Reviews
Russell Arben Fox, Ph.D.
We Must Not Be Enemies: Restoring America’s Civic Tradition
Michael Austin
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
2019
The following review-essay is the result of the combination and reworking of an address given by the author at Friends University on October 26, 2020, and a follow-up blog post.
On the evening of Saturday, November 7, 2020, President of the United States-elect Joe Biden had this, among other things, to say:
My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken. They have delivered us a clear victory. A convincing victory. A victory for “We the People” . . .
I pledge to be a President who seeks not to divide, but to unify. Who doesn’t see Red and Blue states, but a United States. And who will work with all my heart to win the confidence of the whole people . . .
[T]o those who voted for President Trump, I understand your disappointment tonight. I’ve lost a couple of elections myself. But now, let’s give each other a chance. It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric. To lower the temperature. To see each other again. To listen to each other again. To make progress, we must stop treating our opponents as our enemy. We are not enemies. We are Americans.
The Bible tells us that to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.
Some of this is the obvious kind of rhetoric which we have long come to expect in the speeches of victorious presidential candidates — indeed, maybe using such rhetoric is exactly part of the calming, “back to normalcy” feeling which Biden wants to project. Of course, we all know that Biden didn’t really receive a “convincing victory,” much less a victory on behalf of a united people. He won at most about 51% of all the votes for president cast, roughly (at the time of this writing, on Sunday, November 15), 78 million votes out of over 151 million. The distracting and undemocratic mess that is the Electoral College can make things seem a little more decisive than they actually are, but rest assured: Biden’s victory emerged from a very divided electorate, not remotely a united one.
Yet there is every reason to assume that Biden, on some level anyway, truly believes in his rhetoric about healing, about seeing and hearing one another again, and ceasing to treat one another as enemies. Should we believe in that possibility too?
It’s not an easy question to answer. For many of us, in many of our workplaces and neighborhoods and churches and families, the evidence of any possibility of unity over these past four years has been slight. Instead, we’ve seen constant argument and mutual incomprehension, with Trump supporters constantly obsessing over fake news and elite disrespect and various conspiracy theories, climaxing in Trump’s refusal to acknowledge the obvious Electoral College vote results and his filing of one frivolous lawsuit after another. As for Biden supporters (or, more broadly, just Trump