E Pluribus Unum
Civility and Renewal
E pluribus unum. Out of many, one. The words on the Great Seal describe an assignment, not an accomplished fact.1 Elections remind us why the assignment is difficult. The many speak, somebody loses, and the winners inherit responsibility for people who wanted someone else in charge.
Yesterday, Democrats won the House and the Senate. The Associated Press described the result as a stinging rebuke of the president and his party.2 The president said he would accept the results. He also shifted blame and threatened vetoes. The new Congress is not yet seated. The next contest, over what this divided government accomplishes, has already begun.
New Democratic majorities will write laws for districts that voted Republican. A Republican president will sign or veto them for a country that has just rejected his administration. Neither was chosen by all of us. Each answer to all of us.
Voters can fire the other side without endorsing every ambition of yours. The winners would do well to remember the distinction before ordering stationery.
Governing for everyone cannot mean pleasing everyone or splitting every difference. It requires rules that protect the people who lost the argument and public institutions that serve them anyway.
A community need not vote “correctly” to receive competent government. Public services should come without a partisan loyalty test. Rules should apply to friends as well as enemies. When a policy fails, the people responsible should correct it rather than blame their predecessors.
Those are standards citizens can inspect. They give public service meaning beyond any inaugural address.
Losing an election forfeits no right to challenge what the winners do. Opposition remains legitimate, necessary, frequently useful. But holding government accountable and making government incapable of acting are different projects. The opposition owes the country a clear line between the two.
The winners, meanwhile, owe citizens reasons they can examine and a meaningful way to challenge consequential decisions. They owe a changed decision when the challenge exposes an error. They do not owe universal agreement, and citizens do not owe agreement in return. You can understand an administration’s reasoning, recognize its lawful authority, and still work to defeat its policy.
Civility of that kind is demanding. It leaves citizens free to oppose, loudly and without apology, while requiring those in power to recognize an opponent as someone they will still serve.
Lincoln delivered his second inaugural on March 4, 1865, with the Civil War unfinished.3 His final sentence begins, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”
The qualification matters. Firmness comes with an admission that our understanding is limited. A new majority may misunderstand what the country asked for. A president may misunderstand what it will bear. Holding office does not resolve either problem.
Lincoln then turned toward the work of binding up the nation’s wounds and caring for those who had borne the battle. That is the useful inheritance here, without pretending our present divisions constitute another civil war.
“There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people,” George H. W. Bush said in the prayer opening his 1989 inaugural.4 The standard gets harder when the people being served will never vote for you.
Bush also spoke of “a thousand points of light” and a patriotism expressed “in taking part and pitching in.”5 That work continues between elections, whenever you ask a representative to explain a vote, attend a school board meeting, help a neighbor, scrutinize your own side, or acknowledge a sound decision before checking which party made it.
None of this relieves government of its responsibilities. It gives citizens ways to insist those responsibilities are met.
The same test applies to how we govern artificial intelligence. When an institution hands a consequential decision to a machine, who still owes the citizen an explanation? Who can hear an appeal? Who has the authority to correct a mistake?6
“AI decided” cannot become an acceptable answer from people entrusted with public power. A decision affecting someone’s livelihood or access to public services must remain answerable to human judgment, even when machines produce it.
That obligation survives every election, and so does the citizen’s right to demand it be honored.
Yesterday the many spoke, and not with one voice. The winners now have decisions to make for the whole country. The rest of us have work to do beyond applauding our side and awaiting the next campaign.
Out of many, one. We remain different, often disgruntled, and determined to be heard. The assignment is to build and sustain a government that can act amid those differences, account for its choices, and correct its mistakes.
The election settled who gets the next turn at the wheel. What they do with it is everyone’s business.
Stephen DeAngelis
Princeton, NJ
September 2026
About the Author
Stephen F. DeAngelis is the founder, president, and CEO of Enterra Solutions and Massive Dynamics, two companies that apply artificial intelligence and advanced mathematics to complex enterprise challenges. His work spans international relations, national security, and commercial technology, with visiting research affiliations at Princeton University, Department of Chemistry, the Computing and Computational Sciences and National Security Directorates of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He holds patents in autonomous decision science.
Endnotes
1 Meagan T. Frenzer, “The Great Seal: Celebrating 233 Years of a National Emblem,” Pieces of History, U.S. National Archives, June 20, 2015. https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/06/20/the-great-seal-celebrating-233-years-of-a-national-emblem/
2 Jill Colvin, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Will Weissert, “Democrats win the US House and Senate as voters deliver a strong rebuke to Trump and Republicans,” Associated Press, updated November 4, 2026, 7:57 AM UTC. It reports his acceptance in a late-night Fox News phone interview. A news call is not certification. https://apnews.com/article/midterm-election-house-senate-democrats-republicans-trump-f126e12e05b579a327b98481c0ae2226
3 Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, concluding paragraph, in National Park Service, “Lincoln’s Second Inauguration,” last updated August 31, 2021. The excerpt opens a longer sentence. Its application here is the author’s and claims no likeness to the Civil War. https://home.nps.gov/articles/000/lincoln-s-second-inauguration.htm
4 George H. W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1989, transcribed as “Inaugural Address of George Bush,” The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bush.asp
5 Cokie Roberts, “Peggy Noonan: The Woman Who Gave Presidents the Word,” Los Angeles Times, May 6, 1990. Roberts credits “a thousand points of light” to Noonan’s pen and records her work on Bush’s inaugural (note 4). https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-05-06-op-517-story.html https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/bush.asp 6 Stanford HAI, “Economy,” chapter 4 of The 2026 AI Index Report, accessed November 4, 2026. Paweł Gmyrek, Janine Berg, Karol Kamiński, Filip Konopczyński, Agnieszka Ładna, Balint Nafradi, Konrad Rosłaniec, and Marek Troszyński, Generative AI and jobs: A 2025 update, Research Brief, International Labour Organization, May 20, 2025. Adoption and exposure, not displacement or a cause of the result. https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/economy https://www.ilo.org/publications/generative-ai-and-jobs-2025-update
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