On Sunday, after much fanfare, The New York Times’ editorial board announced its presidential endorsement, which was actually a decision to endorse two candidates: Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. “Both the radical and the realist models” being offered in the Democratic primary “warrant serious consideration,” the board wrote, and so voters must decide which is “best suited for repairing the Republic.”

As much as the op-ed served to announce the board’s endorsements, it was also an opportunity to issue some warnings: “Any hope of restoring unity in the country will require modesty, a willingness to compromise and the support of the many demographics that make up the Democratic coalition—young and old, in red states and blue, black and brown and white.” Bernie Sanders, they argued, would merely exchange “one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.” (This is also where Warren falters, according to the board: “She sometimes sounds like a candidate who sees a universe of us-versus-thems, who, in the general election, would be going up against a president who has already divided America into his own version of them and us.”)

The rhetoric of unity to restore American democracy feels good on its face, but the board seems untroubled by and uninterested in the question of who, exactly, might be united under a future president. And by what?

Unity, as a virtue unto itself, is inadequate to the task of justice. After all, as the Times implies, Donald Trump has united the far right and much of his own party around his nativist vision for America. To the editorial board, even with a demagogue in office and income inequality now the worst in America’s recorded history, it appears that “unity” candidates are those who use acceptable, institutional means to make adjustments around the margins of the status quo. But for those who engage in or study movement work, there are bigger fish to fry than Robert’s Rules of Order. So without an adamant demand for economic, racial, and other kinds of justice—what actual good does unity do?

Unity implies some sort of harmony, and the Times board makes it clear that the rhetoric of peace takes precedence over material concerns: It reserves its harshest tone not for Michael Bloomberg—whose policing policies inflicted violence upon thousands of innocent Black and Latinx New Yorkers—but for Sanders, whom they equate to Trump. (Bloomberg’s alleged conduct toward women who worked for him resembles Trump’s crude sexism, but this parallel goes unremarked upon by the Times.)

