Unity: Not in exchange for impunity and injustice

These days everyone is calling for unity. Unity would be great if it were not a codeword for impunity and injustice. The evidence is that that is exactly the kind of false unity Republicans are trying to sell.

Take Lindsay Graham, who just wants us to just “move on.” Forget the criminality of Donald Trump in inciting a murderous attack on the Capitol and the members of Congress working there. Forget that the purpose of Trump and his storm troopers was to substitute a will to power for the outcome of a democratic election, to prevent Congress from certifying the clear results of the Electoral College upheld by a plethora of courts. Forget the intent to stop Congress from performing a constitutional duty it has been performing for more than 200 years with no drama nor contestation. Forget the treason of more than two-thirds of his GOP colleagues in the Senate who tried to negate the will of a clear super-majority of the American people by throwing out the results of the Electoral College.

By doing all these outrageous things, the Republicans preempted any real and dignified unity because that, acceptance of a full and fair defeat, allegiance to new duly elected president, is how unity is wrought in the United States and has been throughout history, even after the toughest of elections between candidates that hated each other.

They carried out a two-headed coup: an attempted parliamentary coup, unprecedented and unconstitutional; and a violent assault intended to support the parliamentary coup, which was fated to fail on its own strength because it lacked the votes needed in the House of Representatives. Trump supporters point to the fact that nearly 80 million people voted for the president as a justification for the two parallel coup attempts. But Biden received more than 7 million votes more than Trump, the highest of any candidate ever. At this point, adherents of democracy accept reality, vow unity for a new leader, and move on.

The level of support for Trump, a vicious, vindictive con man who carried out unspeakably cruel racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and homophobic policies confers no entitlement to sedition. Instead, it speaks volumes about what the Republican Party of 2021 is: a collection of white supremacists and reactionaries financially supported by the most selfish and venal members of the moneyed class, plus a substantial number of white supremacy lite people in the middle class or who simply care much more about their tax cuts than justice or decency. This is the characteristic profile of a fascistic party. As usual, in 2016 Hillary Clinton erred on the side of understatement when she called them deplorable. They are toxic.

With everything despicable and ugly that Donald Trump has said and done over the four years during which he squeezed in the perversity of four decades, why would anyone who does not meet the description in the last paragraph ever vote for him?

The panic of losing racial and class advantage overcome almost anything such that millions were willing to vote for the favorite candidate of Q conspiracy nuts, American Nazis, neo-Confederates, and assorted other extremists and nuts. These Republicans, at best, see the lunatics on the right as the lesser of two evils compared with Democrats, which the right has falsely painted as everything from Communists to cannibals. Demonizing your adversary does not compel unity.

Most GOP voters may not be rabid racists and xenophobes, but they are culpable of reflexively failing to recoil from racism and xenophobia. Rather, they have an infinite tolerance for racism and xenophobia. Similarly, most Germans during World War II were not fanatically anti-Semites, but then again very few lifted a finger before the war when the handwriting was on the wall, and the horror still might have been prevented.

Unity with today’s GOP on their terms would be a replay of the “unity” achieved between the defeated Confederate traitors and Andrew Johnson, who was willing to throw African Americans, who had contributed heroically to preserving the Union by fighting against the rebels, under a bus. The result was 100 years of black oppression, Jim Crow, America’s version of apartheid.

Like the Confederates, today’s Republicans are willing to do anything to stay on top over African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and everyone who does not accept heterosexualism and patriarchy. It says a thing or two that three out of four presidential impeachments in American history are accounted by Donald Trump and Andrew Johnson, men who tried and to a degree succeeded in bending the long arch of history against justice. What kind of unity is possible with people like this? None.

Reversing the liberal reforms of the 1960s and 1970s—the Republican agenda for the last four decades—is a replay of the smashing of Reconstruction after the Civil War. “Unity” at this price is a fool’s bargain and a betrayal of those who elected the Biden-Harris team or who like John Lewis, MLK, and Cesar Chavez have historically fought for justice.

We have seen this movie before, it was called “The Birth of a [racist] Nation” (original title, “The Clansman.”) Its director, D.W. Griffith, shares with the Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl a venomous politics and a cinematographic brilliance, a dangerous combination. We are not watching Triumph of the Will or Griffith’s distorted version of American history ever again.

The kind of unity Republicans are talking about would require us to empathize with the illegitimate grievances of those who think they have a natural right to predominance. But those who have shown zero empathy, for example for forcibly separating family deserve less than zero empathy. And we should tolerate everything except intolerance, which is part of the Republican DNA, as the English only movement, among many other things, demonstrates.

We do not need unity for the sake of unity’s sake. What we need is a battle of policies, ideas, values, and results against the GOP, not in partnership with them. We must beat them, not understand them because what they stand for is crystal clear. And we do not need to make America great again, not because it was always great because that is not true, as slavery, the Trail of Tears, the theft of Mexico, and Japanese internment demonstrate definitively. Rather, what we need to make it truly great for the first time by remaking it in the image of our highest ideals.

For Trump making America great meant making American a country that walks all over every other country, a white country in which whites walk on those who trace their origins to the 80 percent of countries Trump calls shit-hole countries.

We do not need, nor want, to be that country. We cannot build it with the goose steppers and the pseudo/superpatriots, or even the lite racists and xenophobes. We have enough good people in the nation to make America truly inclusive and great. We can start with Biden voters, progressive and middle of the road alike. To those who have been our adversaries and now want to unite us in walking along the path of inclusiveness, fairness, and kindness, welcome. For those trapped in the past, committed to the politics of the rear guard, who will try to trip us up and obstruct everything decent, who cannot stand living in a multiracial and poly-cultural society, expect no empathy for your grievances, expect hard-ball.