The Unity Candidate
Some Guidelines
I have spent the weekend transfixed, trying to see the face of a neighbor in that of a stranger and attempting to let my political imagination soar, to imagine what can be, unburdened by what has been.
In other words, I’ve spent hours listening to the speeches and carefully managed public appearances of presidential candidate Kamala Harris. It has been a strange journey. Imagine that you prompted a ruthlessly-efficient AI to trim all meaning and specificity from recent political speeches and to simply generate random slogans around the themes of unity and vision and change (what kind? Who cares?!).
Political speeches have always maintained an over-reliance on soaring language and vague slogans about ‘values’ but probably never before has a presidential candidate avoided specificity and qualification so assiduously. Perhaps this is the next (intended) phase of democracy: the candidates go through the motions of speeches and rallies to wind up the plebs while secretly pledging their allegiance to the real sources of political power-Israeli lobbyists and hedge fund managers and tech oligopolies. The people expect no detail or specific content in these speeches and none is given. The election is kind of a perfunctory ceremonial process, a coronation obeying the form of elections past when there was some uncertainty and some real competition for votes. There are certainly millions of wealthy Americans who wish that was the case right now and they would label such a process ‘democracy’. Is it? Your answer to that question might predict your feeling about our current election.
Nevertheless, I cut my walk through the gardens of Harris’ lush oratory short. I felt that my mental health required this. The final route I took (before my exit) was her Oprah appearance. It was maddeningly vapid, as usual, and even though I probably wasn’t the target audience I felt an immediate sense of indignation at the transparent attempts to manipulate me. It was a similar feeling to viewing a beer commercial with shots of farm fields and pickup trucks and a gruff voiceover… or pretty and ethnically ambiguous women grinning and rushing toward a bucket of the advertised product-the sense of being openly (and badly) manipulated. The subtext to these efforts seems to say “even if you’re too prickly or aware to be drawn in by this naked manipulation, there will be millions who aren’t. Either way we’re getting what we paid for. We don’t NEED you. Now buy our beer.” Or, “vote for this candidate”. At least the beer commercial has evocative photoscapes of farm fields and mountains… or pretty girls.
Imagine my surprise to learn that this quote was NOT made by Harris… and instead was a statement made long ago by Thomas Jefferson.
The overwhelming rhetorical emphasis of that appearance was unity, our commonality as a people and the importance of that value to the office of chief executive. Her speech on that (television) stage got me thinking (perhaps not in the direction which was intended): What would a true unity candidate look like? What policies might she promote and what governing strategy might she pursue? I have some general recommendations:
Federalism - a unity candidate would be trying to guide and bind 330 million folks of radically varying temperament and station and local concern. Doing this with a firm and active hand in dozens of domestic concerns would be impossible. Therefore most issues should be left to states or cities, to govern flexibly and as decided by much smaller and more unified groups of citizens. You could almost make this a central governing rule.. “The powers not delegated to the central government specifically, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Something like that.
Opportunity is vast and multifaceted in the United States but most citizens support some kind of minimal social safety net and support for the very old and very sick and very poor. This can be taxed and administered best on a regional (state) or local basis, however. Creating federal bureaucracies would only establish nationally administered programs and site the locus of power farther away from the people, empowering lobbyists and interest groups. Even if such measures were taken with the general assent of the governed they would quickly prove corrosive to unity. A unity candidate would be generally opposed to new federal regulatory and administrative powers, except in those rare cases where there was national consensus and national commonality (immigration policy and currency and national parks policies and enforcement of federal laws, for example).
A unity candidate would never try to change the habits or values or beliefs of the people. He would simply represent those beliefs which were already held by a strong majority of Americans. There are many such ideas extant right now, for instance: men and women are biologically different and should be treated differently on the basis of sex in certain areas of public policy; people who break the law (especially violent offenders) should be punished heavily; people who abuse children should be entirely removed from society forever; all folks should be treated equally in law and business and the government should never discriminate on the basis of race or sexual orientation (regardless of the specifics); people who enter the country illegally should be legally punished and prevented from becoming citizens; parents should have a real choice over the school their kids attend and what is taught; …these kinds of ideas.
A unity candidate would avoid foreign entanglements or initiating foreign wars… even proxy wars. This attitude (which can be called ‘isolationist’ at its more determined) has been a natural orientation for American voters since our genesis. After the U.S.-instigated collapse of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan, and our entanglement in the interminable Syrian civil war (and many more) Americans as a whole have had enough. I think there’s a real conversation which should be had about the economic implications of our withdrawal from the role of imperial hegemon… but that’s irrelevant here. This message of reticent and non-interventionism would be the general foreign policy orientation of a unity presidential candidate. It would reflect the general will of the electorate.
A unity candidate would avoid promotion of any values or cultures which were not aligned with a kind of vague monotheistic reverence and the civic republicanism of American history. He would not criticize or offend minority cultures (this is wildly unpopular) but he would emphasize what unifies us, especially in the context of American government: God, American history, the Constitution, and the duties and blessings of our North American republic. These are the values and ideas which (still) bind most of us together and they’re the unifying principles upon which our country was founded. This would naturally include homage to great battles and leaders of the past and a constant emphasis on the beauty and strength of our shared history.
A unity candidate would, perhaps most of all, recognize the value of individual and collective labors. He would continue the long tradition of American presidents being suspicious of federal taxation and would understand that the ability to trade and to earn and spend money is fundamental to how we conceptualize freedom and the ‘pursuit of happiness’.
I cannot say for certain whether these points are an accurate representation of Harris’ political program. She has been, as I already noted, short on specifics. I DO believe that whichever candidate hews most closely to these values is nearly always the best candidate to support in American politics. We should avoid divisive and unproductive debates and radical programs as a rule. I also believe in national unity… e pluribus unum, after all…