Government

There Cannot Be Unity Following Conflict Absent An Acknowledgment Of Wrongdoing

If Republican leaders are going to cry about 'unity' while discouraging further action against their criminal president for the dumpster fire he turned our democracy into, well, they need to just shut up.

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(Photo by Evan Vucci-Pool/Getty Images)

Many of us have been in romantic relationships in our lifetimes. From such experiences, we all know the best, and really the only, thing to say to reconcile after a fight:

Honey, I did nothing wrong and I am not sorry. Therefore, in the future, I will not be changing anything at all about my behavior. Let’s move on. We have to unify. I assume you will never bring up this incident again, OK?

Yes, yes, that always works. Conflict permanently resolved!

Since many on the right do not seem to fully grasp the difference between actual sarcasm and unambiguous statements that one later regrets, let me clarify that what I just wrote is the former. Obviously, that doesn’t ever work, because we are not all having our first day as human beings.

But don’t take my word for it. Because science is a thing (yes, even social science, occasionally), we know that there are six components of a great apology:

  • Expression of regret
  • Explanation of what went wrong
  • Acknowledgment of responsibility
  • Declaration of repentance
  • Offer of repair
  • Request for forgiveness

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You don’t necessarily need all of these elements for an apology to land, but one certainly stands above the rest. “Our findings showed that the most important component is an acknowledgement of responsibility,” said Roy Lewicki, one of the lead authors of a series of psychological studies which confirmed that all apologies are not equally effective. “Say it is your fault, that you made a mistake.”

Donald Trump hasn’t ever taken responsibility for any of his mistakes, so it wasn’t all that surprising when he repeatedly said that the speech he gave to incite a D.C. mob to attack the U.S. Capitol on his behalf was “totally appropriate” (as though we all didn’t hear him making up falsehoods about fake election fraud, antifa, the “deep state,” immigrant caravans, Barack Obama’s birthplace, and the million other toxic fantasies disgorged from his imagination over the decade leading up to that speech). We’re not going to be getting an apology or an acknowledgement of responsibility from Trump himself, so there is no use in holding out hope there.

Trump’s supporters, on the other hand, are finally, painfully, minimally, peeling away from him. His approval rating is at an all-time (but still too high) low, of 29 percent, and 10 Republican members of the House even found the courage to vote for his impeachment.

There’s a delightful Irish saying along the lines of, “I forgive and forget, but I never forget that I forgave.” Maybe asking run-of-the-mill Trump supporters, who were enticed to follow a lunatic, to eat more crow than they have already isn’t strictly a necessity. But, if Republican leaders are going to cry about “unity” while discouraging further action against their criminal president for the dumpster fire he turned our democracy into, well, they need to just shut up. They don’t want unity, they want everyone to kowtow to their demonstrably wrong positions that Donald Trump is a living god and that it’s OK to storm your own nation’s Capitol to overturn a democratic election result because mirror-image patriotism or something. There is not going to be unity with these people until they acknowledge what is clear to the vast majority of Americans: anyone who followed Donald Trump into this mess made a mistake.

So, I’m not demanding an apology from Republicans, and I don’t expect that most of them will ever acknowledge any responsibility for what happened. But unless and until they do, they need to shut up about unity, because they don’t really want it, and can’t really get it. Republicans don’t have to give up their policy positions, they don’t have to stop disagreeing with Democrats, and they don’t have to feel bad about themselves. But if they actually want unity, they first have to say what have become the seven most unifying words in the English language: “I was wrong to follow Donald Trump.”

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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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