My time this morning is limited, but now that Caroline Glick has picked up this unfortunate “unity is fascist” meme from Goldberg, it seems as if something needs to be said about how wrong this is.  It isn’t that fascists didn’t make an obsession out of unity–they did–but this same claim can also be applied to nationalists, communists (remember “workers of the world, unite!”, anyone?), social democrats, liberal democrats, Christians and Muslims (and, I’d wager, almost any political philosophy and revealed religion).  Social solidarity is a kind of unity, but that does not make the labour unions and Catholic social workers who pursue this solidarity into fascists.  One can trace back Obama-like hostility to apragmosyne all the way to Pericles, who insisted in his Funeral Oration that citizens could not rightly neglect the affairs of the city and be concerned only with their own affairs.  I eagerly await the sequel, Athenian Democratic Fascism.  But obviously this is not meaningful analysis.  After all, the troubling thing about what Pericles said is not that it is fascist, since that is absurd, but that it is fundamentally democratic.  Likewise, that is what should bother people about Michelle Obama’s absurd call to political mobilisation, which concluded with the line, “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”  A certain kind of democrat will not stand for voter apathy, lack of participation, and lack of active involvement in “the people’s” government.  Naturally, those who value liberty find this appalling, which is another reminder that democracy and liberty are typically antithetical, and the more you have of one the less you are likely to have of the other.  So why would anyone think that this has something to do with fascism?       

Goldberg said:

Unity by itself has no moral worth whatsoever. The only value of unity is strength, strength in numbers–and, again, that is a fascist value. That’s the symbolism of the fasces, the bundle of sticks that in combination are invincible. Rape gangs and lynch mobs? Unified. The mafia? Unified. The SS? They had unity coming out the yinyang. Meanwhile, Socrates, Jesus, Thomas More, and an endless line of nameless souls were dispatched from this earth in the name of unity.

In fact, no, these particular people were dispatched because they were condemned as dangerous atheists, blasphemers or rebels.  Socrates dispatched himself in obedience to the law of the city, and Thomas More was executed because he would not accommodate the religious revolution carried out by his king.  From the perspective of Catholics in England, Thomas More was dispatched in the name of schism and division.  In each case, and in many of the cases of the “nameless souls,” it was not a question of unity, but of conformity, which is to say obedience, but particularly in the case of the Lord, Whose Passion and Resurrection we glorify this week, it was a case of giving Himself up out of supreme obedience to God, in part to show the disobedience of those in authority.  Arguably, the Sanhedrin condemned Christ because they feared that the people would unite behind Him, but that is very different from saying that they condemned Him in the name of unity. 

There are, in fact, other values to be found in unity besides strength, which is why non-fascists might also prize it, and strength need not be defined only in terms of coercion and mob justice.  Obviously, out of context and taken abstractly, unity may or may not be desirable, which is all the more reason why Glick’s abuse of Michelle Obama’s statement in context is all the worse.  

People may be unified for a great many different things, and it is the objective for which they are uniting that matters.  From a Christian perspective, unity is first and foremost not just a Christian value, but a basic principle of theology, ecclesiology and ethics.  Though overused by ecumenists, ut unum sint (that they may be one) is one of the most important prayers offered by the Lord, as we in the Orthodox Church remember and celebrate this week.  Foremost among the things that unity, true unity, is supposed to represent is love and communion. 

Political religions, including fascism, offer a false, denuded form of unity that comes from collective action to celebrate and worship oneself or one’s people rather than finding unity in God, and it would be tragic to pretend that unity “by itself” is somehow necessarily fascist because it can be concerned only with strength.  Clearly, in the case of the Obamas, the unity being called for is not a fascist value, but a left-liberal democratic value, which is quite enough of a problem on its own.