, “bringing the country together” seems to have become synonymous with “getting my way”. The idea that Donald Trump can publicly claim to be uniting the country without drawing more than the usual amount of scorn should give us a good indicator of where things lie now.

This article is not intended to argue that there is no hope left for the middle ground, or that seeking compromise and bipartisanship is useless or disingenuous. Rather, it is merely that such phrases have, over the last couple of years, been rendered limp from overuse and tossed into the general churn of buzzwords that are regularly used as padding for policy. Those who are genuinely interested in cooperation need to take care not to simply fall in along old partisan lines with new justifications. That cohort will likely shrink considerably when it becomes clear that cooperation involves compromise. This election alone will certainly not bring an end to America’s partisan travails; it will take change, maybe even change at a structural level, to do that. Above all, when taking a frank look at how to mend the rift, we must cast our eyes to the long road— and all the messy, non-buzzwordy tradeoffs that will come with it. 

Trey Di Bona is a freshman in the School of Foreign Service.