Two Short(ish) Thoughts About Socialists and other Nice People to my North

Minnesota isn't Ontario, of course, and Tim Walz isn't a secular Jew and bass player who became passionately devoted to hard and progressive rock in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same way Geddy Lee isn't a Minnesota Lutheran schoolteacher turned Governor and now possibly the future Vice President of the United States. But I see something similar in them nonetheless.

First, a couple passages from Lee's autobiography, My Effin' Life, which I just recently finished. It's a good book! Not fantastic--while I appreciated the way Lee wove into his reflections about Rush and their albums and their tours numerous insightful observations about his family history and the music industry and much more, the encyclopedic character of the memoir was ultimately a little much. Still, one of those insightful observations stood out: a two-page rant on libertarianism. Preceding his comments is a short reflection on an interview the band had with Barry Miles for NME in March 1978, who pushed them to get political:

“Admittedly, we were a little too young and naive to have arrived at a fully informed worldview. We considered ourselves capitalists but voted Liberal; we thought of ourselves as independent but valued our country’s social safety net and national health scheme. We didn’t see that conservative and liberal--or even capitalist and socialist--were values necessarily at odds.” 

Keep that in mind as we jump a few pages forward, to some thoughts of his about Rush's wonderful (and, in this context, notorious) song "Freewill“:

"In 1979, when [Neil Peart] handed me the lyrics for ‘Freewill,’ I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the the heart of it--the idea that our lives are not predetermined--and I hope that would come across, but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus: I will choose a path that’s clear / I will choose free will.

“To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a license for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naive, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society....

“I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply ‘choose free will.’ You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably Talmudic ones) have spend their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretations of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will?...A vague grasp of complicated ideas is not the same a virtuous independence.

“I may sound like I’m a grumpy old man yelling at clouds or that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of my quasi-socialist country, but my point of view has evolved with experience as I’ve watched and cared about what life has thrown at friends, neighbours and strangers alike. We have a social safety net here in Canada that includes national health care, day care and so on--it isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time, especially for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Living in that kind of society of almost (ahem) seventy years has made me see the world through more compassionate eyes than I had as a youth or in 1979. Sure, we pay more taxes than many other do, but I prefer to live in a world that gives a shit, even for people I don’t know” (pp. 250, 289-292). 

What's the point of pulling out this reflection, aside to make the banal observation that the stuff people think they understand when they're 27 isn't going to be the same when they're 70? It's to underscore something that gets lost so often in polarized ideological arguments that it needs to be repeated, again and again and again: that what people like Geddy Lee--a smart, observant, and well-read man, a bit of an armchair historian, but not a political philosopher, much less an economist or politician by any means--mean when they speak of "socialism" (or "quasi-socialism") is, almost always, very simply: not being a radical individualist, and instead, choosing to give a shit about one's friends, neighbors, and even strangers. 

There are, obviously, a great many ways to do that; providing guaranteed health care and day care is just one of those ways (though looking around the world, it's obviously an exceptionally popular one). "Socialism," in all its various construals and constructions and controversies throughout world history, some murderously horrific and some peacefully communal and most some mangy democratic compromise in between, always begins with this: the socialization, or in other words the sharing, the making public and available and collectively empowering, of the goods which human beings find and refine and create. If you insist that there is no other possible use of the term, no other possible articulation of any of the above, which can be separated from, say Karl Marx's materialistic dialectic of history, or from Vladimir Lenin's advocacy of a revolutionary vanguard, or Mao Zedong's collectivization of agriculture, then you're both wrong, and not listening with any kind of open-mindedness to the way many hundreds of millions of human beings (38 million of whom live in the country just north of us Americans) happen to talk about their own political choices when it comes to, yes, giving a shit about one another. Is that real world talk itself often contentious and critical of others' (including their own national histories') formulations of socialism? Of course; human beings make sense of and situate their own thinking in endlessly diverse contexts and ways. Sometimes they even think, as Lee wrote, that "capitalist and socialist" value schemes aren't at odds with one another. Which, depending on the claim you happen to be making, they aren't necessarily at all.

And that, of course, is what brings us around to Tim Walz, who has many of the usual people up in arms, screaming about the Minnesotan's secret wish to impose the Khmer Rouge upon America, all because he said...what? Oh yes, while talking about his "progressive values" (which, accordingly to him, includes things like pouring money into veterans benefits, free breakfast in public schools, strong support for NATO, etc.) to his political supporters, he observed, in the campaign context of reaching out to those who disagree, that "one person's socialism is another person's neighborliness." Which is exactly the correct point to make. Walz is a progressive Democrat in the United States in 2024; he wants to use the power of government to, in Lee's words, give a shit about his neighbors: to be neighborly, in other words, and to do so via funding and expanding government welfare programs to aid children, veterans, the elderly, the unemployed, the poor, and others (including some not in the United States) in need. Is that "socialism"? Or maybe "quasi-socialism"? Could be! It's not Bernie Sanders's New Deal-style, so-called "democratic socialism," but obviously it's related to it. (Sanders's influence on the Democratic party of today, including on Walz, is deep and, I think, entirely for the best.) Far, far, far more related to it, to be certain, then any of the horrific Ghosts of Certain Types of Socialism Past that too many people--people whom for the most part I (like Walz!) assume to be good people, just ones who happen to think that the progressive Democratic form of giving a shit about one's neighbors either doesn't work or isn't worth the cost or actually makes things worse--are tempted to associate this genial Minnesota liberal with.

This isn't going to change this discourse, of course. Libertarian paranoia is too deeply embedded in too many assumptions throughout our political culture to imagine that Sanders, or Walz, or me, or anyone else is going to be able to get a paradigm going such that a critical number of Americans might actually start getting comfortable (again!) with seeing in the broad umbrella idea of socialism arguments about how best to give a shit about one's neighbor. Hopefully, generational change will take care of that; Walz is only 61, after all.

How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.

On Fascists, Jesus, and Woody Guthrie

I’m awake early this morning, thanks to a headache, after going to bed late last night following 2 ½ hours of talking about yesterday’s terrible news at a local news station, filming comments for their late night and early morning news segments, and I’m thinking about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and also Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

There’s certainly a truth in that statement, and those of us who think Trump was a terrible president and would (perhaps will) make an even worse one the second time around should not be so blinkered as to deny that truth. But it is not the whole truth, and unless one assumes the human beings are machines that simply respond to the inputs they receive, with no conscious thought, no reflection, no personal judgment whatsoever along the way, a larger truth must be insisted upon. And this is where, perhaps especially because this is Sunday, I get religious. (I owe this particular reflection to the late-last-night comments of my fellow Kansas writer, Joel Mathis.)

The story that has come down to us through the text known as the Book of Matthew has Jesus preaching a sermon, where among many other civilization-changing principles, He is presented as saying in chapter 5, verses 43 through 46 (most famously in the translation found in the King James Version of the Bible):

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”

It is notable, I think, that Jesus is not presented as having said that one’s enemies aren’t actually that—that they are actually your neighbors, actually your fellow human beings, your fellow children of our “Father which is in heaven,” and therefore lovable. No, instead the received text presents Him as saying acknowledging enemies as exactly that: enemies, opponents, those who disagree with and “despitefully use” and even “persecute” those to whom He is speaking (which, for believers like myself, means all of us). He is calling for us to turn away from hate—and thus also, I think it is reasonable to say, violence—when it comes to even those who we see as enemies to that which we hold dear.

This is, in some ways, the most difficult of all Christian teachings. So difficult, you might say, that even the greatest American leaders, even leaders as familiar with the teachings found in the Christian Bible as Abraham Lincoln, chose to lessen its sharpness when confronted with the enormities it implies. In his First Inaugural Address, he insisted as he finished “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Every political expression must, of course, be guided by a sense of prudence, and articulated in reference to both the aspirations and the reality of the polis that one is speaking of—and, in Lincoln’s case, was trying to save—and so I’ve no criticism of what Lincoln was attempting to rhetorically accomplish at that moment in 1861, when the divisions over the evils of slavery had led to the point of secession and war. But it is nonetheless worth noting that Jesus presented a different possibility: that the affection can and should still exist, even if the bonds which tie people together, which prevent them from seeing one another as an enemy, have been broken.

What does that mean, in practice? Well, if worse comes to absolute worse, it may mean pacifism in the face of direct violence, it means showing love even when those being shown love respond with persecution and death. But less than that point, it could mean Woody Guthrie’s condemnation of fascism—with a guitar.

Of course, by the time Guthrie first started writing that message on his guitar, it was 1943, and America’s involvement in the world war against the Nazis of Germany, the fascists of Italy, and the war party which had take control of Japan, had been in full swing for over a year. Yet Guthrie himself connected that message to something much broader than even that global conflict, to a fight that extended back to the Great Depression and the struggle against “economic turmoil and social disintegration” in general. That Guthrie supported the war effort was undeniable. And yet, it remains important I think, that his machine was not a gun, not a weapon, but a musical instrument. A guitar. Which, unless you use it to bash someone over the head, and maybe not even then, can’t kill anyone. But it, and the music it makes, can kill the ideas and movements that make fascists. Who were clearly people that Guthrie regarded as an enemy. He was no pacifist, and made no criticism of soldiers fighting in World War II. Yet still, hold onto that image: the image of fighting fascism with music, not (or at least not only) violence.

As I wrote above, every political action and expression should be guided by prudential judgment: we really should think, as much and as often as we can, about where and when to apply whatever tools and talents we have to promote that which we believe. That’s the churn of participatory democracy, and it’s something I believe in, as both good and wise. It is possible—it’s always possible—that some moment will be revealed as a Rubicon, the crossing of which leaves all conversation and argument and democratic contestation behind and suggests that guitars must be turned into guns. All I can say in the face of that logical point is: resist it, the way Jesus called us to resist it, the way that image of a defiant, guitar-wielding, fascist-“killing” Guthrie resists it. That resistance may, ultimately, be the most prudent, most purely (if naively) democratic action of all.

I’ve been pretty clear that I consider Trump a danger to the flawed but nonetheless real virtues of the flawed but nonetheless still functioning liberal democracy called the United States of America. “Fascist-adjacent” is the term I’ve used, and until and unless Trump himself shares evidence otherwise, I’m going to consider him an authoritarian, or at the very best a quasi-authoritarian threat, to whatever political goods America’s dysfunctional system can still provide. But I’ve also recognized that something similar can be said about practically every American president in my lifetime. That doesn’t wipe away the concern; that doesn’t make me think “oh well, if Johnson and Reagan and Obama were in some ways similar, then clearly our 45^th president can’t be all that different, or all that bad.” I can still, and should still, recognize and respond to dangers when I see them. But I won’t respond with violence, and I denounce anyone who does, or who apologizes for such. Violence can’t save us from a political danger—in fact, it can only result in the closing down of the politics that we are trying to save. That’s the message I take this morning from Jesus, and Woody Guthrie (who were probably more similar, in the end, then latter would have ever expected). I pray it’s a message others will take too.

Justice Together: Pushing for Justice one City and one Step at a Time

[A version of this piece has appeared in Kansas Reflector and Religious Socialism.]

Back on May 9, something remarkable happened in Wichita, something similar to other remarkable things which have happened in recent years in Lawrence, Topeka, and elsewhere across Kansas.

At the Century II building in downtown Wichita, elected and agency leaders—specifically Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Sedgwick County Commission Chairperson Ryan Baty, the managers of both Wichita and Sedgwick County, and leading representatives from COMCARE, and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services—stood in front of over 1300 people and committed to take certain specific local policy actions to address homelessness and mental health crises. At least one of the commitments they made—supporting the creation of a municipal “Air Capital” ID card--will be controversial, and may already be in the process of being walked back slightly by Mayor Wu. Still, you don’t often see such public support for social justice actions coming from city and county leaders in Kansas, so applause—and encouragement!--for those who brought them to the stage is much deserved.

The group which brought them together and laid out the commitments which gained their assent is called Justice Together, a group I’m proud to have been a participant in from the beginning, though I play no organizational role in it. In early 2023, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, a friend and occasional interlocutor from the Ahavath Achim Congregation here in Wichita, told me about an interfaith group that was coming together to try to move social justice issues forward in Sedgwick County; I’m not a leader in my religious congregation, but I started to attend out of curiosity. At the very first meeting, I was gratified to find Louis Goseland, a Wichita-born community organizer that I remember from Sunflower Community Action and other justice-related associations from more than a decade before. He was back in Wichita as a regional coordinator from the Direct Action and Research Training Center or DART, an umbrella organization that has been working with church congregations and other community groups to help them apply the best lessons of religious activism to motivate their members towards specific social justice goals.

DART started in Florida in 1982, working primarily with church ministries that served the interests of senior citizens; since that time, it been able to help build over 30 additional interfaith movements across the country, including several here in Kansas. DART was instrumental in the formation of Justice Matters in Lawrence, which has raised millions of dollars for a locally managed Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and JUMP (Justice, Unity, and Ministry Project) in Topeka, which is working to bring a mental health crisis intervention program to Shawnee County. Similar interfaith organizations, representing dozens of different churches and faith-related groups, have been formed with the assistance of DART in Wyandotte and Johnson counties.

In Wichita, Justice Together includes nearly 40 denominations—mostly mainline Protestant, but with Catholic, Mennonite, Unitarian, Baha’i, and Jewish synagogues part of the effort as well. Over the past 14 months, they have worked through their church groups to develop specific plans to assist those struggling with mental health (funding to provide free bus passes to those in crisis and to pay for staffing for 24/7 on-call psychiatric help) and homelessness (sustainable funding plans for an integrated agency center, and the aforementioned municipal IDs). It is those plans they asked all these local leaders to support, and which all of them committed to do so.

This is DART’s method, one that they’ve adapted from the history of activism in so many of the churches which they work through, as well as directly from the history of civil protest. Months of research, parishioner outreach, and consensus-building culminates in what they call a “Nehemiah assembly,” an idea taken directly from chapter 5 of the book of Nehemiah in the Bible—specifically Nehemiah 5:12, where the prophet Nehemiah, having heard the cries of the people for justice, presented their pleas to the nobles, rulers, and priests, and “took an oath of them to do as they had promised.”

Justice Together’s strategy, following those of dozens of other similar church-based DART organizations across the country, isn’t directly confrontational; their goal is explicitly not to generate walks-outs and protests. But it does aim to generate tension: to make a well-researched and achievable case, and then publicly, in front of hundreds of newly activated religious citizens (the great majority of whom are, crucially, registered and informed voters!), demand action. This is the kind of tension central to Reverend Martin Luther King’s position, which Justice Together explicitly cites: to raise just enough heat that “a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

It's true that the plans Justice Together developed don’t involve structural change. Their call for more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, and a sustainable budget plan for a Multi-Agency Center to bring together resources for homeless individuals are all needed and important, but not radical; nearly all of these involve projects that the city of Wichita, or the county, or COMCARE already have in front of them. But the fact that Justice Together managed to elicit public support for a free municipal ID program? That is a genuinely transformative step.

Having a reliable form of ID is desperately needed by many in recovery or on the streets when it comes to accessing welfare, getting housing, applying for jobs, and so much more. And it is also something which Republican leaders in Topeka have repeatedly attacked as a backdoor to legalization for undocumented immigrants, leaving aside the complication that access to state services often depends on a simple form of reliable identification. Wyandotte County introduced municipal IDs in 2022, and former Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple had pushed for his city to do the same; both such efforts, as well as those being contemplated by other cities seeking to address this genuine need on behalf of their poorer and unhoused residents, were knee-capped by the Republican majority in the legislature, leaving this small, crucial reform very much in limbo. Mayor Wu’s comments after the commitment-making assembly, during which she said her affirmation “was really a commitment that we will sit together between [the] city and county to talk about this,” reflects the political disagreements which lay ahead.

Thus, a real test confronts Justice Together: will they find a way to publicly hold city and county leaders accountable to their promises. Will they be able to push the negotiations that will have to take place in such a way that the municipal ID goal, which everyone in the movement has extracted a commitment towards, doesn’t get killed by elected and appointed leaders fearful of blowback from ideologues who share the paranoia about illegal immigrants that is unfortunately common among Kansas Republicans? Time, as always, will tell. Whatever their ultimate success, though, the fact of this group’s existence is a reminder of the long history in America of people of faith organizing public support on behalf of specific social justice actions. 

To me, their presence here in Wichita is a blessing in itself.

Why Even Uneventful Primaries are Better than Raucous Caucuses

[This is an expanded version of an Insight Kansas column which appeared in the Wichita Eagle today, March 22, 2024]

When my wife and I went to vote last Tuesday, in the first organized presidential primary which Kansas has authorized in over 30 years, our usual polling station was unusually quiet and empty. I talked to one of the election workers, the volunteers who do the real ground-level work to enable our creaky electoral democracy to continue to function. She told that, as a veteran of multiple elections, this was the least busy she'd ever been. Others who reported on the vote here in Wichita basically said the same thing--which, as a political junkie, ought to sadden me. It doesn't really, though.

I say that despite the dismal turnout: overall, barely over 8% of all registered Democrats in the whole state participated, with the Republicans doing only slightly better, with not quite 11% showing up to cast ballots. Given that the 20-year average for turnout across the nation for presidential primaries is somewhere around 27%, Kansas voters clearly weren’t fired up by the choices available to them. But then, no one expected them to be. President Biden and Donald Trump had already secured more than enough delegates to win their parties’ presidential nominations, and all of the candidates who posed even the remotes challenge to either of their re-nominations had dropped out. So what substantive reason was there to participate, anyway? Why did my wife and I, along with thousands of others?

First, because the substantive results aren’t the whole story; sometimes, voters have symbolic goals in mind. Some Republicans wanted to run up Trump’s totals as much as possible as a show of support in the midst of all his crimes and controversies. (He received 75% of the Republican vote, which wasn’t quite the record some Republicans were shooting for.) And some Democrats cast protest votes as a way of communicating their disapproval of some of Biden’s policy choices. (This was my wife's reason for voting; she, along with about 10% of the Democratic voters state-wide who participated, chose “None of these names," over the current president, who did end up with 84% of the results anyway.) But second, there is also the civic value of the procedure itself.

True, the civic process of this primary election was exceptionally tame--and while this election was particularly lacking in substantive electoral value, even those primaries where the selection of delegates in support of a party's presidential nominee is hotly contested would still be pretty low-key, in comparison to the caucus system which dominated the way the parties organized voters and vetted candidate support for more than 150 years. Some, including Governor Laura Kelly, have talked wistfully about how they prefer the “energy and excitement” of the caucus system, during which those party leaders and voters and activists who are able to gather in specific places at appointed dates and times, arguing and yelling, giving and responding to speeches, casting (or sometimes re-casing) nomination ballots or sometimes just literally pulling one's fellow caucus-attenders one way or another, as supporters of the different candidates line up and get counted.

I participated in the Democratic presidential caucuses in Kansas in 2008 and 2016, and observed the Kansas Republican caucus in 2012, and I agree—the level of engagement on display there is appealing, or at least was very much for me. But then, I'm quite intentionally a political animal, like our current governor and probably pretty much anyone else who ever actually runs for political office--while most citizens are not. For everyone who doesn't vibe with blocks of voters shouting down their opponents, with the hurry-up and wait and rushing to line up or stand up and cheer (or boo), all of which makes the halls that parties have to rent out to handle the crush of voters who show up confusing and cacophonous--well, for folks like that, the whole thing can be pretty alienating, especially if you know your preferences are in the minority, yet you still have a symbolic stand you wish to take. And all of that, of course, doesn't even begin to touch upon all the impassioned yet introverted citizens out there, or the opinionated folks who can't get off work or don't have reliable transportation or can't find child-care or are dealing with physical disabilities, etc., etc., etc. The fact that caucuses are simply not the best way to represent the great majority of folks who actually affiliate with our political parties is indisputable.

I can understand the argument that, for all of these costs and limitations, the participatory democratic virtues of caucuses make defending that system worth it. I certainly respect that a lot more than the grumpy attitude of Kansas's Secretary of State Scott Schwab, who thinks that spending state money to allow Republicans and Democrats to vote for their preferred presidential candidates is a waste of money, and should be left solely for the parties themselves to handle through caucuses (or not--don't forget that many times state parties don't even bother with them, and just select delegates for their party's conventions internally). I'm strongly of the belief that the processes of electoral democracy, however flawed, shouldn't be subject to demands for economic efficiency, and certainly not when you dealing with as relatively cheap an expenditure as $5 million dollars. But should they be subject to, as a matter of theory, a direct and participatory ideal?

In the end, my attitude here hasn't changed in 16 years, when I wrote up my thoughts after participating in the rushed, chaotic, in many ways enjoyable but ultimately just exhausting and frustrating Democratic caucus that was organized here in Wichita in 2008. The fact is the, for all the differences in the many ways the different states and the two major parties have employed the caucus method of selecting presidential delegates over the past century and a half, their one commonality is that they presumed more rural, more spatially intact, less diverse, and less divided and demanding political and socio-economic environments than the great majority of American voters live in today. For all the direct democracy that caucuses supposedly provide, in the much more generally urban and disparate and hurried social contexts which obtain across the majority of the United States of America, simply allowing for a straightforward in a statewide primary makes far more democratic sense. I'm not going to claim that there may not be parts of the country (Iowa, maybe?) where the prevailing political culture and existing democratic practices still fit relatively well with the participatory, caucus ideal. And, to be sure, I'm talking about the presidential election process; I'm more than happy to grant that caucus or caucus-type arrangements might well be an empowering improvement in how many parties struggle to connect with those voters sympathetic to their platforms on a local or state level. But yes: practically everywhere in the country, including Kansas, presidential primaries, staid as they may be, are best.

Of course, if that's the case, and simply asking people to show up and vote for the candidates they want their party to support, then one has to accept that you’re only going to get a large turnout if the results are expected to have an actual impact on what those parties do. Which, in Kansas this year, they didn't.

A couple of local pundits I know have their suggestions. Joel Mathis, more ambitiously, points out that since the candidate being voted on are "running to be president of the entire country," the only solution is "a national primary." His arguments for this are good, but they run smack into the reality of state control over elections (when the Supreme Court allows that, of course). I suspect that what Joel wants will only be possible when--or if--the Electoral College itself is on the table. But functionally we might get closer if we move, as Bob Beatty suggests, the Kansas primary to Super Tuesday. The earlier Kansas's primaries come in the election year calendar, the more likely they are to have some substantive weight in determining what presidential candidates parties select--and while Bob doesn't make this explicit point, since there are already 16 states--nearly a third of the whole country--that hold their primaries on Super Tuesday, encouraging Kansas to join that bandwagon would just get us functionally closer to Joel's ideal.

Whatever happens though, I was glad this primary happened, and I hope the legislature will organize another one in four years’ time, no matter what they naysayers complain about. True, a straight-up primary vote isn’t an exciting, participatory democratic process, and this year was especially predictable. But giving citizens broadly the chance to democratically express themselves doesn’t have to be exciting; sometimes, it just needs to be.

Friendly Disagreements with Justice Stegall (A Continuing Series)

[This is an expanded version of a column of mine making the rounds here in Kansas; as usual, I pretentiously felt I needed more space to make my point entirely. Mea culpa.]

Kansas Supreme Court Justice Caleb Stegall and I have known each other for going on 20 years. We're not close friends; I think we’ve met in person four times at most. But all through those years--particularly in the early ones, before I found a permanent place here at Friends University and he found a permanent place on Kansas's highest court--we regularly shared ideas, and argued about ideas, and not-infrequently fiercely disagreed with each others' ideas. Thanks to all these online interactions we’ve come to know each other and, I think, like each other, despite our deep disagreements, perhaps because we can also see in each other some foundational beliefs and loves we share. I look back on the appreciation I wrote on him eight years ago, when Governor Brownback appointed him to his current position, and I don't think I'd change a word.

All of this is just to that when Caleb made the news recently for a letter he wrote to several faculty at KU Law, his alma mater, stating that he would not continue on as an adjunct teacher there, I was surprised. I wanted to understand his reasons for cutting those particular ties--and now, having read the letter, I think I do. As usual, though, I have questions about it, and a disagreement or two as well.

Two years ago, Caleb did another surprising thing: he publicly rebuked leading members of the Kansas Republican party--which he is a longtime member of--for orchestrating a successful vote against Carl Folsom III, a lawyer with a long career as a public defender on the state and federal level, whom Governor Laura Kelly had nominated to the Kansas Court of Appeals. It was, of course, just a partisan, party-line vote, but GOP leaders had claimed justification because Folsom had, as was his job, defended people charged with various crimes, some of them pretty horrible ones, and that was used to smear the nominee. This frustrated Stegall, and he called out those Republicans for failing to honor “the ideal of a public-spirited, deliberative, and reasoned engagement with others.” 

Now, my philosophical understanding of that ideal isn’t exactly the same as Caleb’s; as I've written before, classical liberal notions of open discussion depend, among other things, upon a degree of civic friendship, which in turn depend upon the maintenance of norms which many people today, for many different reasons (technological as well as ideological, historical as well as cultural), may rightly feel to have been rendered moot, over perhaps even entirely (or perhaps even justifiably) overturned. Much of our divergence here is likely reflective of what Caleb asserted in his letter as the imperative of "privileging individual character and merit above group characteristics"; leftist and communitarian that I am, I'm much more willing than he to consider how norms may be tied up with structural, collective, and historical realities which must be considered whenever one makes judgments in reference to individual rights or claims.  But whatever those particular philosophical disagreements, the liberal ideal he defends remains one which I--as a college professor and occasional pundit whose whole career is dependent upon communication, discussion, and engagement--I have great respect for as a crucial component of our civil society. And regardless, I admire how that ideal has guided Caleb's thoughts and actions over the years as well. 

So how does ideal come into play with his decision to end his teaching association with KU Law? On my reading, it turns on his concern that his old stomping grounds have shown “an institutional failure to cultivate the norms, habits, and skills necessary to the task of lawyering.” The precipitating cause of this concern of Caleb's was what he called the “bullying” response made by of certain members of the KU Law community (specifically, those associated with the school's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging Committee) when the conservative KU Law Federalist Society invited a speaker from the controversial Alliance Defending Freedom to campus. The bullying he mentions included calling student leaders of the club into a meeting to warn them against the invitation, and those students being subsequently labeled as facilitating hate speech by the aforementioned committee. (The speaking event went forward as planned, by the way, with accompanying protests; everyone's First Amendment rights were fully respected, or at least so it appears.)

Now in light of prioritizing engagement, Caleb is plainly correct that, like them or hate them, the ideas promulgated by ADF—which generally frame almost any advance in LGBTQ rights as an attack on religious freedom (consider the role they played in pushing forward a current lawsuit over the supposed potential interference which a Colorado law poses to those who do not wish to acknowledge the legality of same-sex marriage)—have long been present throughout Kansas’s legal environment, including at events sponsored by the Kansas Bar Association. Hence, discouraging students from confronting certain ideas—even those which, as Stegall admits, may be seen as “existentially threatening”—is probably not the best way to prepare Kansas’s future lawyers. Quoting Professor Richard Levy, a longtime KU Law faculty member, Stegall rightly makes the point that “if lawyers cannot talk to each other about difficult subjects on which they disagree, how can we expect anyone too?” That position seems consistent to me.

But I'm not sure how to square that consistency with his decision to separate himself from KU Law. I suppose that if in his considered judgment his alma mater really has caved into a kind of "authoritarianism" which threatens to "cripple a person's ability to critically engage with ideas or people with whom they disagree," then it might not be unreasonable to speak out against those developments by way of withdrawing from the institution. Perhaps we could understand that as a form of protest, or as the posing of a countervailing power as a way to pushing KU Law's leadership to take corrective action. (Caleb perhaps implies this, when he wrote in his letter that he is acting on this matter with a consciousness of others who may feel the same disgruntlement as he, but lack the "authority or security to speak up"--something which, as a state supreme court justice, he obviously is in full possession of.)  But still, in our present moment, it seems to me that remaining present exactly so as to continue to engage, as a colleague and friend, with those whom one disagrees—including disagreements over how to respond to the way some at KU Law may have dealt with an ideological disagreement!--is vital.

Last year, Caleb gave a wonderful address--which he quoted from in his letter to KU--that addressed in part the fact that the law can never be entirely disentangled from the arguments over the ethical concerns and procedural outcomes which always surround it. After sharing an old Jewish parable, he concluded that, in the midst of these quandaries, “heaven smiles mischievously down on us”--then added, “we can smile back, if we have the stomach for it.” It's entirely possible to read this passage--and I suspect this was Caleb's intention--as suggesting a criticism of KU for lacking the stomach to deal with serious, even "existential," disagreements. But by the same token, that line could be understood as a petard upon which Caleb has hung his own arguments. 

To be sure, every person’s stomach for dealing with disagreement is going to be different, and to repeat what I said above, I can certainly see withdrawing in the face of a disagreement as sometimes a productive way of engaging with it. It's not like anyone, I suspect, can entirely refuse to ever draw lines in the sand which they will never cross, or will always withdraw to one side of. So I take seriously Caleb’s reasoning for drawing his line here; I'm not in a position to say he did wrong, and I'm not in agreement with those with condescending takes on my friend's decision. But still, I must admit: it just doesn’t seem consistent to me with his own best arguments; it's not entirely like the smart and gleeful debater I've known over the years. No doubt, this will be something we can continue to disagree about as well.