What Is Unity?
"Unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together," Yuval Levin writes in his new book.
This is my second post on Yuval Levin’s new book "American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation -- And Could Again,” which was released June 11. The first post, featuring an interview with Yuval, is here.
In May, I went through Taylor Branch’s At Canaan’s Edge
In April, I went through John Inazu's book Learning to Disagree.
In March, I went through Mustafa Suleyman’s The Coming Wave.
In February, I went through Nick Troiano’s The Primary Solution.
In January, I went through Michael Wear’s The Spirit of Our Politics.
The book of the month schedule is here.
When I turned 20 years old in 1997, I became a religious zealot.
I do not want to despise the day of small beginnings, but sometimes I undoubtedly do so. One day I may no longer use that term "zealot" to describe my 20-year old self. For now, I use it with some charity in my heart toward who I was then, and toward others who are in similar places in their own path.
I attended a church that largely kept to itself. We limited our time and interaction with those who were not part of our congregation.
But occasionally we would do "outreach." We organized events designed to try to bring new people to us: to our meetings, to our way of thinking and believing.
The very design of these events demonstrated the degree to which we had a poverty of imagination for how to live out our faith. Rather than integrate our lives into the world around us, seeking to live out our faith, we literally stood on street corners and asked people to come to us.
We would send groups of people to traffic intersections to hand out water and soda to people in their cars, along with an invitation to our Sunday meeting.
I didn't do this. Even then in my state of zealotry, I thought this made no sense. Why would anyone come to our meeting because we gave them a soda? I thought. Maybe if we did something that tangibly helped people, that might make some kind of impression: clean up trash; work with local community centers to mentor youth; visit the elderly, etc.
Many churches do this. My old church does many of these things now, and did some things like this even back when I was there. But there was also a lot of the "come to us" approach that assumed others should come to us because we knew the correct answers to all the big questions.
But life isn't about knowing the answers. It's about doing them.
Living the Constitution
Yes, actions speak louder than words. We demonstrate what we truly know or believe by what we do.
But we also learn by doing.
One of the points of Yuval Levin's new book is that we learn the Constitution by living it out.
The book is focused on action, rather than thinking, or talking, or debate. It is about the question: What are we going to do together? It is not about trying to solve the "problem" of other people having many opinions and points of view that differ from ours.
The problem we had at my old church was that we believed that one of the biggest ways we could help other people was to get them to think just like us, and to act like us too.
But look around today. That kind of dogmatic inflexibility, and an obsession with whether other people's beliefs and views line up with ours, is quite widespread. It's not without reason: the last decade has been incredibly polarizing.
However, we are stuck in a self-reinforcing doom loop. We are repelled by the offensive beliefs of others, and pull away from them. We don't talk to them. We talk about them. We don't interact with them. We interact with, quite frankly, what are often caricatures of them. And there is an entire industry of political and media celebrities, influencers, pundits and talk show hosts who are all too happy to feed us those caricatures. They grow wealthy and we grow more divided.
This is a political principle that can be applied to our members of Congress and to our representatives in state legislatures and city councils. We can use this criteria to evaluate who we vote for in our elections.
But this is also a way of thinking about how we fulfill our duty as American citizens. "A nation that gives citizens a lot of freedom requires a lot of responsibility from them," (73) Yuval writes.
Ask yourself: who are the people I can do things with even if we don’t agree on many things? What are the venues and places where that action might take place? What are the needs that you can tangibly impact by acting with others in this way? That might mean a more local focus, rather than spending so much time on national news.
The very act of thinking this way and acting this way is the work of social repair. This is the work of the patriot. Our patriotism is measured not by how we vote, but by how we engage with those who are different than us. We honor those who have given their lives for this country by serving our country, and one of our primary acts of service is engagement across difference with those we may not understand at first blush.
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Defining Unity
All of this, Yuval argues, is unity.
"Politics in every society exists to deal with differences, and so assumes disagreement," Yuval writes.
James Madison, Yuval argues, believed that "cohesion would be produced by common action, more than it would be evinced in shared opinions. In a complex and free society, unity would consist less of thinking alike than of acting together."
"Some degree of agreement on fundamentals is necessary for common action, but that agreement is fairly broad much of the time ... Most of political life involves acting together across and despite disagreements—acting together in negotiated ways to address common challenges and take up common efforts and, through such common action, also forging common aims, a common identity, and real affection" (268).
Yuval's book, in its details, is about how the United States Constitution was designed, by Madison and Hamilton and others, to facilitate this kind of unity.
"Human beings flourish by living in light of the truth," Yuval writes. "But precisely how to understand the truth and live in light of it are questions about which we will continue to disagree, and how to flourish given that fact is the challenge to which the Constitution's approach to unity is directed" (279).
Living out the Constitution means seeking to embody this same spirit of political engagement sketched out by the founders’ design.
The Danger of Fracture
Yuval's plea is that we do not lose patience with our system of checks and balances and slow change, but that instead we give ourselves to the work of living out the Constitution, whether we are in Congress or in the trades. Both have a role to play, and the spirit of both roles is the same.
"We now all too easily persuade ourselves that this moment, unlike past ones in our politics, is an emergency—that we are on the edge of an abyss so that the normal rules must be put aside, and the imperative to compromise and bargain must be suspended," Yuval writes. "We still can't quite grasp the danger of genuine disunity—of a fundamental and violent breakdown of our political order ... We have forgotten that the only real alternative to a politics of bargaining and accommodation in a vast and diverse society is a politics of violent hostility" (286-287).
Yuval quotes from Madison in Federalist #14, which is a good place to end this week's post:
"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," Madison wrote.
"No my countrymen, shut your ears against this unhallowed language. Shut your hearts against the poison which it conveys; the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens, the mingled blood which they have shed in defence of their sacred rights, consecrate their union, and excite horror at the idea of their becoming aliens, rivals, enemies."