Why Should America Be Unified?
If I see one more vapid fluff piece about how Barack Obama is the candidate best suited to "unify America," I'm honestly going to start looking around to see if Rod Serling is standing off to the side addressing the audience.
Why on Earth should unifying America even be a minor goal of a presidential candidate, let alone a primary goal? Unity, in and of itself, is neither good nor bad--and it certainly has the potential to be extremely bad. After all, Hitler unified Germany. Mao unified mainland China. Lenin and later Stalin unified the Soviet Union. (The only kind of unity that could possibly be good would be a completely voluntary spontaneous unity in which everyone was unified in the belief that it is unacceptable to initiate force against someone else--a sort of anarchic unity. But of course such a spontaneous unity would be one that didn't involve any politicians, whose jobs are premised on initiation of force.)
One of the redeeming qualities of America is that we tend to have a healthy debate on most issues, resulting in a constantly evolving marketplace of ideas and perpetual shifting of 'sides.' Hell, I used to be an authoritarian, jingoistic, socially intolerant, right-wing conservative. Wanna get all 'unified' under the former me?
What about Obama? He may be pro-liberty on some social issues and have half decent foreign policy instincts (but only half decent), but he's an absolute authoritarian on economic issues. He advocates violence and coercion in the form of redistributive taxation, telling people who they can and can't hire and how to set employee wages, business regulations (which, by definition, are unwanted obstacles government places between willing buyers and sellers attempting to engage in a voluntary transaction), government control of education, restrictions on voluntary international trade, and myriad other government actions that coerce people, reduce competition, destroy wealth (or prevent it from being created), eliminate potential choices available to consumers, prevent people from earning a living, and generally violate individual rights and reduce our overall standard of living. Do you really want this guy to "unite" America?
Personally, I really like the divided and contentious nature of our society. It keeps us sharp and keeps things interesting. It would be horrible if we all thought the same way and just mindlessly followed someone who was designated the 'leader' of the nation. Even if everyone in America suddenly became an anarchist or radical libertarian and succeeded in completely eliminating government, there still would be (and should be) huge disagreements about all sorts of things--it's just that in a voluntary society free from government, a true, honest debate could take place. You could debate someone all day long about the merits of using technology to radically extend the human life span, but at the end of the day both sides would know that there's no group of people with a legal monopoly on initiation of force standing outside with guns waiting to force either one to abide by the choice of the other.
And even though I enjoy when people e-mail me or comment on my blog in agreement with something I've said, I like it even more when someone disagrees with me. It challenges me to think more deeply about my position and formulate clearer arguments--or, as has happened in the past, actually realize that my argument was invalid or that I was entirely wrong.
I don't know about the rest of you, but the last thing I want to see is a "unified America."
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!