The American promise of unity

The Declaration of Independence, which launched our nation into existence, announced an act of separation.

It did not proclaim the birth of a new people but rather asserted that Americans had found themselves in a situation in which it had become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” It implied that the British and the Americans were already two peoples and, therefore, that the Americans were already one.

But after winning independence, as they gradually turned their attention from the struggle for separation to the work of self-government, the people of the United States came to see that simply saying they were one people was not enough. Unity would take even more work than separation and would require a structure of government built for the task.

So in the summer of 1787, they sent a group of their best politicians back to Philadelphia, to the very room where separation from Britain had been proclaimed, to formulate a framework for governing their new republic, rooted in the principles they had declared a decade earlier and geared to holding a dynamic, fractious, growing society together.

Unity was much on the minds of those delegates. But just what did they mean by unity? And what might we mean by it now?

Ironically, the meaning of unity has always been a contentious question in America. But the Constitution does point toward an answer. It offers up an ideal of unity that is rooted in the practical nature of political life and that works to make common action possible. Such unity requires some agreement about who we are and what we believe as a society, but that very general agreement is only a starting point for political life.

Ultimately, politics exists to deal with differences, and so assumes disagreement. And in a free society, where politics cannot involve the coercive quashing of differences, it exists instead to facilitate common action despite differing beliefs and priorities.

That means unity is less a condition than a way of life. It does not need to be tranquil in order to be genuine, does not need to be calm in order to be productive, and has at least as much to do with disagreeing better as with agreeing more.

The various capacities of the Constitution to facilitate greater cohesion, therefore, point us to a distinct idea of unity with much to teach us now. They suggest that unity is less about thinking alike than about acting together and, therefore, that unity is more within our grasp than we might think.

Although they did not simply define unity, the framers were forthright about two assumptions related to it that seem, at first, to contradict each other but that ultimately illuminate their particular conception of the term.

On the one hand, they assumed that unanimity of views was not an option for a free society. On the other hand, they assumed that political union, marked by genuine cohesion and togetherness, was an absolute necessity for their new nation and that this must be a union of the people, not just of the states.

James Madison, who reflected most deeply on this challenge, was adamant on both points. In Federalist 10, he wrote: “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” And writing in Federalist 14, he warned against the lure of division and of fragmentation of the union: “Hearken not to the unnatural voice which tells you that the people of America, knit together as they are by so many cords of affection, can no longer live together as members of the same family; can no longer continue the mutual guardians of their mutual happiness; can no longer be fellow citizens of one great, respectable, and flourishing empire.”

So unanimity was not an option, but unity was both possible and necessary. How could that work?

Madison’s gesture toward affection is surely one part of the answer. American life is not simply politics, and discrete disagreements need not loosen what Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 15, called “that sacred knot which binds the people of America together.” Averting bitter fracture in an often fragmented society would have to be a central purpose of American political life, so that the heterogeneity of American society did not make a shared political existence impossible. In this sense, unity would have to be at least as much a product as a premise of American politics.

That distinction, which clarifies the complicated tension between Madison’s assumption of permanent differences and his insistence on a robust union, amounts to the beginning of a definition of unity. In a complex and free society, unity would consist less of thinking alike than of acting together.

But how can people act together when they don’t think alike? That is the question that motivated a great deal of the work of the Philadelphia Convention. Indeed, some of our most divisive constitutional debates are about whether we need to ask that question and, if so, how we ought to answer it.

A great deal of the dysfunction of our contemporary political culture is a consequence of failures that stand in the way of putting the Constitution’s distinct answer to that question into effect. That answer, and the definition of unity that it implies, has roots that run deep in the political tradition of the West. It can be hard to pin down because it combines classical, Christian and modern insights with republican and liberal aspirations. Teasing these apart just a little could help us clarify the character of Madisonian unity and appreciate the complex roots of our regime.

The approach to political unity that characterizes Madison’s defense of the Constitution owes a great deal to Greek philosopher Aristotle’s idea that politics (and political unity) is best understood as a mode of bringing the people involved closer to one another as fellow citizens. Madison thought this kind of process could change how people understood their own aspirations. By being forced to work together toward common goals, we come to understand ourselves as sharing a life in common.

A political community shares a common life. Its politics is not just a venue for negotiating treaties among hostile, unconnected individuals or groups, and its form of government is not just a framework of procedural rules. Citizens also share a general sense of what their life together aims to do. But that sense is often just a starting point for disagreement. This is surely true in the United States, where that sense is articulated in the Declaration of Independence and pervades our political rhetoric.

The declaration puts forward a set of truths about the human person: that we are all created equal and that we are all endowed with certain basic rights. That set of truths commits our society to a politics of equal citizens, where the answer to the question of who rules is not “the one,” “the few” or even “the many,” but “all citizens.”

That means our consent is the root of the government’s legitimacy. Our commitment to these principles is, in fact, very widely shared. The framers of the Constitution had to take it for granted in doing their work, and people involved in American politics ever since have too. There are a few people on the fringes of our two broad political camps who would deny these principles and openly reject the Declaration of Independence, but they are broadly perceived as radical outliers.

For the most part, our political differences are about what these principles actually mean or demand, not whether they are true. We implicitly understand them to define the foundation of our common life and in a decisive way. President Calvin Coolidge articulated this point on the 150th anniversary of the declaration in 1926:

“It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

It is easy to wave away such talk in modern America and insist that we no longer think this way, but our political life suggests that we certainly do. The very popularity of arguments accusing political opponents of betraying the declaration’s core principles testifies to the hold those principles still have on us.

Forging unity is the ongoing work of American life. After an election, after an arduous legislative process, after more than two centuries of producing the common together, we are far from done negotiating and competing, pushing and pulling. The Constitution’s distinct idea of unity has made sure of that.

This complex conception of unity can be very attractive, but it has its downsides and its adamant detractors. Some critics have long found politics by internal tension to be counterproductive and self-defeating. They seek to express and represent a unified national purpose through focused acts of government power rather than to create common ground through accommodative negotiation. Because this approach prioritizes action over negotiation, it tends to empower narrow majorities. And because it values unitary executive action over plural legislative bargaining, it tends to raise the stakes and the temperature of our politics.

We have grown less capable of dealing with one another because we have embraced an approach to American government that deemphasizes dealing with one another. This change has not been driven by a desire for disunity. It has been driven by impatience with American government and by a passion for democracy that is both understandable and well-intentioned.

American federalism has been reconfigured to combine state and national power in pursuit of national ends, leaving less room for states and communities to differ and compete. Congress has been centralized and consolidated to better enable party leaders to stage-manage performative party conflict, making narrow majorities more cohesive but giving them less reason to seek broader coalitions and to legislate. The presidency has moved to fill the vacuum and, in the process, has become the focal point of ideological conflict — embodying the exaggerated hopes and fears of opposing camps but becoming less capable of steady administration and durable action. The courts are called on to resolve political and cultural conflicts rather than to police the boundaries of constitutionalism. The parties have lost their roles as facilitators of coalition building and have, instead, become mere brand names for two opposing camps keen to remain terrified of each other at a distance.

By grasping that our divisions have been deepened, in part, by our abandonment of the constitutional system’s core approach to unity, we could find our way toward a constitutional restoration and, with it, a recovery of both our capacity for unity and our desire for it. This cannot be a partisan enterprise. We will need to choose to prioritize cohesion, coalition building and the forging of trust.

We should begin by recognizing that these are among the original aims of our Constitution and that today’s intense disunity has been driven in part by our broken constitutional practice, which has undermined the means by which these aims are pursued in our system. To recover those means and better pursue those aims, we will need to recover the understanding of unity that undergirds the Constitution, grasp its appeal and its truth, and think about reforms in its light.

That aspiration suggests not only an agenda of reform but also a particular spirit in which to approach the work. Citizens who want to see our society grow stronger should approach its institutions in a spirit of repair — informed by a sense of what is missing and has gone wrong and inspired by a sense of what is good in what we have and could serve us well. Our era tempts us to repudiate our inheritance, but it requires us to renew it. Americans are frequently angry at our Constitution now because we sense that it has broken down. But if we grasped that we have broken it, we could see that it needs us if it is to serve us. By rising to repair it, we could enable it again to repair our society and bring us closer together, as it was made to do.

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

From the book “American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation — and Could Again” by Yuval Levin. Copyright © 2024 by Yuval Levin. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Basic Books Group, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY. All rights reserved.

This story appears in the November 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.