‘Don’t Divide the Country’

Conflating “unity” and “democracy”

The refrain “divisive” is endlessly repeated in the media as a slur against any good political candidate. The media presents as a moral good the idea of “bringing the country together,” i.e., making everyone agree on everything. This is an old idea from the Progressive Era of United States history, where “public opinion” became something to be managed by the new national bureaucracy. The more uniform public opinion, the more efficient the country. “Unity” and “Democracy” are presented as basically the same thing, while tight electoral margins of 48/52 percent are packaged with this concept as examples of a well-functioning democracy where both parties compromise on differences of opinion.

But why should Democrats and Republicans basically agree on almost everything? What actual evidence is there that there are “compromises” between the parties that are actually satisfying to the voters in any way? Why is it less “democratic” if the parties have significant differences? How is it more “democratic” if the two major parties basically agree on everything, and effectively form a single “uniparty”? Isn’t that just a single-party state?

The other interpretation of tight electoral margins is a lack of unity and agreement. The country is kept in a constant state of tension where no candidate can earn and maintain a true popular mandate, thus preserving the status quo and making sure that the group of people currently in power stays in power.

One could easily argue that a landslide victory represents a real uniformity of opinion. Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon are the only presidents in U.S. history ever to exceed a popular mandate greater than 60%. These wide margins of victory occurred in three of these cases at times when the country was at a particular inflection point, and we can see how the ruling elite, with their numbers and charts, would be alarmed at the implications of such a trend repeating.

The last three are certainly controversial, but from different sides of politics. Two of them are heroes of the left. The establishment would never argue that President Johnson, for example, with his 61.1% of the vote, was anything close to a dictator, but they will certainly argue that President Putin is a dictator, because a percentage of 87.29% is considered not credible. Apparently, the difference between democracy and dictatorship lies somewhere in the 26.19% difference between these two electoral outcomes. This is never explained; it is simply asserted.

When the media declares Donald Trump a “divisive” figure and slurs his supporters for the same reason, what they are demanding is not that there be any genuine “coming together” in America, but the opposite. As evil does, their language is the precise opposite of their real intentions. The permanent division of the popular vote away from any real unified popular mandate for an executive figure is what keeps the two parties undivided and the chief executive hamstrung. “Not dividing the country” just means not dividing the single-party state into two. They must maintain the fragile illusion that there are two political parties in America rather than one uniform bureaucratic power structure.