Below is a transcript of our conversation with former U.S. Representative Dan Kildee:
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas, and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University's students and faculty. The Robert and Marjorie Griffin Endowed Chair in American Government at CMU was established in 2000, and this year, former U.S. Representative Dan Kildee was named as the 8th individual to serve in that position. Kildee, a lifelong Michigander and native of Flint, served in Congress from 2013 to 2025. He is currently the president and CEO of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint. We sat down to talk about his experience that he brings to his time on campus and the state of politics in America…
Dan Kildee:
Well, the thing that's really interesting about it is that it's intended to bring somebody who was a practitioner in the field to the campus to teach a couple of courses and to organize symposia, a publication, do other things, essentially to bring the most current experience from the field of politics and government into the classroom. It's, for me, just a great opportunity to sort of pull on my experience, but actually kind of look forward to educating young minds and hopefully maybe spark some kind of interest in public service.
DN:
All we hear about is division. All we hear about are polar opposites. How are you approaching the overall subject of politics and certainly the current state of things, current issues at a time when everything is so heated and politicized?
DK:
It's a harder environment than even the environment that I entered back in 2012 when I was first elected to Congress and vastly different than the environment of politics when I was first elected to public office, which is 48 years ago when I was 18 years old. So, I have to be frank and just lay the cards on the table and say, look, this is nothing for the faint of heart.
If you're going to get into this, I want you to be completely prepared for what you're about to face. Having said that, another important part of my message is that politics is what we make it. And if we don't encourage people who are willing to be more thoughtful and more understanding, more tolerant of other views, if we don't encourage folks who hold those characteristics to get involved, we're going to be left with only the extremes, the bomb throwers, to dictate the course of political debate in this country. And I believe that's a prescription for failure like we (we) perhaps right now can't even imagine. There's no guarantee written on the back of the Constitution. We have to make it work.
DN:
Some would say an awful lot of damage has been done. And how much more does the democracy, how much can it stand?
DK:
I think it has limits, you know, and we don't have to look very far in the history of the world and even of the 20th century, let alone the 21st century that we're in, to see that robust democracies can disintegrate, virtually every totalitarian government in the Western Hemisphere, or even really globally, but you look at Eastern Europe in the 20th century, those governments started out as legitimately elected governments, and then the authority was imposed. That's one aspect of it, but this anger and this venom that's out there, we really haven't seen it quite like this. Imagine the Civil War with Twitter, instantaneous communication of outrageous and sometimes false imagery. The ability to communicate at warp speed, sometimes without thought, I think is the fuel that's driving so much of this division now. I mean, we're having a thoughtful conversation. This is why public media is so important. Look, most people don't think about politics all the time. Most people actually are sort of in the middle. But if you were to look at a sort of word cloud of the information that is traveling back and forth between folks, you wouldn't think that. You would think that there are two sides, red and blue, left and right, and there's no middle ground when in truth, there's a lot. It's just, it's not interesting, unfortunately, to a lot of people.
DN:
Now serving as the Robert and Marjorie Griffin Endowed Chair in American Government, former Michigan Congressman Dan Kildee, great to have you back and all the best working with the young minds and working forward.
DK:
Thank you very much. Good to see you again.
