As President Biden, harnessed to the Constitution, sets out on his presidency, we find ourselves mulling the idea of unity. The new president made unity the theme of his eloquent inaugural. The word appears nine times in his speech. The concept is the essence of our national motto, e pluribus unum, or out of many, one. The motto is on our Great Seal, along with Annuit Cœptis, meaning “He,” as in God, “favors our undertaking.”

One could say that it echoes the first of the commandments brought down from Sinai: “I am the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.” Yet we confess that, in temporal matters, the idea of unity as a goal rests uneasily with The New York Sun. We cherish the blasted pluribus as well as the unum.

This isn’t a new thing with us. The editor of the Sun used to keep on his desk a plaque that read, “In disunity is our strength.” We’ve always kept a weather eye out for the dissenters. In our republic, this idea goes back to the debate between the federalists and the anti-federalists, whose debates tempered our Constitution. We understand why the Founders were so obsessive about limiting the power of government.

It’s no small thing — on the contrary, it’s y-u-u-uge — that President Biden won his office with the largest vote in the history of America. When it comes to tolerance, though, the right, in our opinion, still has the high ground over the left, with its campaign to scream at government officials who fetch up in restaurants, use firebombs and rockets against stores and government buildings, and draw up blacklists.

To those who say that the standing to make that claim is diminished after the catastrophe of the riot at the Capitol, we say — they’re right, up to a point. For that’s a form of the very “whataboutism” the left has been denouncing. It doesn’t excuse the purge now being pressed by the left or the new censoriousness of the big social media platforms. We’ve never seen in our national press an editorial tundra as stolid as that which obtains today.

Save for a column by William McGurn in the Wall Street Journal, to cite but one example, we haven’t spotted in a major newspaper a defense of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik after she was ousted from a board at Harvard for objecting to the electoral vote from several states. If standing on what one sees as a constitutional principle is no longer okay in this country, what’s the virtue of the unum over the pluribus?

This is one of the questions on which, we predict, will hang the fate of the Biden presidency. There are already calls for subjecting the Trump years to a vast lustration, like, say, that being sought by Speaker Pelosi and Secretary of State Clinton. It’s a time for the new president to be careful of what the Democrats wish for. And to remember that there was a time when the judges who sat on the great religious court refused to hand down a capital sentence if the sages were unanimous. With that, we join the millions who wish the new president Godspeed.

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Image: Impression from an 1877 die of the Great Seal as used in 1879 by President Hayes. Courtesy of the National Archives via Wikipedia.