But by making unity his goal and the standard by which he’ll be judged, Biden is setting himself up for failure. When Biden was walking the final leg of the inaugural parade route, a couple of CNN journalists shouted out, “President Biden, can you unite the country?”

He didn’t answer, but if he had, honesty should have compelled to say, “Actually, probably not.” Just as no one really got tired of all the winning under President Trump, no one is going to get tired of all the unifying under President Biden.

There are two problems with calls for unity. One is that they tend to be nebulous, leaving out what we are all supposed to be unifying around.

We should all respect and honor one another as Americans, and seek to preserve our governing institutions, but beyond that, it gets fuzzy (and even whether we should preserve those institutions and how to go about it are matters of dispute).