Is Unity the Answer?

(From the archives: February 4, 2021)

Joe Biden was inaugurated just a few weeks ago, and in the days since then, an old mantra has been revived and promulgated by political pundits and the White House. As of Jan. 20, the gauzy notion that Americans must seek “unity” has been deemed to be something that we must all care about — or at least hear endlessly about — as a new administration assumes the reins of the executive branch.

It has become conventional wisdom that we Americans are starkly divided, politically. And why wouldn’t we be? In just the past four years, this country has endured an unprecedented wave of false political accusations (such as the Russian collusion hoax that was debunked in the Mueller report), hysterical corporate media propaganda and the rancor of a sham impeachment and subsequent acquittal in 2020. The idea of unity sounds appealing to many — after all, we’d like to come together over shared American principles and objective truth, right? — but what would that entail? And how would we possibly establish this elusive national cohesion?

So, I ask my friends and family members who voted for Biden: How will we achieve unity when millions of peaceful Trump supporters, conservatives, libertarians and independents are being smeared as racists and potential domestic terrorists? The national security apparatus, FBI and Homeland Security are currently getting ramped up for a new domestic War on Terror, and many — including former CIA chief John Brennan — want the Surveillance State to be unleashed upon some of our fellow Americans who ostensibly need to be “deprogrammed.”

How does a constitutionally questionable impeachment trial of a former president bring Americans together? Millions of citizens of this republic see through this charade as a thinly veiled attempt to “erase” Trump and prevent him from running for a second term in the future. This should be decided by voters, not demagogues in Congress.

How will we achieve unity when left-leaning Big Tech oligarchs and trillion-dollar corporations collude to crush small conservative-friendly social media competitors such as Parler? Has President Biden spoken out on this creeping corporatism?

How are national harmony and cohesion enhanced when the Biden administration declares war on the great American petroleum industry? Should the thousands of Americans who have lost their jobs after the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline be comforted knowing that they were sacrificed for the lofty and “unifying” environmental goals of their rulers in Washington and the globalist “Build Back Better” cabal in Davos? I suppose canceling federal oil and gas leasing will bring Americans together somehow, as we become more dependent on foreign crude?

How will we bring about national healing when millions of Americans with sincere concerns about 2020 election irregularities and haphazard, last-minute changes in voter-verification procedures are mocked and dismissed as conspiracy theorists?

Do months of draconian COVID-19 lockdowns, ever-changing mask mandates, botched government vaccine rollouts and the hypocrisy of rich liberal politicians (lecturing us to stay at home while they dine indoors at fancy restaurants) bring Americans together?

Perhaps instead of cramming an artificial, stifling “unity” down the throats of dissenting Americans, we should recognize good-faith disagreements and respect deeply-held beliefs of our fellow citizens. Unity might not be possible — or even desirable — but we do seek a peaceful coexistence in our shared country. The Biden administration should treat Trump supporters and other conscientious objectors as adults — and patriots, for the most part. But how should we proceed?

I propose that we should look to decentralized power, local control and subsidiarity instead of a suffocating obeisance to the mandated values of Washington politicians. We have the answer before us; it is right there in our Constitution. We must return to our roots as a federal republic.

Reasserting states’ rights and individual rights prevents a dreadful consolidation of power that Patrick Henry and so many others feared. Nullification of unconstitutional laws is something that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson saw as “the rightful remedy.”

We Americans must remind Washington that our natural rights are sacrosanct. And we must remind ourselves that what binds us together consists of the principles in the Declaration of Independence and the limits on government enumerated in the Constitution.