On Unity

Jonah Goldberg offers some coruscating thoughts on "unity" in this week's issue of National Review. He takes Senator Obama to task for his interminable yawping about the need for us to "unite"...around him, of course. Joseph Ellis makes a similar observation regarding constitutional modalities.

The founding fathers dedicated a great deal of thought to the subject of unity, and they found it was something to view with skepticism at best and, more often than not, with fear. Hence we have a constitution designed to thwart the baser forms of unity. Our government is set up so that the Senate cools the populist passion of the House, the executive thwarts the passions of the legislature and vice versa, and the Supreme Court checks the whole lot, to which its composition is in turn ultimately subject. "Divisiveness"-the setting of faction against faction, one branch of government against another, and the sovereignty of the individual over the group-was for the founders the great guarantor of our liberties and the source of civic virtue...If Obama and the Democrats believe unity in all things is the supreme political value, but the American tradition holds that liberty is a greater good, then could it not be argued that Barack Obama's greatest rival in this race is not the other candidates, but patriotism?