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Spotting Division Isn’t the Same Thing as Sowing It
Not everyone complaining about “divisiveness” is doing so in good faith
According to historians and political scientists, the two most presidents in U.S. history were Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln. But whereas Lincoln is seen by many as perhaps the greatest president in American history, a man of courage, honesty, and integrity, Trump on the other hand is a serial liar and likely criminal, and his tenure was marked by one failure after another.
Which made me wonder: aren’t we using this word “divisive” rather simplistically? Isn’t there a difference between a great leader who is divisive because he (or she) takes an unpopular but morally correct stance on an important issue, and a poor leader who uses divisive rhetoric in order to drive a wedge between his (or her) own people?
Abraham Lincoln was the first kind of divisive. So was Martin Luther King, Jr., for that matter. Trump is clearly the second kind. But since my conservative friends could simply reply, “You’re just using ‘good divisive’ to mean ‘liberal’ and ‘bad divisive’ to mean ‘conservative,’” let’s try to be more systematic about how we distinguish different kinds of divisiveness.
The analysis will boil down to asking two key questions: first, is the leader…
