Presidential election season for many years has been that time when politicians seeking high office tell us that they are the "leaders" who can "bring us together."   The purpose of good government, of course, is to allow us to be ourselves, to live our own lives according to our own values and to resist that awful and insistent screech to "bring us together."

The most awful political systems in modern history have proudly proclaimed that all of us now think and work and play and feel as one.  In fact, that is the salient feature of Nazism, Bolshevism, Maoism, and Fascism.  The Hitler Youth, for example, was intended to bring the rich and the poor, the city and the country, the Bavarian and the Prussian together as equals, all doing the same hard marching, all living in common barracks, all seeing themselves as part of a united people. 

The left loves this sort of homogenization of life guided by the sting of the state and the siren song of corrupted and infiltrated institutions.  Convincing all politicians – conservative as well as leftist and Republican as well as Democrat – that we need a "leader" to "bring us together" is the left's sneakiest maneuver.

This sort of artificial "unity" has all sorts of hidden horrors.  Consider academia.  Colleges ought to be all different, proposing different and conflicting approaches to life and offering different values.  The different professions of faith within the Judeo-Christian tradition ought to be distinct in real ways. 

Research and science ought to have "schools of thought" so that if one asked ten different universities which school of thought its relevant department had regarding climate change, one would get several different schools of thought instead of exactly the same dogma all the time. 

Not every young man or woman just out of high school should believe that he "ought" to go to college, because it is suitable for some but not for all.  Indeed, a college degree ought to be considered not proof of any particular credentials – proficiency tests can do that just fine – but rather proof that the graduate has engaged in a private pursuit of knowledge, using the university to help him.

Instead, we have folks like Sanders and Clinton acting as if we all ought to have a right to college and that we all ought to exercise that right.  (Why not have the federal government simply award a pro forma bachelor's degree to everyone who graduates from high school?  That would be much cheaper and save years of time on college campuses.)

Consider the homogenization of corporate life when every corporate bureaucracy – the real bosses of most large corporations – are cadres of leftism pushing the same agenda and accepting the same premises as every other corporation.  (This explains the real dread leftists feel towards small business, family farms, and similar genuinely independent economic activity.)

Consider, even, the regimentation of philanthropic and charitable activities.  Those groups that follow Leftist lockstep, like the Girl Scouts, are lauded, while those who try to stay true to their values, like the Boy Scouts, are hounded and harassed.  Politically correct charitable conglomerates like the United Way are pushed rather directly on employees in government and big businesses, while the genuinely useful but small and unnoticed charitable work gets no support or encouragement at all.

The great virtue of federalism, the marketplace of governments, is slapped and battered by federal judges and bigoted federal prosecutors and noxious leftist media so anything in one state not identical to most states is somehow constitutionally flawed and morally suspect.  The grand idea of America, that a modest federal government would exercise what slight control is essential to the nation and that states should be a flower garden of dazzling differences, has long been dismissed as contrary to the totalitarian goal of "bringing us together" – for our own good, of course.

We need to be much more disunited than we are today.  We need presidential elections to become, once again, relatively unimportant events in our lives because Washington and the gnomes who live there have become unimportant again.  We need someone who will inspire us to be many separate parts that associate or connect to the nation as a whole only when these parts wish that to happen.

Can this happen?  Can the crushing gravitational attraction of leftist collectivism with its faith of secular humanism can be tamed and then caged?  The hour is very late, and the work to do is long and hard, but it is surely a battle worth fighting.