As far as I understood it at the time, George W. Bush’s 2000 slogan of “compassionate conservatism” was meant to signify that he wasn’t the kind of Republican who wanted to eliminate the Department of Education or take similarly radical moves to shrink the federal government down the size where it could be drowned in a bathtub.  It wasn’t the kind of promise the Democrats could easily thwart. Likewise, Barack Obama’s “Hope and Change” theme was hard for the Republicans to combat, although they did their best after Obama’s productive first two years when they took back the House and stopped all legislative progress. But Joe Biden’s “Unity” mantra has some weaknesses.

Basically, anytime Biden does something a Republican doesn’t like, he will face the charge that he’s not pursuing unity–that he’s breaking a campaign promise. We already have the spectacle of the Washington Post dedicating three reporters to this topic. The headline (“Biden struggles to define his ‘unity’ promise for a divided nation”) indicates that we’re going to have an excruciating four years of meta-discussions about who’s to blame for the lack of unity, what unity actually means, and whether Biden kept his word or not. 

I’m not looking forward to this, nor am I interested in participating. What I hope is that Biden will lower the temperature of our political disputes and that, over time, this will have a variety of positive results. I really do believe that a nation under stress will act out. The Great Recession was incredibly stressful. The entire Trump presidency was stressful. The COVID-19 pandemic is stressful. We shouldn’t expect Americans to be the best versions of themselves in these circumstances, but we can slowly heal and get better if conditions improve. In the meantime, as long as Biden doesn’t exacerbate our stress levels, he’ll be a big improvement over Trump on that metric alone.

I think it’s easier to understand unity as a goal if you realize first that it’s relative–we’re never reaching some utopian endpoint where we all agree on the proper direction for the country. Second, we will grow closer together simply by having a president who isn’t intentionally pulling us apart.

This might never mean that Congress starts passing bipartisan legislation, but it could mean less political violence, fewer families ripped apart by political divisions, and less overall insanity. But these changes may be incremental and hard to detect for some time. They also have to contend with counter-forces that benefit from our divisions, whether it’s partisan media or social media influencers pushing outrage to grow their followers.

One thing I know is that every time a Republican complains that a Democratic policy priority is a broken “unity” promise, I want to punch that Republican in the face. So, yes, there are some intrinsic problems with this unity messaging that won’t go away.