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There are some individuals who take a specific idea, that the Left and the Right could set aside their disagreements and come together in unity to achieve political goals, and hold it in higher regard than their own ideology. Those individuals are naive, and the unity they imagine is but ephemera. It’s pleasant to look at, but it does not survive contact with a single vote that matters. The political spectrum in America has always been crowded with ideas on how to improve the standard of living, and within that crowd, serious people disagree about all of it. That disagreement isn’t the system failing, it’s the system working.
This idea seems to recur every so often. Supposedly, the populist left and populist right find some common ground against the “establishment” where the old party lines are dissolved using a shared sentiment of anti-war, anti-corporate and anti-surveillance policies. And everyone knows the sales pitch that’s been repeated every time this comes up in conversation, by which I mean “The Left and The Right want the same things, but we’re kept in conflict because of ‘elites’ who profit from our division.” Some see this as appealing, but it’s also told almost exclusively by people who have never had to decide who gets the judgeship.
When watching the political discourse unfold on social media, there is something notable about a political influencer, commentator or even a politician who cultivates a following on the pose of being Right Wing, Alt-Right or Far-Right and then slowly walks the audience toward accepting more and more of the liberal agenda and the policies accompanied by it. The willingness to compromise the convictions that brought the audience to them in order to appease the same Left Wing whose party members celebrated the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 is on the border of insanity. Albeit not every liberal leader or follower celebrated but the ones who did were not confused as to what side Kirk was on.
These figures with reach over millions walk their audience down a path of frivolous conspiracies that do nothing other than turn the engagement into profit. Candace Owens literally spent the winter telling her audience Charlie Kirk was a time traveler who knew he would die young and then spent the spring telling them to fix the fracture with the left.
I won’t pretend to know what’s in her head, but the incentives are obvious on their own. The Right-wing audience is oversaturated and every figure in that space is competing for the same viewers. The unity pitch opens a new avenue to market, which would get you left-leaning viewers who would never have clicked on the clips, coverage of your redemption from the mainstream and bookings you would have never gotten before. Owens recent meeting with Hunter Biden is content that no amount of “staying the course” could have produced. Whatever her reasons are, the pivot itself is the product. The conspiracies and talks of unity seem in opposition to one another, but they’re in the same business. Both of them are what you sell when the argument has stopped growing your audience.
More likely than not, they are the most susceptible to being absorbed into the Left because their convictions don’t survive the pivot and they treat the intellectual conflict between the two parties as a defect that can be cured. When you really think about it, if a political body cannot draw the line between friend and foe, then it wouldn’t exist as a political body at all.
There is another pattern worth pointing out. The Far-Right figureheads who entertain the idea of unity with the Left often appeal to humanity and decency to soften their audience’s resistance to it. It’s a familiar political maneuver which in early August, Tucker Carlson gave a pure demonstration of it on his livestream when he announced a ten-point plan, crafted as a foundation for whatever comes after the current system, weeks after promising to help build a third party.
The points were fairness, sovereignty, productivity, beauty, health, honesty, optimism, wisdom, decency and unity. Every item is an abstraction that nobody on earth could oppose, for who could be against fairness and health? Conversely, Tucker Carlson isn’t pitching unity with the left the way Candace Owens is because his idea is a third party that transcends the left-right divide.
One might read this and argue that the party of unity that claims to have no enemies does technically have one enemy, and that is the person who rejects the notion. It creates a test that expels the committed right and admits the left by default. Since the left’s hostilities already speak the language of “decency,” the third-party fills with the class that speaks the language professionally. And sure, temporary coalitions over single issues are real politics, but that isn’t unity. At that point the over-bloated aberration of liberalism isn’t a corruption of the plan, it’s the plan’s only possible output.
It is almost to say that the rival of the party of unity is no longer viewed as a rival but as an obstacle against all of humanity and all that is decent, or what they perceive decent to be. By using humanity as their defining line, it becomes a frequent way of cheating because it claims a universal mandate to deny the other side any form of standing. When it gets to that point, you no longer have the defining word “we” against the background of “they.”
Even more so, the figure who built their audience on hard positions and then preaches unity shifts the friend-foe distinction. As a result, the enemy yesterday was the progressive coalition and today the enemy is the “extremist” audience member who wouldn’t play along with the shift, and that shift is framed as audience growth. This is why the pattern is so consistent. When talk of unity comes from the right, the concessions only run one way. The right gives away its policies while the left gives away small, pointless concessions that cost them nothing that counts. Instead, what unity talk actually creates is a purge on the right, which is eventually just called maturity.
To give credit where it is due, the Left understands all of this, and you’ll rarely catch their institutions talking about unity the way the Right does. They actively talk about defeating the Right. The Left didn’t call for reconciliation after Kirk’s assassination, and a meaningful number of them called it deserved. There are exceptions, there always are, but the tendency is the point. That is a political body behaving like a political body should. It knows who its friends and enemies are, and it’s not confused on whether or not the distinction matters because they’ll never hire anyone to explain that it doesn’t.
None of this requires the Right to emulate the Left. It only asks that the Right-wing figureheads stop pretending the conduct is not happening. There are a few decent men on the Right who have been relentlessly in intellectual conflict with the Left for years and will tell you it will never be over, but the man who tells you the conflict is over because he is tired of fighting has essentially switched sides and asks for you to call it peace.
Unity in American politics might sound delightful to some, but it’s delightful in the way that most things are delightful when you have no stake in the outcome or understanding of the machinations used to achieve it. The question has never been whether the lines between parties exist, but it’s who gets to draw that line and what happens to the ones who let someone else draw the line.
