Earlier this month, just as the midterm elections were taking place, Kevin Williamson wrote something that’s been sitting in my browser since I first read it. “Against ‘Unity’” presents a provocative-seeming but actually rather conventional invitation to seek tolerance and pluralism, not a politically-achieved sense of moral-therapeutic feeling of social unity:

For what I guess are obvious reasons, the past couple of weeks have been heavy with discussions and columns on the theme of President Trump and “unity.” “Trump can’t unite us,” says the headline on a discussion between Ross Douthat and Frank Bruni in the New York Times. “Can anyone?”

One possible answer to that question is: “I don’t care.”

Nobody has ever explained why it is we need to be “united” to begin with, or made the case that we are somehow seriously disunited. There’s a great deal of histrionic howling and stupidity surrounding our politics, which is really only a proxy war for deeper underlying cultural differences. There’s some cause for concern there, but the cure for that division isn’t “unity” — it’s the opposite of unity: Live and let live. A great many of our problems come from the desire to forcibly recruit people whose lives and interests are unlike our own into the pursuit of our own narrow visions of the good life. The whole point of our national arrangement is that we can be pluribus and unum at the same time. That’s why the states didn’t cease to exist when we created a federal government. “Unity” means “oneness,” and trying to push people into oneness when they want different things will always cause tension. If there’s “unity,” then somebody wins and somebody loses. Plurality, on the other hand, means that we don’t all have to live the same way or hold the same things dear.

There are things to be concerned about, of course. But the country is trucking along just fine, our institutions are robust, our communities functional. …

And even if such “unity” were necessary or desirable, why should it come from the chief administrative official of the federal government? We have a president, not a prince. The president isn’t the country. He isn’t even the government. The purported need to bask in the glow of solidarity under his benevolent gaze is gross and unworthy of us as a people.

We aren’t here to be bent by the government to some national purpose. The government is here to be bent to our purposes. … Government is there to fix potholes and mind the borders and keep the peace. It isn’t there to give us a sense of purpose, or to make us feel good about our neighbors and fellow citizens. And if you can’t endure your neighbor because you’re so torqued up about whoever won the last election or whoever’s going to win this one, then you have problems that no mere politician can solve. …

We should try to get a government that functions better as a government rather than try to make it function as some kind of national moral totem.

If our sense of national purpose is fraying, political solutions to that problem seem unlikely to be the best remedy.