Humphrey — Legislative Deliberation & National CohesionCampaign Briefing: Representation

Foundations

September 25, 2025

“Let us commit not merely to be many, but to be one — strong because of our differences, deliberate because of our duty, united because we choose each other over division.”

I. The Necessity of Thoughtful Deliberation in a Great Republic

Across more than two centuries, this country has been held together not by uniformity but by deliberate, often painstaking acts of mutual understanding. The genius of our system is not that it magically produces agreement, but that it compels us — across regions, interests, and convictions — to wrestle together toward a common course.

Hubert Humphrey was known throughout his long public life as the “Happy Warrior,” not because he was naïve to conflict, but because he understood that joy and optimism were essential fuels for national unity. During the Vietnam era, with cities in turmoil and campuses aflame, Humphrey continually urged that America’s strength lay in its vast diversity, in the proud, varied texture of our lives — rural and urban, North and South, factory and farm. Just as John McCain later warned that the Senate was drifting into tribal partisanship, Humphrey cautioned that America’s democracy would not long survive if we did not forge common cause out of our many differences.

Humphrey’s appeals to reject “the counsel of defeat and division” were not partisan slogans. They were constitutional imperatives, rooted in the same understanding that drove McCain decades later to implore the Senate to resume real deliberation. The deliberative machinery of Congress was designed so that the people of Iowa could explain themselves to the people of Pennsylvania, so that Nebraska and New York might understand their shared stake in each other’s well-being. Without that process, we lose the very mechanism by which the many become one.

“This campaign is driven by reality over rhetoric, thoughtfulness over reflex,” you might say — because the problems before us cannot be solved by reflexive partisanship. The aim is not merely bipartisan deals; it is non-partisan dedication to the people’s needs, rooted in shared facts, shared responsibilities, and shared futures. That was as true when Humphrey challenged the bitter divisions of the 1960s as when McCain stood on the Senate floor, urging colleagues to trust each other again.

II. Mutual Dependence: The Heartland and the Hubs

Consider for a moment the literal lifeblood that flows between the breadbasket and the metropolises of this country. If you live in Los Angeles, New York, Miami, or Dallas, you do not grow your own wheat, your own lettuce, your own soy. Those come from Iowa and Kansas, Nebraska and Minnesota. Yet if you live in those rural heartlands, the grain you harvest travels on railways financed by Wall Street bonds, through ports expanded by urban tax bases, insured by companies housed in Chicago or New York.

Hubert Humphrey, who started out as a small-town pharmacist in South Dakota and Minnesota, never forgot that cities needed farms as much as farms needed cities recognized this deep interdependence. In countless speeches to both labor halls and farm bureaus, he argued that Minneapolis could not thrive if Moorhead did not, that New York needed Kansas wheat, that Alabama depended on Michigan’s factories just as much as Michigan relied on Alabama’s cotton.

The American economic organism is a single intricate body. To pretend we could sever rural interests from urban capital flows — or shut our borders without devastating the farmers who rely on seasonal labor — is to misunderstand the very nature of this team.

Just as a football team depends on every position executing its duty — no quarterback stands without guards, no running back without linemen — so too does this nation rely on each state, each industry, each community to do its part. And if any one of them decides to stop blocking for the rest, the entire enterprise collapses.

“Being united does not mean we are all identical, but it does mean we recognize our profound equality and interdependence.”

III. Real Consensus Requires More Than 50% Plus One

Some in modern politics have come to believe that a bare majority — half the people plus one — is enough to justify pushing through any policy, however radical, however likely to be overturned in the next cycle. That is not real consensus. True consensus, the kind that binds a diverse nation together, looks more like three-fifths, two-thirds — majorities forged by reasoned persuasion, not fearful conformity.

This was central to Humphrey’s philosophy of reconciliation during some of America’s most fractious years. Campaigning for the presidency after the trauma of the Johnson administration and amid Vietnam’s heartbreak, he did not promise to win by shoving legislation through Congress on razor-thin votes. Instead, he called for national conversations — between unions and farmers, between the wealthy and the working class, between urban minorities and rural whites. He knew from experience that majorities built on fear or transient popularity could not last. Only those forged through mutual understanding would endure.

In every family in this country, as we all understand deep within our own hearts, differences of philosophy are not cause to exile a child as “radical” or “un-American.” They are cause for discussion, for questions, for shared examination of facts. This is how healthy republics are supposed to work: neighbors, legislators, citizens presenting their perspectives, probing each other’s reasoning, and refining solutions that might endure because they were not born of one camp’s triumph alone.

We have seen the opposite of this too often: hyper-partisan primaries where turnout is driven by the angriest factions, and lawmakers who then mistake their mandate as permission to crush all dissent. That path leads only to deeper division, greater instability, and policy that lurches every few years between extremes.

IV. Rejecting the Politics of Enmity

There is a powerful, corrosive temptation today to reduce every disagreement to accusations of near-treason. To call your neighbor a fascist or a communist simply because they do not share your preferred tax structure or regulatory approach is to strip the humanity from politics and turn fellow citizens into existential enemies.

This is not only intellectually lazy; it is morally dangerous. Our politicians are not sovereigns — they are our employees. We hire them to represent our needs, our best hopes, and yes, even our disagreements, in a way that moves the country forward. When they instead turn us against each other for political gain, we must remind them that they answer to us, not we to them.

Humphrey never lost sight of this. Even as protesters shouted him down on college campuses, he refused to answer with hate. Instead, he said it was easy to be cynical, to declare the country finished, torn forever by partisanship — but he could not bring himself to say so, because he believed too deeply in America. “Politics is not war. It is the means by which we peacefully sort out our differing interests, build on our diverse strengths, and secure the blessings of liberty together.”

Deep reasoning, of testing facts against each other’s logic until the soundest ideas prevail, is the very model we should demand of our Congress. It is what McCain urged on the Senate floor, and what Humphrey traveled thousands of miles by train and car to preach in union halls and courthouses: that disagreement is not a threat, but the raw material out of which durable unity is fashioned.

V. Why This Matters Now: From Civil War to Civil Commitment

History has taught us how dangerous it is when disagreement turns into dehumanization. Brother once did take up arms against brother in this country, in the Civil War that scarred us all. We are still repairing from the aftermath of not fully pursuing reconciliation when the shooting stopped.

That is why the “politics of reconciliation” — Humphrey rightly highlighted — is not weakness. It is the strongest expression of our national maturity. It channels our diverse views into a dynamism that can quite literally move mountains. It sands off rough edges, shores up our collective weaknesses, and makes it possible for us to rally when hurricanes destroy our towns or fires sweep through our forests.

Hubert Humphrey embodied that spirit in the 1960s, telling crowds that while it was easy to mock the process or call America hopelessly divided, he could not do it because he had seen too much of the country, believed too much in its people. John McCain, decades later, echoed precisely the same theme from the Senate floor, urging trust across the aisle, faith in the essential decency of our democratic rivals, confidence that America would always be more than the sum of its factions.

Time and again, we have seen Americans cross state lines not to invade but to help: Louisiana factory workers struggling around the clock to replace firefighting equipment for New York companies after 9/11; truckloads of food from the Midwest heading to hurricane-ravaged Miami; people from Colorado to Oregon driving down to help in California’s earthquake aftermath. These are not isolated acts of charity. They are testaments to what it means to be part of the same national family.

Conclusion

America is not great because we are uniform. We are great because, in all our clashing perspectives and regional rivalries, we choose — over and over — to be one people. To listen, to reason, to compromise, and to stand together when the waters rise or the markets tremble or the world needs a steady example of free people governing themselves wisely.

We will remain strong only so long as we remember that our states, our industries, our communities are not competing fiefdoms but indispensable parts of a single, magnificent republic.

“Let us leave to history the grim work of counting partisan victories. Let our generation be remembered instead for the quiet triumph of choosing each other, time and again, as partners in this American experiment.”