Someone stop Chris Hayes. Writing this good could destroy us* all:
Then there's the other major contradiction of the [Obama] campaign, the fact that it is simultaneously promising two things -- progress and unity -- that have an uncomfortable relationship to each other. In his speech, Obama recited moments in American history when politics became something more than the mundane mechanics of governing and effected a true transformation of the polity: the civil war, the New Deal, the civil rights movement. But the problem is that those were moments not of unity, but of extreme polarization. The South only granted rights to black citizens under force of arms, armies of unruly civil war veterans gathered in Washington DC during the Great Depression to demand the government provide them with a safety net, and when Martin Luther King Jr went marching through the South, he was met with batons and firehoses and accusations that he was dividing people and stirring up trouble.
Standing on the site of where Abraham Lincoln gave his "house divided" speech, Obama invoked him as a model:
"[T]he life of a tall, gangly, self-made Springfield lawyer tells us that a different future is possible. He tells us that there is power in words. He tells us that there is power in conviction. That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people."
It's hard to quarrel with the sentiment. But Obama didn't mention that Lincoln was also the most hated and polarizing figure in American presidential history. Sometimes unity is the price of progress.
*Us=His fellow twentysomething progressive journalists. Hayes is a terrifying force of nature.
Update: Hoisted from comments:
Progress and unity are at odds like mechanical work and heat minimization are at odds. Yes, any attempt to do mechanical work will in our imperfect world produce heat. Nonetheless, the engineer has every incentive to minimize the amount of heat produced, because all that heat is wasted energy. Progress causes discord, but this is a negative feedback loop--discord slows and reverses progress. The civil rights era may have been a time of great division, but only by holding together blacks and moderate whites could MLK Jr. succeed.
