DETROIT – Back in the bad old days of Stalinism, any deviation from the party line was treated as heresy, even treason, and was liable to get you expelled from the party, if not arrested or even shot.
What I worry about is that, long after the Soviet Union became a bad memory, we are moving in that intolerant direction ourselves.
Republicans are actually purging party members who do not support the false claim that the last presidential election was “stolen” from Donald Trump, who lost by seven million votes.
Five years ago, the late William Milliken, a Republican who held office longer than any other governor in Michigan history, was expelled by the Republican Party in his home county.
Democrats and liberals haven’t gone to that extreme, at least not yet. But there is less and less tolerance for views that vary from what is now perceived to be party orthodoxy, especially on questions of race and gender. The Voting Rights Act has commonly been thought to require that two Michigan Congressional districts be “majority-minority” districts, that is, have a majority of their population be African-American.
Well, that made sense in 1970, when blacks had been denied adequate representation for years. The black population was much more segregated in those days, and it was also relatively easy to carve out two districts with majority black populations.
Not anymore. The African-American population is now far more widely distributed. Detroit doesn’t even have enough people to fill a single congressional district, and the black population is rapidly decreasing in the city while the white minority is growing.
Last month, the new Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission came up with a map that had no black majority congressional districts – although two were very close.
I thought that made sense, and said the time when we needed to require black majority districts may be past. I noted that one of Michigan’s current black majority districts has a white member of Congress, and that the mostly black voters of Detroit, have repeatedly and overwhelmingly chosen their current white mayor.
But while some readers agreed, others attacked me and said I was helping those who would disenfranchise blacks.
That reaction was mild, however, compared to what I experienced a few months ago, when there was a seeming rush to tear down every statue of a Confederate general. While deploring racism, I noted that not all of those in the Confederacy were the same.
Slavery was, of course, a profound evil, and attempting to secede from the nation to start a new country based on slavery was indeed, as Ulysses Grant said, “one of the worst (causes) for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
But Robert E. Lee was not Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave dealer and later the brutal founder of the Ku Klux Klan.
While not sympathetic to his cause, I noted that Lee had done the nation a service in refusing calls to wage a guerrilla war after the South was defeated — something that might have turned this country into something resembling Afghanistan.
It is also worth remembering that the idea that one owed his first loyalty to his state, not the nation, was an intellectually defensible proposition then. There were some in the north as well as the south who thought states had the right to secede from the union.
This caused me to be denounced by a number of readers, including one who said my observations had “the stench of compromise with evil.”
Lee was a traitor, they said, and should have been hung. That, to put it mildly, would have been unlikely to heal the nation.
Seeing everything in starkly ideological terms and believing that your opponents in the other party are evil is a virtual guarantee to destroy democracy. We may have come close to that on January 6.
During the Cold War, one of America’s proudest boasts was that we were not like that. Back in the 1960s, I remember a teacher telling us that we didn’t have ideologies in this country.
That wasn’t completely true, even then. What was true, however, was that many people held a combination of “conservative” and “liberal” ideas. That extended to Congress, where, in 1971, say, all you could say with confidence was that most Republicans were generally friendlier to business; most Democrats were generally friendlier to unions and minorities.
Most, but not all. In the 1970s and 80s, there were always some Republicans who were more liberal than some Democrats, and vice-versa. That meant that on most issues, compromise was possible.
Not anymore.
Michigan Republicans, who control both houses of the legislature, have repeatedly spent time passing bills the Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, was certain to repeal, such as ones opposing mask and vaccination requirements.
That mirrored the more than 50 times at least one house of Congress voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, knowing that President Obama was certain to veto any such bill.
About the only thing to draw bipartisan support this year was a bill to end the “tampon tax” on feminine hygiene products.
Apart from that, we’ve been in an era of futile posturing.
Shortly before he died this July, Carl Levin, who represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate longer than anyone else ever had, said “if you aren’t prepared to compromise, you aren’t prepared to govern.”
Nor, he might have added, can democracy work.
And that is what most worries me.
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