First thing to establish: I am not anti-Republican, though it’s true that I am a Democrat. But I do believe that there are too many Republicans in government today: nationally, in West Virginia, and in Jefferson County. I also believe that the total control Republicans have over our politics is reckless and it’s hurting us. Republicans in power need a Democratic opposition to prevent their own tendency to overreach and break things.
Naturally, it works in the opposite direction too. Overreach by either party, though, creates polarization, a social disease in which nothing gets done or, worse, where government works for the benefit of only those who voted it in.
If the party in power has no opposition political party, it has a lock on policy. It can dominate, and will usually choose to do so. It has no need to please any of the people who do not agree with its policies. It can ignore the opposition. Or more ominously, it can step on their necks. It can channel resources to its own coffers. It can plow on and rig subsequent elections. It can even cancel elections. It can be as mean and one-sided as it wants to be.
History has seen this happen often enough, in the United States and elsewhere, so you could be forgiven if you thought it was inevitable.
The classic example of this kind of ideological split in America was the Civil War, an attempt to fracture the country along an issue that the electorate held widely divergent views about — slavery. We may no longer be in actual war, but we still see skin color and hair texture as issues to take sides on.
We’re at a time now where race has again become a flashpoint in America. Republicans, in the majority of states where they control government, have resurrected race as an electoral issue. They don’t call it that exactly, but you see the underlying truth of the matter in the attention they give to eliminating DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives in public, educational, and social programs. They’re banning books by Black authors (among others), making it harder for Black people (among others) to vote, striking references to Blacks (among others) in history and culture, and firing Blacks (among others) who hold positions of authority. It’s like the issue fomenting the Civil War is having a resurgence.
I feel, not without evidence, that Republicans are uneasy at best about Blacks’ greater visibility in American culture. They regard it as a diminishment of White status and their influence in the country. Blacks and other groups that Whites target are seen as threats to the privilege that we Whites have traditionally come to believe we deserve. Why we should deserve that privilege is rationalized in any number of suspiciously contrived arguments. We’re more intelligent, we’re guided by better morals, we’re better stewards of the American way, we’re even more beautiful and more handsome. But the underlying truth of this range of hokey, unprovable justifications is that we’re tribal and we’re protective of our tribe. Our tribe members have white faces and we make up the White race.
It is Republicans who majorly believe in this version of White superiority, strongly enough that in their seats of power they have enshrined it into the political agenda that we label White Supremacy. The word ‘supremacy’ here implies not just a belief, but an actionable agenda to maintain Whites in perpetual power. They do that by trying to keep ‘contaminating’ foreigners out of the country; by ‘realigning’ history, education, and culture to valorize Whites and denigrate non-Whites; by making it hard for non-Whites to vote; by triggering negative associations about non-Whites in the media; by rigging elections. And they’re doing it through deceit and subterfuge. And if none of that is sufficient to get the job done and keep ‘those people’ in their place, then they’ll upend democracy itself and replace it with leadership of the elite. Not intellectual elites, by the way, but economic elites — the super rich.
I attribute these anti-democratic behaviors in part to the fact that Republicans will not talk in good faith with the Democrats. Current Republican legislators and notably the president himself don’t see the need to involve opposing voices in their deliberations, because why should they? They’ve got their hands on all the levers already. The upshot is that such blindered governments don’t see the citizens opposing their positions as their constituents. If they didn’t vote for them, then why bother with them.
This explains the attacks on DEI, trying to turn the positive connotations of those good words — Diversity, Equity, Inclusion — into negatives. But those terms are essential to the very notion of democracy and even deeper to the teachings of every world religion. Anti-DEI is essentially telling people “you’re not one of us and we don’t want you here,” where ‘here’ is our school, our church, our playground, our neighborhood, our town, our country.
DEI is all about the Golden Rule and when you attack it, you’re attacking the foundations of our Constitution: ‘All men are created equal,’ and so forth. It comes down to one fundamental conclusion: being anti-DEI is being un-American, at least according to the established Constitutional principles of Americanism.
Will the people being treated as “not as good as me” be forced to adapt? Will they withdraw voluntarily? Will they be sequestered away from the ‘good’ people? Will they be eliminated? History has examples of each possibility. All of them are failures to embrace DEI.
It may be true that any action, physical or political, has an equal and opposite reaction. If some action makes the billionaires richer, it’s likely to make someone else poorer. If you make the path smoother for White people, you might make it rougher for non-White people.
But if, as your starting point, you believe that DEI is misguided, the ‘may be true’ turns into a certainty. DEI is part of a cure, not part of the disease. It’s a real shame that our legislature and our governor this year just passed and signed a law outlawing DEI in our government, schools, and universities. West Virginia will be the worse for it.
So there’s one good reason why governments should not be veto-proof Republican or veto-proof Democratic. No one party should control all the levers, because some people will ultimately suffer for it.
So I propose a remedy. If you’re in a red state like West Virginia or a red country like Jefferson County, vote for a Democrat to force your legislators to listen to the other side. Make the politicians honestly debate. If you go overboard and create an inflexible Democratic majority, vote for a Republican. Repeat till you have a workable and cooperative balance. If someone can’t cooperate, vote them out. There’s no reason we have to be satisfied with just half of the good ideas cooperative individuals can come up with.
Published in the Spirit of Jefferson on May 14, 2025