In search of a truly United States

The nature of the United States asks a question of Americans every day: Are we better together or not?

The question is not lightly asked. The United States was beset by divisions at its founding – from slavery to states’ rights to regionalism. The founders’ answer was the Constitution: a statement of both common principle and enormous compromise that would act as a bulwark against the centrifugal forces that threatened the nation.

By the time of the Civil War, those divisions had split the country. President Abraham Lincoln’s answer was the conviction that the world needed a United States – that the contradictions inherent in the nation were not fatal but rather the source of its transcendent value. The United States mattered because it grappled with those contradictions together rather than splintering apart. 

It is not yet clear what Americans’ answer for today will be. But it is certain that there will need to be one. Such questions are not answered by passive reliance on the efforts of the past.

In this week’s cover story, Simon Montlake looks at one of the areas where an answer to this question is most urgent: election laws. He explores the potentially dangerous consequences for democracy that emerge from a lack of trust. 

Democracies are laboratories of trust. The solutions democracies offer are not always high-minded or idealistic, but they are practical. One of the most obvious examples is the Constitution’s checks and balances. Trust in the system was not a matter of faith but of balance. The system worked because no one side could gain too much power. 

If the founders were united against any one thing, it was tyranny. James Madison once wrote, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Is polarization threatening a new variant of tyranny? When we fear one another – refuse to listen or compromise – are we committing ourselves to pockets of tyranny where power is increasingly concreted into “the same hands”?  

Audrey Kline of the National Vote at Home Institute suggests that the ideal of full nonpartisan elections is perhaps not realistic. What must exist, she says in an interview with ABC News, are “bipartisan counterbalances” to help administer elections.

But what happens when those counterbalances fail because each side is no longer committed to a common vision or set of facts – to working with each other?  

“We’re all wrestling with these questions,” Ms. Kline said. “Leaving it up to a bipartisan team is probably as close as we can get to a perfect sort of check-and-balance system. But when we can’t agree on basic facts, it becomes more difficult.”

The contradictions inherent in the United States mean the country cannot operate simply by wishing them away. E pluribus unum – “out of many, one” – is not a statement but a mission. We can’t save America without one another. The question for every generation is whether we want to. 

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We’re trying something a bit different in the print edition with this week’s news section. In place of "Humanity Behind the Headlines" we bring you "Search for Solutions," featuring stories that explore where progress is being sought – even when it may seem elusive. These stories aren’t about declaring victory or prescribing a set path forward, but they offer meaningful insight into the work being done to address obdurate challenges.