March 25, 2021 9
To Hell with Unity
Fintan O’Toole
They had a better class of insult at Cath-
olic boys’ prep schools in the 1950s.
During his first semester at Archmere
Academy in Delaware, where Latin
was a big thing, Joe Biden was given a
nickname: Joe Impedimenta. The word
referred to his speech impediment, the
stutter that meant, as he recalled, “I
talked like Morse code.” But it also
signifies in Latin the baggage encum-
bering an army’s progress over rough
terrain. As president, Joe Impedimenta
needs to move fast. It seems obvious,
however, that he will be held back by
a formidable hindrance. His baggage is
an impossible ideal, a desire for bipar-
tisan unity that cannot be fulfilled. Yet
he can and must leave it behind him
and learn to travel light.
Biden has long returned to a phrase
from Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural
address of 1861. In his 2007 book,
Promises to Keep, he deplored the
way “partisanship rips at the bonds of
affection that tie the country state to
state, political party to political party,
citizen to citizen.” In November 2008
Biden stood with Barack Obama as the
then president- elect, in his own victory
speech, quoted Lincoln’s words to “a
nation far more divided than ours”:
“Though passion may have strained, it
must not break our bonds of affection.”
Even leaving aside the reality that Lin-
coln’s appeal preceded by a matter of
weeks the outbreak of open civil war,
its repetition on that hopeful occasion
thirteen years ago now casts a gloomy
shadow. The appeal was no more suc-
cessful in 2008 than it had been in
1861—and there is even scanter reason
to think it will be heard in 2021.
Indeed, in Biden’s own previous analy-
sis, the “ethic of division” in contempo-
ra r y A mer ica n pol itic s took hold as ea rly
as the 1994 midterm elections, when
Republicans stormed to victory under
the banner of Newt Gingrich’s radically
right- wing Contract with America, in
the process winning more House seats
in the South than the Democrats for the
first time since Reconstruction. If this is
so, almost thirty years of calls for mu-
tual respect and tolerance have been not
just rebuffed but flung back with con-
tempt. There surely comes a time when
repeated declarations of unrequited
love look less like fidelity and more like
madness, a time to see the bonds of af-
fection tying party to party as bonds
in the other sense, chains that shackle
the democratic majority to the will of a
fiercely intractable minority.
What Biden surely understands by
now is that he does not have to break
those fetters—the Republican Party
has done the job for him. The willing-
ness of most congressional Repubicans
to endorse Donald Trump’s attempts
to overturn the November election and
their unwillingness to convict Trump for
his role in the violent putsch of January
6 may be horrifying. But these choices
are also clarifying. There can be no illu-
sions of accord, or even of civilized dis-
pute. There is only a minority that will
do everything in its considerable power
to thwart, to wreck, to undermine.
There should be a kind of liberation in
this implacable hatred. Biden has been
freed, by the failure of the Republicans
to move beyond Trumpism, to shake
off his pursuit of consensus politics. He
has become Joe Nonimpedimenta.
After all, unity—the word Biden used
over and over in his inaugural address—
is not necessarily a virtue. Trump, for
instance, is a great unifier. He brought to-
gether people who would not previously
have recognized their mutual affinity—
bankers and neo- Nazi thugs, tech bros
and the peddlers of deranged conspiracy
theories. His movement is generous and
inclusive—anyone who acknowledges
him as the leader has found a sense of
belonging in Trump’s big tent. None will
be repudiated. All will know that, as he
informed his invaders even when they
were still hunting Nancy Pelosi and his
own vice- president in the Capitol, “we
love you.” He effectively adapted the
old socialist slogan “No Enemies on
the Left” for the right: no fascist, white
supremacist, misogynist, anti- Semite, or
insurrectionist left behind.Imagine, however, that Mitch Mc-
Connell’s little rebellion against Trump
had not melted away so pitifully between
January 6, when he seemed to launch
it, and February 13, when he voted to
acquit the man he acknowledged was
“practically and morally responsible for
provoking the events of the day.”
Just before the mob stormed the Cap-
itol, McConnell told the Senate that
validating Trump’s attempts to defy the
electorate, the courts, and the states
“would damage our republic forever.”
If he had taken his own rhetoric seri-ously, there might have been an effort
on his part to recreate an atmosphere
in which, as Biden had dreamed in
2007, it would be possible to debate is-
sues of substance “without questioning
the basic decency of the people on the
other side of the line.” The most senior
Republican in Congress was apparently
recognizing, however belatedly, that his
party had done potentially fatal dam-
age to the American republic. And this
mirage of reconciliation might have
gained substance from the knowledge
that Trump’s attempt to overthrow the
results of the election failed in large part
thanks to the basic decency of some Re-
publican state officials and judges.
It is conceivable that, at that mo-
ment, McConnell might have taken
up Biden’s challenge, in his inaugural
address, to “write an American story
of... unity, not division.” He might
have offered the incoming president the
kind of deal his implied act of contrition
seemed to warrant—Republican sup-
port for Trump’s impeachment in return
for a middling, modest, watered- down
program of government that protected
the privileges of those who already hold
them and dropped all the far- out stuff
like a Green New Deal. What then?
Biden would have been trapped, forced
either to reveal his bipartisanship as a
mere pose or to make himself a pris-
oner of McConnell and the GOP.
Of course, McConnell did not make
such a move. He couldn’t do it. His party
remains a majority- owned subsidiary
of the Trump Organization. To repudi-ate Trump and return to what used to
be mainstream conservatism, it would
have to vacate the insurrectionist space
Gingrich opened up in 1994 and that was
occupied successively by the Tea Party
and MAGA movements. To do so would
demand an effort of both moral will and
political skill far beyond the Republican
Party’s collective capacity. If it could not
bring itself to convict Trump in the Sen-
ate trial even in the face of a direct threat
to the lives and safety of its own leaders,
what circumstances might force it to
begin the painful task of remaking itself
as a democratic party of the center right?
McConnell has placed himself in
a no- man’s- land, not loyal enough to
avoid Trump’s rage at his betrayal, not
honorable enough to act on his own
convictions. Yet if McConnell had,
even as a tactical move, made serious
overtures to Biden and offered to work
with him, he could have created an
equally insoluble dilemma for the in-
coming president. Biden is wily enough
to know that he has avoided a trap. It
takes two to tango, and the Republi-
cans are locked in their own perpetual
dance of rage. So Biden is going to have
to learn a whole different caper.
If he really wants to draw on Lin-
coln’s first inaugural address, there is
a passage that speaks much more di-
rectly to his own task. Lincoln reflected
on what must happen when a minority
insists on its right to overturn the prop-
erly expressed will of the majority:
“The rule of a minority, as a permanent
arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so
that, rejecting the majority principle,
anarchy or despotism in some form is
all that is left.” The rule of a minority as
a permanent arrangement is the under-
lying project of a Republican Party that
cannot win majorities in presidential
elections.^1 Despotism and anarchy—
not as alternatives, but rather working
in tandem —are pretty much where that
project has ended up: the combination
of Trump’s authoritarian instincts with
mob rule. It remains, if democracy is to
survive, wholly inadmissible. This has
to be Biden’s starting point.How do you govern in a democracy
where one of the two main parties is
incapable of escaping its own willing
embrace of despotism and anarchy, and
where such a party—through the system
of grossly unequal representation in the
Senate, the gerrymandering of House
districts, the packing of the courts, and
the suppression of voters—is able to
embed itself as a minority that can frus-
trate the will of the majority? The obvi-
ous, and accurate, answer is: with great
difficulty. But you also do so by a relent-
less and unmerciful application of the
attitude that Biden in 2007 hoped always
to avoid: questioning the basic decency
of your opponents. When the opposition
cannot separate itself from the far- right
movement that would, in McConnell’s
terms, “damage our republic forever,” it
is folly to pretend otherwise.
This is why, in spite of his inevita-
ble acquittal, the Senate trial of Don-
ald Trump should not be seen as aJoe Biden; painting by William Powhida, 2020. It is on view in the exhibition
‘Twenty Twenty,’ at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut,
through March 14, 2021.(^1) See my “Democracy’s Afterlife” in
these pages, December 3, 2020.
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