Yuval Levin discusses the U.S. Constitution as a unifying force.
First of all, to see that the Constitution is concerned with unity is to take notice of a particular understanding of what unity is that could be very helpful to us now in America. It’s an idea that is particularly evident in the thinking of James Madison, who was uniquely attuned to the dangers of division and faction. It was for him above anyone else that this was the problem to be solved. And Madison outlined a distinct understanding of the nature of political unity that we can start to see by looking at what might seem at first like a kindof contradiction in his thinking.
On the one hand, he insisted that disagreement about fundamental questions is just an inherent, unavoidable fact of living in a free society. He put it very bluntly in a lot ofplaces. For example, in Federalist 10, he says, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he’s at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed.” Period. If we let people think what they want, they’re not all going to think the same thing. Anybody who’s ever been in a meeting knows that’s true, and there’s no way to get a lot of people to think the same thing. And yet, Madison also insisted that that did not mean that the United States of America could not be a unified society, that we could not be one nation and understand ourselves as belonging together. And so Americans are never going to stop disagreeing, but shouldn’t give up on unity.
Unity is achievable if we don’t expect it to mean unanimity. So then what should we expect it to mean? Embedded in the constitution and especially in Madison’s approach to it is I think a kind of classical approach to that question that looks to politics as an arena for coming to agreement about common action. And so simply put in a free and therefore also diverse society unity does not mean thinking alike. Unity means acting together. And the difference between thinking alike and acting together is a very important distinction for us to think about in this moment.
