The Unity Tour Was Kind of a Mess—and That’s Okay
The party is still divided on policy and politics—but a full airing of differences is healthy.
The Democratic National Committee’s Unity Tour is over, and the reviews are in: Most journalists panned it. . . Journalists treated the “unity tour” as a spectacle meant to spotlight party unity. It was anything but—yet it was necessary.
Photo credit: Senator Bernie Sanders and Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez at a DNC rally in Mesa, Arizona, on April 21, 2017. (AP Photo / Matt York)
The embers smolder on social media, and controversies can reignite them into firestorms. Almost a year after he was mathematically eliminated by Clinton, Sanders voters still feel like their man could have beaten Trump, if the DNC hadn’t had a thumb on the scales. Clinton voters believe her victory was hobbled not merely by James Comey and Russian hacking, but by “Bernie or Bust” voters who Sanders helped create by treating the former Secretary of State as a creature of Wall Street and the 1 percent.4
There are genuine gulfs in ideology as well as political strategy. On one side, Sanders and many supporters want to see Democrats fight to win back working-class white voters who’ve abandoned the party. “I come from the white working class, and I am deeply humiliated that the Democratic Party cannot talk to the people where I came from,” he sternly intoned a week after the election. A few days later he added in a speech: “One of the struggles that you’re going to be seeing in the Democratic Party is whether we go beyond identity politics.” Naturally, the party’s existing base, overwhelmingly female and multiracial, don’t like seeing their issues derided as “identity politics” and shunned as distractions, lifestyle questions or political correctness run amok, while the troubles of white downscale men are centered.5
A Unity Tour was bound to roll into that pothole, and it did almost immediately when it headed to Omaha, Nebraska to support a former state senator running for mayor, Heath Mello.
Mello’s feisty economic populism caught the eye of Sanders’ supporters . .
Still, I think it’s progress that these issues are being faced in Donald Trump’s first 100 days, when the Resistance still seems sizeable and urgent and people can come together around the necessity of defeating Trump—even as they disagree on tactics as well as policy. None of the Unity Tour stumbles were fatal, a few ended productively, and the party factions will have to keep working to define what “unity” means in the wake of the transformative Sanders-Clinton battle.15
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