Hamtramck, Michigan, a city of 28,000 just north of Detroit, is a case study in the promise and perils of American pluralism, and a window on the political forces working to destroy it.
A working-class enclave that’s home to thousands of Muslim immigrants from Yemen and Bangladesh, Hamtramck made news in 2015 when it became the first U.S. city with a majority-Muslim city council. At a time when Donald Trump was falsely claiming to have witnessed “thousands and thousands” of Muslims celebrating the 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center, Hamtramck’s political trajectory seemed a renunciation of the bigotry and lies engulfing the Republican presidential primary.
It looks different now. With socially conservative Muslims in control of the local government, Hamtramck was in the news again last month, this time after the city council passed legislation banning Pride flags from flying on city property.
The ban didn’t take place in a vacuum. In May, national polling by Gallup showed a 7-point decline from the previous year, to 64%, when people were asked whether gay or lesbian relations are “morally acceptable.” Similarly, the percentage of Americans supportive of transgender athletes playing on teams that “match their current gender identity” declined to 26% in 2023 from 34% in 2021.
The decline in acceptance of LGBTQ Americans accompanies a GOP campaign targeting them with discriminatory laws and demonizing rhetoric. Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in particular, has waged a relentless attack on LGBTQ rights and dignity, including seeking to remove mention of LGBTQ Americans from classrooms. While DeSantis and other GOP leaders wage a war on “woke” – formerly known as “empathy” — conservative activists, from Fox News hosts to the censorship advocates Moms for Liberty, have sought to make LGBTQ synonymous with sexual predation and exploitation of children.
It’s an ugly game, intended to strike a responsive chord of bigotry in conservative communities. Of course, residents of Hamtramck were very recently on the receiving end of such a campaign themselves. One of Trump’s first acts as president was an unconstitutional ban on Muslims entering the U.S. (which he subsequently revised to pass court scrutiny).No doubt some of the hundreds who descended on U.S. airports to protest that ban were LGBTQ Americans seeking to protect the rights of Muslims.
But finding fault lines in American society, and driving wedges into them, is the work of contemporary politics, and the chief occupation of the Republican Party. Mexican “rapists.” LGBTQ “groomers.” Urban “criminals.” Such epithets are the product of the political laboratory. The targets of past GOP attacks – the purveyors of what Trump in 2016 called the “violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology” — are now recruited to join in current GOP attacks. “Republicans are wooing Muslim voters by promising to protect them from L.G.B.T.Q. rights advocates,” David Weigel reported in Semafor last month.
As Michelle Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, “the backlash against what’s sometimes called gender ideology is so strong that it’s creating space for strange new political bedfellows.”
The turnaround in Hamtramck suggests how easily the Democrats’ multiracial coalition can be unwound under pressure from the right’s culture war. The long conservative war against affirmative action in university admissions sought to recruit Asian-Americans to the grievance politics of White conservatives, turning them against Black and Brown minorities. Anti-Black sentiment among some Hispanics, and xenophobia among some Black Americans, are likewise wedges to turn racial minorities against each other, in service of White conservative rule. Feminist success in the American workplace and culture is easily recast as a victory that threatens to turn American men into losers. For men without valuable college degrees, including minority men who already perceive that their opportunities are too limited, the misogyny of bro politics may seem like self-defense. Meanwhile, affluent liberals, the most cosseted part of the Democratic coalition, may soon have to live their principles as the need for diverse housing shifts more attention to carefully cultivated suburbs. Will they act in short-term self-interest or long-term community interest?
Multiracial pluralism, and the political coalitions that make it work, is difficult to build, and hard to sustain. The Democratic Party has traveled too far, and is too dependent on its diverse constituents, to turn back now. But the threats to that coalition will not stop even as the White majority recedes; they will evolve. Each piece of what the late New York City Mayor David Dinkins used to call the “gorgeous mosaic” is vulnerable, capable of being pried from the picture, leaving a gaping wound. The politics of scapegoating and reaction is in a race against the politics of multiracial liberalism. Given the corrosive effects of reaction and scapegoating, it’s a battle that American liberals can’t afford to lose, and one that American conservatives can’t afford to win.
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©2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com/opinion. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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