Taking measure of Biden's unity call
Throughout his candidacy and into his presidency, Joe Biden pledged to seek national unity, a call heard in many democracies. He even tried to fend off doubts he could find it. A first test came during the post-election transition as he reached out to governors – many of whom still had not acknowledged his victory – to coordinate the vaccine rollout and other pandemic responses.
Now a few weeks into his term, the challenge of restoring civility and consensus to American politics shifts to Congress as it takes up his proposals on the economy and immigration. As those debates unfold, merely counting how Republicans and Democrats vote may be an unreliable way to measure unity. What matters more is tone and motive.
The current Biden proposals are just a start. They will be followed by measures to address other divisive issues such as climate change and racial injustice. Finding unity, skeptics say, is something of a fool’s errand. Progressives eager for bold change want to draw the president leftward. Republicans are still smarting from the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump and dealing with their own divisions.
One politics-watcher who expresses cautious hope is Frank Luntz, a pollster who spent three decades helping Republicans craft their messaging. Now he is trying to move Congress beyond partisan rancor. “What the public really wants is a government that is more efficient and more accountable,” Mr. Luntz told members of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of centrist Republicans and Democrats. “More efficient, so we learn to do more with less. More effective, so we stop doing what we cannot do well. And more accountable, so that when we make more mistakes, people know that they can have those mistakes fixed. If you demonstrate efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability, you will restore public trust.”
A similar point was made about U.S. politics by Matthew Syed, columnist for The Times in the United Kingdom:
“The deliberative function of democracy relies on listening to the other side, judging an argument on merit rather than the identity of the person who expresses it, and recognizing that no single ideological faction has a monopoly on truth. It is about appreciating that it is often in the coming together of opposing ideas that both sides find, somewhat to their surprise, that we have found a synthesis that transcends both. And isn’t this a subtle and rather beautiful thing?”
For Biden, the most experienced legislator to sit in the Oval Office since Lyndon Johnson, strenuous debate that includes listening is not something to avoid. It is essential to rebuilding trust.
“There is no ability in a democracy for it to function without the ability for it to reach consensus,” he said in January. “Unity requires that you eliminate the vitriol. If you pass a piece of legislation that breaks down on party lines but it gets passed, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t unity. It just means it wasn’t bipartisan.”
The challenge for the country’s elected leaders is to be more impartial toward each other and less partisan in their political causes. By definition, impartiality encompasses all. The best place to embrace it is in the halls of government in Washington.
