Politics & Power Quote by Adam Michnik

The line lands like a warning flare from someone who has watched moral certainty turn into state power. Michnik isn’t just advising “civility”; he’s describing a political mechanism: once arguments are framed as sacred doctrine, disagreement stops being a debate over policy and becomes a contest between the righteous and the damned. That’s when persuasion is replaced by purification.

Calling politics “religiously ideological” is a pointed phrase. It doesn’t only mean church-and-state entanglement. It targets any movement that borrows religion’s emotional infrastructure: heresy hunts, demands for public confession, the comfort of absolute answers. In that atmosphere, evidence becomes suspicious because it’s secondary to faith, and compromise starts to look like sin. The subtext is practical, not philosophical: democracies don’t usually die from lack of slogans; they die when slogans become litmus tests for belonging.

His second sentence tightens the screws. “Traiters to the American nation” evokes a specific American reflex: to confuse dissent with disloyalty, to treat politics as a wartime posture even in peacetime. Michnik, shaped by Poland’s communist-era pressures and the Solidarity era’s high-stakes negotiations, knows how quickly “enemy” language justifies surveillance, purges, and social exile. It’s also a subtle defense of pluralism as national strength: the nation isn’t the party, and patriotism isn’t a uniform.

The intent is prophylactic. He’s trying to stop the slide from conviction into crusade, from democracy’s argument to democracy’s inquisition.