And for a riven people who feel they no longer share much with their fellow citizens other than their history, Lincoln's shared-memory approach to fostering unity has much to offer.
In the intervening years, he had come to realize that the active recollection of national memory is what draws people together and clarifies the meaning of their common political inheritance.įor the American statesmen confronting the forces of discord and division that once again threaten the unity of the nation, there is much to be learned from the evolution of Lincoln's reasoning. Yet as discord escalated into civil war, Lincoln turned to something more like a Biblical approach to preserving unity - one grounded in appeals to shared memory. He was convinced that the nation could be held together through a rational defense of the republic's founding principles. As a young man, Lincoln favored a strategy for preserving unity through appeals to dispassionate reason and Enlightenment philosophy. When a similar conflict over national values and principles threatened the unity of the country during the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln devoted much of his energy - and a number of key speeches - to the question of national harmony and perpetuation. Invoking these core concepts cannot alone heal a nation that is torn apart over the concepts themselves. Who is worthy of respect and honor? What kinds of liberty, and how much of it, should Americans preserve? Who and what threaten the nation's security, and how should the state manage those threats? The divisiveness that characterizes this period of American history is not the result of the emergence of some new, foreign set of values in the nation's politics, but of Americans' failure to reach a consensus about the meaning of their shared political inheritance. The problem of growing disunity arises from Americans' inability to agree on what these defining concepts mean and what a commitment to them entails. Certainly, Americans do share a commitment to respect and honor, to liberty and security, and to the truth. Augustine, Biden outlined a vision grounded in the "common objects we as Americans love, that define us as Americans," including "pportunity, security, liberty, dignity, respect, honor and, yes, the truth."īut Biden's broad notion of unity obscures more than it reveals.
In his inaugural address, Biden acknowledged this growing threat of division and discord, calling on Americans to join in an effort to restore "the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity." Without unity, he warned, we will not be able "to restore the soul secure the future of America." Citing St.
NATIONAL UNITY DEFINITION FREE
Whether we're discussing family policy, the structure of the tax system, the pursuit of free trade, or the promotion of democracy abroad, Americans increasingly accuse their political opponents of not only being wrong on policy specifics, but of misunderstanding, and even deliberately distorting, the values and principles that define the nation itself.
Are President Joe Biden's recent immigration reforms an expression of America's identity as a "nation of immigrants," or are they a betrayal of the nation's commitment to struggling Americans already living within our borders? Are policies promoting diversity and equity a step forward in America's ongoing struggle for racial justice, or are they a perversion of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream of a nation where citizens would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character"? It isn't merely that modern Americans vociferously disagree over policy it's that they so frequently frame these disputes as proxy battles in a much larger fight over the meaning of America's most fundamental values. Every political debate in the United States seems to generate a frenzy.
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