ArcaMax

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — What could be nicer music to the ears of a deeply divided American electorate than U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ calls for “unity” as her final campaign message? Well, put it this way: You know when you went to the amusement park and were lured by the gentle-looking kiddie ride, only to have it spin you around and make you more violently ill than any roller coaster ever could? That’s what “unity” is in today’s western democracies.

In a final campaign advertisement, Democrat Harris vowed to be a “president for all Americans” and to tackle “politics that have driven fear and division.”

At a rally in Atlanta last week, she said, “I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy. [Trump] wants to put them in jail. I will give them a seat at the table. That’s what real leaders do.”

Except that it’s a really bad distinction to make with Trump, in particular. For all his bluster, Trump did give key administration positions to neocon warmongers with whom he fundamentally disagreed on policy. He made John Bolton his national security adviser and Mike Pompeo his CIA director, to the point where the fighting spilled out into the public domain. Trump most recently called Bolton a “moron” and a “nutjob”.

Pompeo explained in his memoir, released last year, that he felt like he was “biding his time” in wanting to tear a strip out of China while Trump was trying to deal with Beijing over diplomatically sensitive matters, reportedly telling Pompeo to just “shut the hell up.”

Yet Trump gave guys like this a voice at the table, at least until it risked sparking a war. Would Kamala?

Trump also struck up friendly relations with America’s global competitors, including Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, referring to the latter as “Rocket Man,” almost affectionately, and drawing a clear, businesslike distinction between these countries’ interests and the respective leader singularly responsible for defending them.

Would Harris dare do the same with her ideological opponents, both foreign and domestic? Probably not, if history is any indication.

During an appearance on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, Harris characterized Trump’s engagement with opponents as “getting played” by them.

What actual proof does she have of Trump getting hoodwinked, let alone in a way that’s detrimental to American voters? Unlike during the Biden-Harris administration, new wars weren’t popping off under Trump.

Trump also warmly welcomed early presidential independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. into the fold, declaring that he’d let the career environmental lawyer, known for taking on Big Pharma, work on issues from health and environmental reforms to government regulation.

Harris had a non-hypothetical chance here to suggest how she’d deal with someone whose views departed from her own, but she just ended up calling RFK Jr. the “last person in America” who should be allowed to touch health policy.

So no seat at the table then, I guess? She could have at least said, “Well, of course, I’d welcome different views at my table. Diversity is strength, after all. But in this particular case, I’d probably set up a kiddie table with animal balloons and paper cups and let him ‘go nuts’ starting with the chemicals in those. Then, maybe we’ll see.”

The Western establishment has started using “unity” as a synonym for uncompromising conformity to their agenda. As someone based in Europe for nearly two decades, it’s impossible not to notice that the term, when uttered by top unelected bureaucrats running the European Union, usually means that the citizens of the 27-nation bloc are about to be fitted with yet another ideological straitjacket.

“Unity” on the Ukraine conflict, for instance, has meant censorship, harassment or marginalization of voices that risk undermining the establishment narrative. It’s also meant having the supranational government in Brussels control the maximum and minimum temperature you’re allowed to keep home, just so they can deny Russia energy revenues for heating or cooling that it’s ultimately just obtained elsewhere.

Ahead of the European Parliamentary elections earlier this year, unelected EU Commission President (and de facto “Queen”) Ursula Von der Leyen, like Harris, used “unity” as an electoral ploy, suggesting that populists and nationalists “want to trample on our values, and they want to destroy our Europe.” She added that “we”, meaning the current EU establishment, “will never let that happen.”

That’s one way to look at it. Another way is that the average European has been growing increasingly fed up with the policies of the Western establishment, and in the absence of being shut out from the table, they’re looking around for different dinner hosts. Which would explain populist surges or victories this year around Europe, from Austria and France to Eastern Germany and the EU parliament itself.

Von der Leyen and other top officials also routinely refer to “tools” that the EU has to control speech and expression, notably online, all in the interests of fostering Unity, of course. In February 2021, French Senator Jean-Raymond Hugonet of the center-right establishment Les Républicains party suggested that Chinese social credit-style control was really the only way to ultimately “manage democracy” in light of social unrest, which he qualified as “anomie,” meaning lack of adherence to defined standards.

No defender of true democracy should be shunning or vilifying debate, division and dissent — however messy it can get. A better solution is just to learn to do it better, without the constant hysterics. If the EU had learned that, then maybe it wouldn’t currently be backtracking on policies from climate and energy to migration — and all in the direction of critics’ prior arguments.