The State of the Union and the Problem of Unity

On Bidenism – and the limits and pitfalls of a unity politics that runs the risk of stifling the response to the authoritarian assault on democracy

I am not the biggest fan of the kind of staged spectacle the State of the Union offers. Political rituals have value and can function as a stabilizing routine. But this one tends to direct too much attention to the level of “civility” and decorum – as if it was a lack of good manners that was currently plaguing the nation…

My grumblings aside, however, last week’s SOTU was actually really illuminating. It was a reminder of Joe Biden’s strengths: a personal style of politics that transports a certain aura of authenticity, and a governing philosophy that is, at least in theory, very popular among centrists and liberals alike. But it also encapsulated the limits and pitfalls of a unity politics that runs the risk of stifling the response to the authoritarian assault on democracy.

(The Republican counter, meanwhile, delivered by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, really captured the essence of what is animating the anti-democratic radicalization of the American Right – a pervasive siege mentality that has reached the level of reactionary paranoia. But that’s a topic for another day.)

Unity and bipartisanship

Biden opened and concluded his speech with pleas for bipartisanship and unity. He expressed his gratitude to Republicans who have been willing to cooperate with his administration – and his eagerness to work with the new speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy. He also congratulated Mitch McConnell, who he addressed as if he was talking to an old buddy with whom he had been through a lot. And he emphasized the “over 300 bipartisan pieces of legislation,” how “time and again, Democrats and Republicans came together,” which supposedly “proved the cynics and naysayers wrong.” Bipartisanship, the president really wants us to believe, is still possible, he just demonstrated it, he will demonstrate it again.

This particular occasion, this genre of speech, practically demands a focus on unity and bipartisanship. The president is supposed to address Congress not as a partisan, but as the leader of the nation, the whole nation. And uniting the country has long been the central promise of Bidenism. Last Tuesday, it was also a successful political move. It made him appear “presidential” in a very traditional, well-established sense. It’s such a vague, arbitrary, purely subjective concept, “being presidential”; and yet, on this night, the term captured something about Biden, in contrast with an opposition that, at times, seemed to have fully coalesced behind Marjorie Taylor Greene as its stylistic and spiritual leader.

Will this have any actual effect on the electorate? Will voters now flock to the Democrats? Will it have a lasting impact on Biden’s approval rating? I doubt it. We must never underestimate the power of the rightwing media machine, and always remember that conservatives will be presented a very different version of the events. The strategy of focusing the message on good governance, bipartisanship in economic matters, and uniting the country also has a questionable track record. That was Biden’s approach in his first year in office, and it left him unpopular, constantly on the defensive. This began to change after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, and specifically in the fall of 2022, when Biden started emphasizing the fight to preserve democracy against the onslaught of MAGA Republicans. The pro-democratic mobilization of an anti-MAGA coalition in blue and purple states focused on protecting civil rights turned out to be the engine behind the strong Democratic performance in the midterms.

And yet, the foregrounding of the struggle over democracy might have been a rather short-lived experiment; this speech seems to indicate that Biden has returned to his pre-Dobbs approach. This is clearly where he feels most comfortable; and it is very much in line with a certain strand of conventional wisdom among Democrats – kitchen table politics. It also demonstrates the influence of “popularism” on the party’s power centers: Popularists believe Democrats should focus on a set of popular policies from a narrowly defined socio-economic realm while deemphasizing everything else, particularly the “culture wars” and all matters of race and racism in America.

I’m hoping to devote an entire essay soon, in the next newsletter perhaps, to why I find this theory problematic – why I believe it is based on a fundamental misconception of what the “culture wars” are about. The fact remains, however, that it worked as a strategy in this speech. The reviews of Biden’s SOTU, at least the ones from outside the rightwing bubble, have been mostly very positive to outright glowing. Biden won this one.

Focus on Bidenomics

That’s not entirely due to his unity message, however. In fact, Biden did go on the attack against Republicans. But it matters where he emphasized differences and embraced conflict, and where he didn’t. Almost the entire speech focused on socio-economic matters. Biden talked at length about economic policies, the job market and especially manufacturing jobs, semiconductors and infrastructure, better health care and a fairer tax system, antitrust enforcement and reigning in corrupt forms of capitalism. This was, for better or worse, a kitchen table/pocketbook State of the Union address, with some economic populism mixed in.

It's not that Biden has found some secret formula that no one before him had discovered. Talking about how “the middle class has been hollowed out” has long been part of the standard repertoire for Democratic politicians across the country. Biden’s strength is that he sounds sincere when he talks about the dignity of work. He also talked movingly about the need for police reform, or his determination to fight cancer. Biden, as even most of his critics would probably agree, is a politician who is able to empathize, on a personal level, with human suffering, especially with the suffering of parents who have lost children.

On some socio-economic issues, Biden was also willing to draw some clear lines. He went hard at Republicans who want to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act or go after Social Security and Medicare. When Republicans reflexively railed against what is indisputably true, the president seemed to relish the conflict, nimbly jumping at the chance to get his opponents to make something of a public pledge, live on national television, by which they seemed to repudiate some of the key tenets of the GOP policy agenda.

Democracy at last

It wasn’t until the very end of his speech that Biden really turned to the state of democracy. Until then, the democratic crisis had only gotten a shout-out in the beginning, when the president referred to January 6 as a grave threat, but one that was mostly in the past, as “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken.” Fully 70 minutes later, with only four minutes left, Biden returned to the issue of democracy in America – and he only spoke about it for 120 seconds. Compared with the feistiness with which he defended his socio-economic agenda, these few minutes differed markedly in thrust and in tone. On democracy, Biden did not emphasize differences with his Republican opponents. He opened with a general pledge of allegiance, describing democracy as “the most fundamental thing of all. With democracy, everything is possible. Without it, nothing is.” But this pledge came not with a warning for those who would undermine democracy, but with a unity plea. In striking contrast to both his democracy speeches from last fall, Biden did not name the enemy. “For the last few years our democracy has been threatened and attacked, put at risk” – passive voice, no mention of MAGA Republicans; these last few minutes were entirely about unity in the fight for democracy.

Unity, according to Joe Biden, is not only possible – it is destiny, inevitably emerging from what the president described as the nation’s exceptional character. Exceptionalism shaped and framed the State of the Union address. At the very beginning, Biden emphasized America’s “story unique among all nations.” That is the theme to which he returned in his conclusion, after the two minutes on the state of democracy.

In this view, America is exceptional because underneath all the squabbling, it is unified behind an idea, “the only nation based on an idea,” as the president assured his audience: “that all of us, every one of us, is created equal in the image of God.” This is the line Biden has always held, even in last year’s democracy speeches, which were much darker overall.

There is a striking tension between the diagnosis that democracy is under threat and such long-standing myths of America’s supposedly exceptional character – what Biden has called “the soul of the nation”: the belief in equality and democracy, in the notion that all people are created equal. If that were truly the case, why would democracy ever be in danger from within? If the exceptionalist story were correct, the fundamental conflict over democracy that defines the country wouldn’t exist.

“Democracy must not be a partisan issue. It’s an American issue,” the president pleaded with Congress and the nation. It was surely meant as an uplifting, unifying message – but one that stands in stark contrast with empirical reality. Democracy very much IS a partisan issue in the United States today; it is actually the issue that defines the partisan struggle more than any other.

In some ways, this is not a new situation, as the question of who should get to actually participate in the democratic process has always been highly contested. Conflict, not consensus, over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America has been the norm in U.S. history. And yet, the fact that this struggle now overlaps so clearly with party lines is indeed the result of a rather recent ideological reconfiguration of the two major parties. This process of party realignment or partisan sorting started before the 1960s – but the major civil rights breakthroughs of that era certainly acted as a crucial catalyst. Until the final third of the twentieth century, those who wanted to leave white patriarchal rule intact largely dominated in both parties, or at least were powerful enough to veto any serious racial and social progress; those who wanted to transcend traditional hierarchies of race, gender, wealth, and religion could also be found on either side of the aisle, but they weren’t influential enough to upend the bipartisan white elite consensus.

The civil rights revolution of the 1960s sped up a process by which all those opposed to egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy united in the Republican Party. Their voices have dominated the GOP since the 1970s. While the Democratic Party came to lean towards embracing the idea of extending the democratic promise, conservatives were willing to tolerate democracy only as long as it wouldn’t undermine established hierarchies. Their allegiance, however, was never to democratic ideals – but to the traditional order of white Christian patriarchal dominance. Whatever doubts anyone may still have held about where the parties stood on the question of multiracial pluralism got a clarifying answer during the Obama and Trump presidencies, which fully polarized “the Left” and “the Right” around the core issue of democracy. That is the fundamental reality of American politics right now: The fight over whether or not the country should actually be a democracy maps onto the conflict between the two parties. Democracy itself has become a partisan issue.

Joe Biden did not acknowledge that in his State of the Union address. He couldn’t – not while the focus was on unity and its exceptionalist foundations in the “soul of the nation.” Instead, the president defiantly insisted on perpetuating the idea of “a nation that embraces light over dark, hope over fear, unity over division. Stability over chaos.” And he’s correct that America’s elites have often tended to focus on “unity” and “stability.” The problem is that this kind of unity politics has almost always been the manifestation of an elite preference for “a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice,” as Martin Luther Kind famously put it in his Letter from Birmingham Jail.

In the history of the United States, the price for racial and social progress has always been political instability. Political “consensus” and “unity” was usually based on a cross-partisan agreement to leave the discriminatory social order intact and deny marginalized groups equal representation and civil rights. It was not a coincidence that “polarization” started when one party decided – however reluctantly – to break with the white patriarchal elite consensus and supported the civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

It's also not the case that democracy – certainly not the egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic kind – has thrived when the political conditions were stable. The political system was stable whenever and as long as democracy didn’t interfere with a political, social, and cultural order in which white Christians – and white Christian men, in particular – got to be on top and got to define what did and what did not count as “real America.” Conversely, moments of racial and social progress – or even just perceived progress – have always been conflictual, have always led to reactionary counter-mobilizations fueled by those who would rather abolish democracy altogether than accept multiracial pluralism.

“Unity” and stability sound good in a vacuum. But in the reality of U.S. history, they have almost always been in tension with the goal of moving the country closer towards the democratic ideal of egalitarian multiracial pluralism.

This tension was once again apparent in Biden’s speech. As the president set out to renew his promise of uniting America under the umbrella of Bidenomics, there was little room for the struggle for equality and equal respect for women and traditionally marginalized groups – for what distractors love to deride and dismiss as “culture war issues.” In the first State of the Union address after the reactionaries on the Supreme Court abolished the right to bodily autonomy in Dobbs, Biden’s address of roughly 75 minutes contained four sentences on abortion. As the crusade to demonize the LGBTQ community and strip trans people, in particular, of their fundamental protections and even their liberty to exist in the public sphere is escalating, the State of the Union included one sentence on LGBTQ rights. There was a general plea to make good education accessible for all kids of pre-school age, framed as a matter of national interest and security in an ever-more competitive international environment. But not a word on the authoritarian takeover of education in Florida and elsewhere, and nothing on the accelerating red-state campaigns to ban “divisive” books that dare to criticize the white nationalist understanding of America’s past and present or upset conservative white Christian sensibilities in any way.   

Unity Bidenomics: Messaging strategy or actual diagnosis?

When I try to make sense of the Biden administration’s default preference – and that of the Democratic establishment more broadly –, I often come back to the same question: Are they doing this because they believe it’s good politics, the best messaging strategy, even if it doesn’t actually hold up analytically? Or are Biden and those who are shaping Democratic politics actually convinced there is a shared consensus around the principles of egalitarian democracy, that whatever conflict exists can be solved by focusing on the kitchen table, that the assault on democracy and civil rights is all downstream from economic anxieties, and actually just a distracting sideshow from the issues that *really* matter? If it’s the former, I still disagree, but acknowledge that the politics of this situation is complicated; if it’s the latter, democracy is in big trouble.

“We just have to remember who we are,” Joe Biden concluded. But that will not be good enough. Who are “We,” and who gets to define the boundaries of that which is accepted as “Us”? There has never been a unified answer to these questions. The central fault line in U.S. history has always been the one between those who envision “We, the people” in accordance with egalitarian democratic principles – and those who aren’t willing to accept “America” as anything but a land of and for white Christians. The reality of American politics is that one party is dominated by reactionary forces that do *not* believe in equal representation and equal rights, that a sizable portion of the electorate is not willing to accept those values and favors traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth instead. The defense of democracy should be built not on the false comfort of exceptionalist myths, but on an unflinching admission of the nature of the conflict in which we find ourselves.