A pandemic causing more than 400,000 deaths. Economic hardship closing businesses and destroying jobs. Racial tensions leading to peaceful protests and violent riots. “To overcome these challenges – to restore the soul and to secure the future of America,” President Joe Biden said in his recent inaugural address, “requires more than words. It requires that most elusive of things in a democracy: Unity.” 

Biden is right to seek unity between Americans. He is also correct that building unity requires more than words. But words can unite or divide as well.

For instance, in remarks offered when the president signed an executive order that, in part, rescinded former President Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission, Biden said “unity and healing must being with understanding and truth, not ignorance and lies.” Too often, politicians in Washington, D.C., offer lofty, noble and admirable speeches when beginning something important (a new term of office, a new policy proposal, etc.) only to immediately return to a division-inducing brand of politics as soon as they have the opportunity. Accusing your political opponents of supporting “ignorance and lies” would seem to fall into that category. 

If Biden sincerely desires to build unity among Americans, he will have to do better.

Building unity requires more than expecting your opponents to change their opinions to agree with yours, or abandoning their policy positions when they diverge from yours. That confuses conformity with unity. In the political world, conformity is often oppressive and short-lived while unity is empowering and enduring.

Building unity requires a humility of mind – acknowledging you can learn something from differing viewpoints – that leads to listening and seeking to understand an opposing perspective. It requires an intellectual openness to expand your mind beyond your own ideas and experience to comprehend the ideas and experience of another. It requires a depth of character to avoid the knee-jerk impulse to respond to opposition by attacking and delegitimizing it.

These essential requirements for building unity rarely score political points, motivate a political base or create an appealing fundraising pitch. Hence, they are rare among political leaders. With a few notable exceptions – an Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan – most political leaders lack the capacity and/or the fortitude to truly do what it takes (or do it long enough) to build unity.

But that is also part of what makes it a political ideal worth striving for. Most Americans remember with fondness and admiration past presidents and political leaders who were willing and able to make the sacrifices necessary to truly achieve unity.

So as the members of Biden’s administration seek to fulfill the president’s inaugural vision for unity, they should be commended for recognizing something America truly needs today. They also must be called out when they fail to live up to that vision, as with Biden’s remarks about the 1776 Commission.

If the Biden administration is willing to listen as sincerely to criticism as it is to commendation, it has a hope of building unity in America. If administration officials devolve to politics-as-usual rhetoric that marginalizes, demeans or caricatures opposition, then any otherwise unifying action they might take will likely fail to produce the unity they desire and that America needs.

Actions do speak louder than words. But as Trump’s social media presence repeatedly proved over the last four years, words can get in the way of hearing what your actions are trying to say. The Biden administration will do well to take that lesson to heart, and America will be much better off if it does.