"WHAT BINDS US? WHAT DO WE ALL HAVE IN common anymore?” Justice Clarence Thomas asked in a rare media interview aired on Fox News in 2017. “We always talk about E Pluribus Unum,” Thomas said, referring to the traditional motto of the United States which translates as “out of many, one.” “We need more unum. We have the pluribus.”
The media headlines of the past year suggest that things have gotten a lot worse since 2017—and both Thomas and Fox played a part in the divisiveness. But if you look beyond the headlines, including those on Newsweek, a different picture emerges. Even in what feels like an angry, factionalized society, there are signs of unity.
Take the Supreme Court, a lightning rod in America’s cultural and political storms. The highest court was less divided and less divisive in its 2022-23 term. (To be fair, not much could be as divisive as the Court’s decision, in the previous term, to overturn Roe v. Wade.) The nine justices were unanimous in nearly half of their decisions, more than double the proportion of the previous term. Liberals and conservatives voted together on most decisions that were not unanimous, including half of the 12 that were decided 6-3, a vote that could reflect the Court’s partisan split.
In one significant 6-3 case, the Court rebuffed an attempt by Republican politicians to put state elections outside the scope of judicial review in Moore v. Harper, to the relief of most Democrats and moderate Republicans. And while the six conservative justices got no liberal support when they effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions in two cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the ruling itself was largely popular. Poll after poll has shown that majorities of Americans do not support the use of race as a factor in college admissions.
While the Supreme Court’s public approval rating swung back and forth, Americans were united in their dislike of Congress. According to an average of polls on website FiveThirtyEight, Congress has a net disapproval rating of 60 points, worse than either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, two historically unpopular candidates for president. That reputation was deserved: Congress passed just 27 bills last year, the fewest since the Great Depression.
All the political noise made it easy to miss the evidence of common ground. Republicans and Democrats voted together to avoid a catastrophic default by raising the debt ceiling, even though the deal cost Kevin McCarthy his job and Joe Biden a lot of political capital. Huge bipartisan majorities acted to avoid a government shutdown in November, with the House voting 336 to 95 and the Senate 87 to 11. Both Republicans and Democrats cracked down on bad behavior in their ranks. George Santos was expelled from the House over falsehoods and fraud, while Rashida Tlaib was censured for her inflammatory rhetoric over the Israel-Hamas war.
Outside the Beltway, consensus is being forged faster, creating unlikely coalitions on some of the most heated issues of the past few decades. Redstate voters increasingly agree with blue-state politicians on legal protections for abortion. In Ohio, which voted for Trump before and after he fulfilled his promise to install Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade, 57 percent of voters supported a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.
“Ohio is not a fluke,” said Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations for the national group Reproductive Freedom for All, after the vote. And it wasn’t. Democrats campaigning on abortion rights swept state elections in Virginia, humiliating Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin in his bid to control both chambers. In Kentucky, another state that twice voted for Trump, Democratic Governor Andy Beshear campaigned on abortion rights, ignoring the counsel of national Democrats, and won reelection. By November, Trump had distanced himself from the strictest abortion bans; he blamed Republicans for losing votes on the issue and, according to Rolling Stone, was planning to run as a “moderate” on abortion.
On immigration, the shoe was very much on the other foot. Blue-city mayors now agree with red-state governors that waves of migrants crossing the southern border represent a crisis that Joe Biden needs to address, immediately. “Don’t yell at me. Yell at D.C.!” said New York Mayor Eric Adams after busloads of migrants from Texas overwhelmed his city. In city after city led by Democrats, mayors decried the White House’s immigration response, using lines that Texas Governor Greg Abbott, the mastermind of migrant busing, would have quoted with pride.
The crisis changed the political calculus in Washington. Senate Democrats stayed in town into the holidays to negotiate border restrictions that were decried by immigration activists as a Trump-style crackdown. By the new year, even Biden, who made reversing Trump’s draconian immigration policies a touchstone of his 2020 campaign, had moved, telling reporters
