When Kansas Republicans Become Libertarians, Sort Of

[An article of mine in Current magazine, which is an updated approach to a column that originally ran in the Wichita Eagle and which I expanded upon here.]

President Biden’s September announcement that either COVID-19 vaccinations or regular COVID testing would be mandated of all federal workers, as well as all who work for businesses that employ 100 people or more, was, it goes without saying, divisive. That divisiveness, though, is not entirely widespread. According to the latest polls, Biden’s actions are supported or at least unopposed by two-thirds of the American people, and despite many predictions about protests and resignations, the data suggests that vaccination-reluctant Americans are coming around. So the opposition to Biden’s vaccination mandate in reality seems to be fairly localized.

Take the Republicans in my own state of Kansas, among whom opposition to Biden’s vaccination mandates really is widespread. Not only did the leadership of the Kansas GOP immediately unify around a condemnation of Biden, but one of our U.S. senators was the first to introduce legislation to strip Biden of the financial power to enact his order, a proposal that was defeated on a party-line vote. This fact might align with those who assume the opposition to Biden is entirely a matter of party polarization, and surely it mostly is. But looking at the claims made by Kansas Republicans brings up arguments over ideas as well—although exploring those ideas is a frustrating endeavor.

The language employed by Derek Schmidt, Kansas’s Republican attorney general, is perhaps the best guide to this strange debate. Schmidt, who is planning a 2022 challenge to Kansas’s Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, was quick to join with other Republican leaders in threatening to fight the Biden vaccination mandate all the way to the Supreme Court. While doing so he made his principles clear: “Receiving the COVID-19 vaccine is a personal choice” that should not be subject to a “government decree.” 

There are many ways in which Schmidt’s formulation is directly aimed at Governor Kelly, who has fought with the Republican majority in the Kansas legislature over mask mandates and school closures for the past eighteen months. Such language will likely be central to his gubernatorial campaign. But at the same time, it presents some Kansas-specific intellectual confusion.

This because in 2022, in addition to voting for a governor, Kansans will vote on the “Value Them Both” amendment, a proposed anti-abortion amendment to Kansas’s constitution. Schmidt is closely tied to the proposed amendment since it is a response to a Kansas State Supreme Court case wherein the Kansas attorney general defended a state law that outlawed a particular second-trimester abortion procedure. The state lost on a 6-1 ruling, with the court declaring that the language of Kansas’s constitution supports the right of a woman to choose to access abortion services, an interpretation Schmidt has regularly condemned. In a recent interview he repeated his condemnation, and strongly connected his support for the amendment to his campaign to return “pro-life” values to Kansas. So far, that’s consistent enough.

But when the interview turned to the public health fights of the past year and a half, Schmidt explicitly affirmed the formulation of “choice” employed in the very same Kansas Supreme Court decision he insists needs to be overturned. He repeatedly emphasized that the choice to get vaccinated is an “individual decision for individual citizens, not for the government,” and that “people ought to be entrusted with” the right to choose what is medically best for themselves. Schmidt concluded: “People do have a right . . . well actually the Kansas Supreme Court in a different context calls it a ‘right to bodily integrity.’ . . . I don’t mean to conflate the two debates [but] . . . it is quite a thing for the government to order a needle to be stuck in someone’s arm.”

The interviewer pushed back at this point, observing that a woman’s choice to make use of abortion services is an even more personal decision, involving an even more intimate question about one’s “bodily integrity,” with government restrictions that may force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term presumably being “quite a thing” as well. Schmidt’s response: “There is, of course, a difference . . . At least in the view of those of us on the pro-life side, there are two persons’ interests who have to be accounted for in the abortion context. That is not so, or at least less so, in the vaccination context.”

Two points come to mind about all of this. First, if Schmidt sincerely believes that vaccinations should be treated as a matter of personal choice due to the “right to bodily integrity,” such as is reflected in the very case he is seeking to invalidate, then he really should read that case again. Because the deciding majority did, in fact, touch upon the problem of the government sometimes requiring that needles be stuck in arms. The court concluded, while citing other decisions, that their interpretation of the Kansas constitution’s language regarding choice posed no threat to well-established precedents for state-mandated vaccinations so long as individual health exemptions are provided—which, as it happens, the Biden plan does.

Second, Schmidt’s reference to “two persons’ interests” in the case of abortion is also perplexing. What are we to make of someone who presumably holds to a deep belief in preserving unborn life but then looks at the question of vaccinations, hears the clear evidence showing the threat that remaining unvaccinated poses to the lives and livelihoods of millions of others, sees the death that refusing vaccination is bringing into hospitals every day, and still insists that not being required to put a needle in your arm is the more defensible position?

There are ways in which Schmidt’s employ of this particular “pro-choice” formulation could be made more intellectually interesting, even if not coherent. Perhaps one could ask if he in fact denies the life-threatening character of COVID-19, or wonder if he’s going to go full libertarian and attack vaccinations against childhood diseases as well. At the same time, one might be forgiven for suspecting that treating Schmidt’s language as worthy of intellectual engagement simply plays into a cynical, situational game. Maybe in his circle it’s all just political messaging, all the way down. Americans like the idea of choice, and so when one political party advances policies that require restrictions as a matter of public health, wave the banner of choice and oppose them; it’ll resonate with the American people! As for the accusation of inconsistency, well, that can be dismissed as a persnickety concern that won’t get any play on social media anyway.

Those of us who maintain any kind of civic hope must constantly be on guard against such crude reductionisms. Ideas matter, and bad ideas, if exposed, should be noted for what they are. Being as clear and as consistent as possible in our language, and being open about whatever inconsistencies they involve, is essential to doing so; this is a point as old as Orwell. But talking with my students here in Kansas, I recognize I’m in an increasingly marginal position.

COVID-19 hasn’t been alone in bringing stresses to American political discourse that have confused the ideological positions that have long defined our major parties; Trump, of course, has been a primary player as well. But whether we blame Trump or the pandemic or both for our disorientation, it is sad that in the midst of our present crisis principled disagreements over matters of great import—personal liberties and public health—have been hard to find. American democracy requires parties that can advance such arguments honestly. Playing games with them—as too many leaders of the Kansas Republican party are doing today—simply invites further cynicism about the place of ideas in politics, at a time when more cynicism is the last thing we need.

Ideology, Abortion, and Schmidt's Confusion (or Not?) over "Choice"

On Sunday, The Wichita Eagle posted a column of mine online (it appeared in the physical paper on Tuesday) which attempted to describe--in less than 600 words--the nature of the ideological confusion which the Kansas Republican party has sown over the past 18 months. I don't think I did a particularly good job. Fortunately, Derek Schmidt, Kansas's attorney general and a candidate for the Republican nomination for governor in 2022, sat down for an interview with Tim Carpenter of the Kansas Reflector this week, and in the full podcast he expressed that confusion far better than I ever could.

At the beginning of the interview, Schmidt talks about his anti-abortion bona fides, and the role he played in crafting the "Value Them Both" amendment, a proposed anti-abortion amendment to the Kansas Constitution which will be on the ballot next August and which the Kansas Republican party is all but entirely determined to see passed. As he commented, "that amendment is a response to what I think is an erroneous decision of the Kansas state Supreme Court which somehow managed to find in the state constitution the right to access abortion services that I just don't think is there." He repeated that point a couple of times. The case he was referring to, and the decision which the amendment would invalidate, is Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, a case from 2019 in which a state law that outlawed a particular second-trimester abortion procedure was challenged. Schmidt defended the law, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling in a 6-1 vote that, as the language of Kansas's Constitution supports (on those judges' interpretation) a guaranteed right for a woman to choose to access abortion services, state laws which limit that right, such as the one mentioned above, must pass a "strict scrutiny" test to be legitimate. For whatever its worth, I wrote at length about that case and its relevance for thinking about the long-standing issues of judicial review and popular sovereignty here.

One could attempt to qualify Schmidt's interview statement by suggesting that what he labels "erroneous" about the decision is solely the 5-person majority's language which took Kansas's constitutional jurisprudence to such a high level. (Justice Biles wrote a concurring decision which demurred partly from his colleagues' reasoning, stating that the Kansas Constitution's guarantee of  "equal and inalienable natural rights" was best interpreted as applying to abortion in light of the Supreme Court's currently--though perhaps not for much longer--reigning Planned Parenthood v. Casey precedent, which stipulates that restrictions upon the right to access abortion services can be justified only so long as they do not violate the somewhat more moderate "undue burden" test.) That would be an interesting development: that Schmidt only wants this state supreme court decision overturned because he thinks it valorizes a woman's right to choose abortion in a particularly uncompromising way. But no such development will emerge, and the attempts to give context to Schmidt's statement will fail, not at least if (and this is kind of the whole point) you actually take his statements about his beliefs at face value, as the interview itself later shows.

Why? Because once the interview got into the dominant issue in Topeka over the past 18 months--namely, Democratic Governor Laura Kelly's attempts to use her emergency powers to put in place what she and her medical advisors determined were necessary public health measures, and the way Kansas Republican leaders have consistently opposed and limited her efforts--Schmidt explicitly affirmed the uncompromising formulation of "choice" employed in that same decision which he insists needs to be overturned. As the interview turned to the spread of vaccination mandates across the U.S. as a public health measure, Schmidt repeatedly emphasized his opposition, clearly stating that there should be "no vaccination mandates," that the choice to get or not get vaccinated is "a personal decision," an "individual decision for individual citizens, not for the government," and that "people ought to be entrusted with" the right to choose what is medically best for themselves. He emphasizes this, he said, for a "couple of reasons." One is practical; he thinks more people will get vaccinated if you keep the choice entirely voluntary and a matter of public education and encouragement: "you catch more flies with sugar than you do with vinegar." But the other, which he implies he believes is even more important, is kind of fascinating:

People do have a right...well actually the Kansas Supreme Court in a different context calls it a "right to bodily integrity"....I don't mean to conflate the two debates [but]...it is quite a thing for the government to order a needle to be stuck in someone's arm.

Carpenter, to his credit, pushed back (though not, I think, as thoroughly as he might have) on this point, observing that a woman's choice to make use of abortion services is an even more personal decision, involving an even more intimate question about one's "bodily integrity," with government restrictions that may force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term presumably being "quite a thing" as well. Schmidt responded:

There is, of course, a difference, which is...at least in the view of those of us on the pro-life side, there are two persons' interests who have to be accounted for in the abortion context. That is not so, or at least less so, in the vaccination context.

Well. Let's unpack that a little bit.

First, if Schmidt sincerely sees his belief that vaccinations should be treated as a matter of personal choice reflected in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt, then he really ought to read it again. Because the 5-person majority on the Court did, in fact, touch upon the problem of the government sometimes requiring that needles be stuck in arms, presumably in violation of the right to bodily integrity, and they concluded (though I would agree with Biles that they did so much too casually) that their interpretation of the Kansas Constitution's language posed no complications for the well-established precedent of mandatory vaccinations. They did this by citing other decisions which labeled such public health practices as defensible when individual health exceptions are allowed (see pp. 40-41). Whether that's genuinely unproblematic assertion or not, it's connected to language which Schmidt himself uses, so he ought to at least acknowledge it.

Second, there's Schmidt's reference to "two persons' interests" in the case of abortion, a rather bloodless way to talk about the central conviction which has long defined opposition to the availability of abortion services in the United States: that a woman who chooses abortion terminates an unborn life, one which had no choice in the matter. That's a conviction which has been challenged and construed in different ways over the decades in light of arguments over the definition of fetal life, changes in our understanding of (and expanding technological access to) human embryonic development in the womb, and much more--but it remains the core principle that, as Schmidt put it, "those of us on the pro-life side" make use of. What, then, are we to make of someone who holds to that deep belief in preserving life, who then looks at the question of vaccinations, hears the clear evidence showing the threat which remaining unvaccinated poses to the lives and livelihoods of millions of others, sees the death which refusing vaccination is bringing into the hospitals and emergency rooms of America every day, but nonetheless still insists that "the right to bodily integrity" makes not being required to put a needle in your arm the more defensible position, in part because, supposedly anyway, the "vaccination context" is "less" a matter of other persons' "interests" than abortion is?

Well, as I see it, we can make a few different things. One is the observation I made in my original column, an observation rooted in many well-attested political truisms. To expand on it slightly: lots of people believe lots of things, and they believe those things for lots of different reasons. A lot of the exact same beliefs held by some people are held in an equally passionate but entirely different way by other people, and some individuals affirm both those different beliefs at the same time. In short, people are complicated. The existence of such complications make it possible for some people--let's call them "political elites"--to arrange and communicate packages of beliefs--let's call those "ideologies"--to attract the votes and the financial support of people to their vehicles--let's call those "political parties"--for enacting those packages of beliefs. Since these are packages of beliefs, not necessarily bedrock principles, they can always be re-packaged and re-communicated to the American people as political actors feel appropriate, something which has been done by different parties at different times throughout American history. 

In my column, I used the example of "choice," something which most Americans, socialized as most of us are so as to value individual liberty and personal decision-making, respond to positively. Over the course of the pandemic, "choice" has been a valuable tool (or, if you prefer, "ideological package") that Kansas Republicans have used to justify challenging Governor Kelly's efforts to mandate public health measures. We all know this; everyone knows someone who has refused to wear a mask or refused to get vaccinated or complained about restrictions at their workplace or their school or their church because they have--or should have--the liberty to choose to say no: "my body, my choice." It has been very effective politics for them, in that it really has articulated and given partisan direction to a general libertarian, choice-centric sentiment here in Kansas. Which led me to to point out, very simply, that it's a weird and possibly electorally confusing thing for Kansas Republicans to have made use of explicitly "pro-choice" language throughout 2020 and 2021, given that in 2022 they're going to be united around passing a constitutional amendment via referendum which is anything but "pro-choice."

My column prompted two different types of responses, which constitute two other ways of interpreting the confusion here, if that's what it is. The first (which started hitting my inbox as soon as the Eagle posted my column on Sunday) is that I'm wrong, that the positions taken by the Kansas Republican party on vaccinations and abortion actually fit together perfectly, and that if anyone has been engaged in ideological repackaging for political gain, it's been those duplicitous, pro-abortion Democrats, who have abused the notion of personal freedom for evil ends. I really didn't take that stuff seriously, in part because it just confirms what I also wrote in my original column: that beliefs can always be re-interpreted so as to demonstrate consistency, and the resulting ideological packages really can, at least sometimes, logically hold together. That doesn't make such packages persuasive; as I pointed out above, Schmidt's claim that invoking the right of bodily integrity to resist vaccination mandates and invoking the right of bodily integrity to resist abortion restrictions are "of course" fundamentally different is confusing, on multiple moral and legal levels. But still: this is what we free-thinking human beings do. If one group of human beings decide that they believe in libertarianism when it comes to public health but don't believe in libertarianism when it comes to reproductive rights, their justifications may be stupid, but that doesn't mean they're always incoherent. When it comes to defending our prior beliefs, we can be very clever creatures, and the Kansas Republican party (and Schmidt himself) no doubt have many clever people on their payrolls developing their talking points.

The other type of response however, and the other way of considering Schmidt's statements, is one I do take seriously. It's the suggestion--which I received from some local activists and scholars I respect--is that "coherence" and "persuasiveness" and such are all, like the packages of beliefs themselves, entirely ideological, and thus irrelevant--in fact immoral--in the face of the actual material conditions which the Kansas Republican party's employ of whatever language they choose is attempting to mask. The "Value Them Both" amendment will remove state constitutional limitations which protect a right which many women--particularly those that are poor and without social support--greatly need, and with its removal state laws passed by anti-abortion legislators will cause those women great harms. So what does it matter what Schmidt or anyone else actually believes or not? Treating their language as worthy of engagement, by way of pointing out the packaging involved and the confusions it arguably results in, simply plays their game. My interlocutors didn't paraphrase Marx's famous line from Theses on Feuerbach, but they might as well have: our point should not be to interpret the reasoning by which policies are justified, but to change the policies themselves.

That kind of materialism is, admittedly, bracing. It gives one the frisson of cutting through something, of getting to the heart of the matter, of "getting real," of kicking a stone in some grand Johnsonian refutation. And it's powerful stuff; while Marxist and other forms of critical philosophy are not my areas of special expertise, I think I understand enough of those arguments to be able to appreciate the ways in which talk of "packaging ideas" and "ideological interpretation" can implicitly legitimate beliefs which treat real material consequences as mere matters of ideological debate. The threat of that reductive danger makes maintaining radical challenges to the dominant discourses of liberal democratic and capitalist modernity immensely important, or at least that ethically must be the case for anyone who holds out for a better, less alienated, more democratic, more socially just and equal world. And yet...look at the words I used to make my point in that prior sentence: "understanding," "appreciation, "legitimization," etc. These are all describing intellectual actions which are themselves properties of the discourse about ideas. Absent, I suppose, either 1) the revelation that we really are wholly determined beings, operating in mental environments characterized entirely by false consciousness, like the unliberated captives in The Matrix, or 2) the determination (perhaps following from 1), or perhaps following from a doctrinaire reading of V.I. Lenin) to employ no other methods besides those of revolutionary violence, the brute--even, dare I say, material--fact of pluralism in our late modern condition necessitates the recognition of different existing construals of the same ideas, and the talking about of those differences. And that invariably lead to attempts to construct accounts of those differences, risky as that account-making may be to some. My talk of ideological packaging is one such construction. Does engaging in it--even if while so doing I note the stupidity or unpersuasiveness of some arrangements--functionally risk granting legitimacy to arrangements of ideas which can used to move policies in materially harmful ways? Almost certainly. But despite all my anarcho-socialist, populist democrat, and left conservative sympathies, I'm also still enough of a bourgeois liberal enough to ask: what is the alternative? Because I don't see one, at least not one that is actually available to a critical mass of thinkers and voters and citizens in Kansas, anyway.

Cards on the table: maybe I've gone on at such length because the language of people like Schmidt isn't entirely foreign to me, as it is to many others on the left. Not his or the Kansas Republican party's current (though probably soon to change) employ of the language of "choice," though; while I've grown far less sympathetic to arguments against abortion rights over the years, my old disagreement with centering "choice" in our articulation of the rights which liberal modernity tells us we possess remains firm. The pandemic, and the deadly abuses with the valorization of choice has made obvious, should have made that clear, if nothing else ever has or ever can. But that aside, I'll admit it: Schmidt's pro-life claims don't appear to me as obviously crazy. Wrong? Very much so. His appeal to a right to "bodily integrity" was a way to explain (assuming one even needs an explanation beyond a Republican elite packaging some beliefs so as to beat up on a Democratic governor) why people should be able to choose whether to not to wear a mask or be vaccinated is deeply stupid, and his commitment to that explanation, in the midst of surging Delta-variant numbers, while nonetheless refusing to extend it to women seeking to protect their access to abortion services, is deeply confusing. But not, I think, complete evil incoherence. Stupid and confusing are persuasive enough charges to be brought forward in an intellectual debate, aren't they? Maybe not for everyone, I guess. But for me, they'll do.

"Twas a Matter of Timing and the Timing Was Right"

Exactly one year ago--March 27, 2020--Bob Dylan dropped "Murder Most Foul," without any public announcement or preview or warning--his first work of original music in over 8 years, in preview of his first album of new music since 2012's Tempest. I'm not a Dylanologist like many fans out there; I recognize that he's arguably been one of America's most important poetic voices for 60 years now, but even the Nobel Prize people know that. I am comfortable saying that Rough and Rowdy Ways in one of my favorite Dylan albums, and "Murder" is one of the primary reasons why. 

It's not the sort of song that I have any particular interest in listening to at any given time, but sometimes, like almost any truly great poem or work of art, the strange, haunting, tragic, but perhaps even weirdly hopeful incantation of Americana that this song provides is--like "Desolation Row," another one of Dylan's masterpieces--something that I just really want to hear. I'll put it on, and for the next 17 minutes I'm carried away. The greatest poets, like all the greatest artists and performers, are never solely about their chosen medium; they are also about the connection which they, through their various Muses, are able to provide between their times, their moment, and the medium in which they work. Dylan, whatever other criticisms one can make of the man--and surely those criticisms are legion--has continually, over more than a half-century, been able to bizarrely, unsettlingly, regularly connect with and/or comment upon his times. For him to have released this compelling dirge just as American settled into the third week of so of the pandemic, realizing that the year to come would not be a year of quick containment and renewal, but rather a year of difficult, despairing adjustments and realizations...well, some would call it prophetic. Which is a label Dylan has received often before, and hearing it again, would probably just make him shake his head once again, smile his creepy smile, and pick up his guitar again. 

Anyway, thanks Bob, I guess. Can't imagine what America will be like when you're no longer with us, watching us all, and writing your songs. Worse, I suspect.

Some Possibly Helpful Thoughts on Localism, Populism, and Proximity During a Pandemic

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

The departure of Donald Trump from the White House [crosses fingers] will assuredly not mean the departure of Trumpism from American life. The collection of grifters, paranoiacs, and devout (and, I think, devoutly misinformed) Christians who embraced Trump as the salvation of our broken liberal capitalist state may or may not stick with the man himself (or rather with the narcissistic tweetstorms that will no doubt continuously flow from his mansion in Florida), but the populist discontent which he channeled, the sense of technological alienation, socio-economic frustration, and constitutional disregard many justifiably feel in relation to our ever-increasingly unequal, undemocratic, and elite-driven country--that, I'm certain, we're stuck with. That can been as a threat requiring constant condemnation--or maybe, instead, we can dig into this discontent, find its constructive elements, relocate them, and use them to build a different, more local and less easily abused political foundation.

Of course, figuring out how to disentangle Trump from ideas embraced by, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of voters, is no simple matter. Populism--which, borrowing from The Oxford Handbook of Populism, I'll define minimally as "an ideology that posits a struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite," and thus is, among other things, "a normative response to perceived crises of democratic legitimacy--is an alluring idol, the promise (one which many consider democratically dangerous) of making political connections with the imagined masses who feel alienated from or resentful towards those who wield social power within the dysfunctional mass democracies of today. I say "imagined" masses not because I reject the possibility of such alienation and resentment operating on a nation-wide scale; rather, I call it imagined because the populist articulations we see around us, whether expressed as a positive or a negative, are almost inevitably couched in a statist, collective context--and the pioneering work of Benedict Anderson decades ago has made it impossible, I think, for serious people to speak casually of national communities and their political expressions through states without recognizing their fundamentally "imaginary" quality, as things constructed through acts of affective identification and imagination.

Scholars who recognize this imaginary element in the politics of the contemporary democratic nation-state are often quick to suggest alternative stories which the inhabitants of such states could, or should, tell themselves, so as to short-circuit the lure of populist stories that, in the view of many of them, invariably cast the fight between the “common people” and the “conspiring elite” in dangerously ethnic or exclusionary terms. Their goal is to find a way to cast the affective identification and imagination at work in liberal capitalist states into the civic realm: hence, “civic nationalism” or “constitutional patriontism.” This effort, while it has had great influence in the scholarship on national identity over the past 30 years, has seemed less than wholly convincing as populist narratives have revived over the same period. Rogers Smith, while sharing the fear of these scholars regarding the threat to liberal democracy which populist narratives present, suggests that any political story which fundamentally rests on “pledging allegiance to an abstract creed” is doomed to struggle.

Instead, Smith argues that those stories which will lastingly engage the affective imagination of a people are the ones which focus on “a shared endeavor that participants can see as expressive of their identities and interests as well as their ideas.” This is not a denial of the constitutive role which acts of political imagination will invariably involve, but it suggests that such affective expressions need not be either “mechanistic” (which suggest unchanging laws or identities) or “teleological organicist” (which suggest an inevitable evolution towards a destiny or end-state); a people can also see itself constituted through “contextual accounts” which derive themselves from mapping “how the interactions of different units in [society] foster change in those units and in the society as a whole.”

Given Smith’s appreciation of the constitutive function which a story about the contextual interactions of different parts of aspects of a social group can serve for the group itself--an appreciation he deepens even further when he associates the best kind of national stories with “reticulation”: that is, they will “weave networks” that “transform jumbles of differences into more orderly and attractive arrangements that generally have more utility and durability”--it is unfortunate that he never seriously considers any group besides the nation state. After all, his talk of contextual accounts of a jumble of different subgroups and distinct social units being woven into a network which constitutes an appreciation of the whole has an obvious analog in a very important, though clearly not national, form of imagined community: the city. Consider the applicability of Smith’s considerations to Jane Jacob’s justly famous description of the “sidewalk ballet” of a thriving city in The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance--not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. 

That Smith does not recognize this obvious parallel is perhaps a matter of convenience; while he allows that our globalized and interconnected world allows for a cacophony of potential political stories, he sees “narratives of nation-states” as possessing a “simplicity, clarity, and authority” which “proponents of rival senses of political identity often can manage only with great difficulty.” Or it is possible that he sees that convenience as reflecting something natural and inevitable. William Galston, relying in part on the political theorist Pierre Manent, makes this point multiple times in his own recent attack on populist narratives; it is essential, he writes, to make a civic case for the pluralist and democratic nation-state, because only a government that is incorporated by national bodies can have the scale of representation to make genuinely “legitimate decisions about laws and rules,” and only a national body can incorporate enough resources to generate the sort of wealth that can reward the very human characteristic of “ceaseless effort and ingenuity in the service of material improvement.” Democracy at our present moment, according to this argument, requires a liberal capitalist nation-state, and since such states create elites, and elites can be depicted as threatening the common people by populist demagogues, the great task of theorists of democracy, in Galston’s and Smith’s minds at least, is to call for the sorts of stories and public policies that will prevent the populist narratives which are parasitic upon such states from gaining any political ground.

My concern, at this point, should be obvious: if the fundamental problem with populism--and the efforts which some theorists go to either counter or re-orient its appeal as a constitutive narrative of affective imagination--is the complicated fact of its appeal to the feelings of powerlessness and longings for popular control which exist in the contemporary nation-state, then what about focusing on the constitutive, people-building power of other, less statist scales of belonging? Of course, so long as our national governing bodies wield sovereign power, and our major media organs remain committed to casting every debate into terms of what effect said debate will have on the use or abuse of state power, any such alternative will face many practical obstacles. But those obstacles may not be insurmountable.

One particular way in which localism has taken on theoretical forms which potentially carry with them real possibilities for constituting a sense of popular identity is the family of ideas which are sometimes referred to as the “new municipalism” or “radical municipalism.” Heavily indebted to the “libertarian municipalism” of Murray Bookchin, but expressed in light of a more locally interconnected understanding of participatory democracy than his did, it is an attempt to think more seriously about what a politically empowered egalitarian commons would look like in a localized urban context. That such models can be productively imagined and politically built upon in relatively rural contexts is an understanding as old as Thomas Jefferson’s proposed ward system or Alexis de Tocqueville’s idealization of the egalitarian town meetings of 19^th-century America. The parallels between those associational forms and those spoken of by the Populists of late 19th-century America are strong--but considering how poorly the Populists fared in America's urban centers, that would only seem to further suggest the incompatibility between populist formations and the urban life most American citizens live.

Yet perhaps the distinguishing feature that municipalist narratives could offer, one which borders on the populist articulation of a defense of the common people and yet does not get hung up on inevitably statist definitions of citizenship and claims to a sovereign people--definitions which, in the 19^th century, became entangled with an anti-urbanism and an anti-immigrant ethnic sentiment, echoes of which continue to Trump’s so-called “populism” today--is their rigorous focus on the most basic phenomenological fact of urban life: bodies in proximity to each other (which is exactly the same central reality to Jacob’s sidewalk ballet). As Bertie Russell observed:

[The] municipalist movements have found themselves building on a unique potential of the urban--proximity. In its simplest forms, we can understand the quality of proximity the observation that...the local level is the place the space where shifts and changes can truly be transformative in terms of impacting people’s lives....[Their] initiatives are harnessing the potential of the urban scale through adopting a politics of proximity, the concrete bringing together of bodies (rather than of citizens, who already come with a [state-defined] territory) in the activation of municipalist political processes that have the capacity to produce new political subjectivities....[We] should understand the politics of proximity as attending to those forces that pull us together, as opposed to those forces that push us apart. Whilst contemporary urbanization is characterized by the ever-increasing massification of bodies...this same urbanization is driven by dynamics that pull us ever further apart. Perhaps it is precisely because of this contradiction that the municipality has been adopted as a key site through which a politics of proximity can be pursued. 

While the theoreticians of municipalism have thus far, to my knowledge, not thought to connect populist stories about constitutive identification (or their more civic equivalents) with the urban “subjectivities” that they see as emerging through the politicalization of the proximate bringing together and shifting and changing of human bodies, the parallels are, I think, obvious. The focus on the needs of human bodies, on organizing to maintain their proximate patterns of movement and change, or resisting those socio-economic forces which pull people apart, inducing alienation in the place of togetherness--that all can fit within a populist framework. Remember that Smith argued that the best stories of identification must incorporate some degree of “reticulation,” some respect for the pluralistic “patterns among the elements that constitute a larger whole.” In rural or suburban environments, it may correctly be the fact that the distance between bodies requires a narrative of affective and imaginary identification on a national scale, since locally there isn’t sufficient shifting and changing to prevent the craving for such stories to land upon exclusive, ethnic ones. But in cities? The requisite reticulation which the constituting story needs to making human plurality into a part of one’s imagined community, rather than an obstacle to it, will be as obvious as the foot traffic on the sidewalk outside one’s front door (or at least potentially could be, anyway).

Margaret Kohn's work on the "urban commonwealth" provides a specific example of putting this kind of imagined subjectivity--a non-statist, urban sense of the common people united against those who would alienate and privatize them from one another--to direct political work. Kohn refers to the theoretical construct she explores as “solidarism,” but at one point in her analysis the populist parallel is made explicit. Using the urban uprisings of a decade ago--Occupy Wall Street being the best known in the United States, but with parallels all around the world--as her model, she suggests that life in cities today is increasingly teaching more and more people to rethink how they see themselves as bodies which occupy public, democratically articulated spaces. In association with that particular urban education, Kohn postulates a greater awareness of how it is that those spaces, and the means by which they are "common" to those who live and move and change within them–speaking here of the roads and parks and playgrounds and markets through which healthy urban activity is expressed--are separated from them, thus making them, presumably, something that people can feel no politically identifying affection for.

Enabling this awareness are the operations of, in Kohn’s words, "two very different understandings of the term 'public.'" The first she calls the "sovereigntist model, which identifies the public with the state," and the second the "populist model, which sees the public as a force which emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” Predictably, the sovereigntist model requires a regulative state in order for the urbanites to find identification through their actions in their spaces: “A public space is one that is owned, authorized, or regulated by the state.” Whereas the populist model defends the contentious interaction of persons, with their always shifting associations, as a necessary component of persuasion; it justifies “the public as a force that emerges outside of state institutions in order to challenge policies and publicize issues that do not make it onto the government’s agenda.” In short, Kohn is pointing to a kind of populist imaginary which comes from the same space as the subjectivities which radical municipalism invokes: finding oneself constituted as a community through the practice of “extralegal” action, putting bodies into public space “as a way of ensuring that the law does not protect the interests of the elite at the expense of the common people."

Obviously, talk of the people being able to exercise political force in regards to public places "outside of state institutions" is terrifying to those who consider state-enforced property rights to be sacrosanct. Such urban and local populist formulations do not necessarily take a clear position on the place of private property (Kohn herself doesn't, recognizing that the idea of "social rights" or the "right to the city" are far from fully developed), but again, the key point is not contesting every particular argument being made as part of this intellectual shift. Rather, the point is taking up the discontent which issues in the whole drive to politically express oneself through in connection with one's collectively self-articulated people and place, and explore the possibilities of the shift itself.

It is my belief--and, with a little creative re-interpretation, perhaps a belief which aligns with the theoretical work done by the theorists and activists mentioned here--that populism, the popular engagement of people against elites, can be made relevant to political formulations outside of national imaginaries. And if the rhetoric of populism really can be theoretically articulated as a local and urban matter, then perhaps exclusive national narratives, whatever their effectiveness, could also be understood as invoking a language which is parasitic upon the embodied place where populist feeling mostly actually resides. To be certain, it is ridiculously unlikely that a conceptual exploration like this one could be persuasive enough to be even just a small part of making incoherent any further Trumpist and state-dependent abuse of the valid populist sentiments out there. But given how likely it is that our national pre-occupations will allow bad actors like our soon-to-be-former president to continue to turn legitimate frustrations with the elite disregard of our  proximate (and, for most of us, urban) places in nationalist, exclusivist directions, any rhetorical and intellectual resistance, however small, is worth doing.

Glimmers of a Different Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Two weeks ago, the Wichita City Council, by a 4-3 vote--a result which surprised more than a few Wichitans--implemented a mask requirement in the city of Wichita, in the wake of the Sedgwick County Commission's refusal to fully support the mask mandate which Governor Kelly had called for all the state of Kansas to embrace. (To be fair, the commission later decided to support a similar order from Dr. Garold Minns, the county's health officer.) Then earlier this week the Wichita Historical Preservation Board, by a 5-2 vote--a result which, once again, surprised more than a few Wichitans--nominated Century II for state and national historic status, thus supporting the effort to get the iconic building listed by the Kansas State Historic Preservation Office and the National Register of Historic Places. If that happens, it would likely present very serious obstacles to any plan--such as that proposed by the Populous outfit hired by the Riverfront Legacy folks--which involved the destruction of Century II, which is why multiple interested groups sent representatives to the Preservation Board to make their case (in vain, as it turned out).

I found myself wondering yesterday: is there anything these two votes have in common?

The obvious first response--and, in all likelihood, mostly the correct one--would be: "no." Why would there be? One was a vote taken by elected representatives to the city council, the other by appointed members to an advisory board. One was a vote that had immediate, material consequences about life in our city, the other has only the force of a recommendation (though a significant one, all the same). One was a vote that reflected angry divides which have played out across the often-frustrating distribution of state, county, and city authority when it comes to matters of public health; the other reflected not so much ideological or political differences as generational ones, informed by an argument that has been studied and debated at length here in Wichita for years. In short, these were votes taken by different bodies, for different reasons, addressing categorically different types of issues. What possible overlap could their be?

For that matter, it's not hard to imagine a set of relatively clear demographic and, consequentially, partisan differences in the groupings of people who might be deeply invested in the results of either of these votes in fairly predictable ways. Don't we all know that it's all those very-online liberals and Democrats who support wearing masks as a way to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and the anti-government Republicans who don't? And aren't those Democrats all younger and more urban and more racially diverse than those older, more suburban and rural, and more white Republicans? And so isn't it reasonable to assume that all the opposition to the plans to tear down a beloved but certainly-no-longer-cutting-edge building, and instead invest in some wholesale redevelopment of our downtown, would be coming from those grumpy Republicans who also don't wear masks?

I'm using a lot of stereotypes and assumptions in the above paragraph; the number of real-world exceptions to them in both cases would likely be pretty significant. Still, for all the limits in that particular act of imagination, I'm confident that almost every Wichitan who is even remotely politically informed would recognize the basic contours of what I'm talking about. The city council voting for masks? A progressive win! The Historical Preservation Board voting to protect Century II? A victory for tradition! Clearly, these votes are completely separate from each other.

Except, that is, for that fact that they do both partake of a particular perspective. It's hard to name just what that perspective is, but you can see it if you look at these votes, and those invested in them, closely. There are Wichitans out there--maybe not large in number, but not hidden either--who were both strong proponents of the mask mandate, and strong proponents of the decision made by the Historical Preservation Board. It's worth thinking about that small, curious overlap.

Consider, for example, that both of these close decisions faced, directly or indirectly, a certain type of business opposition. Some of the largest and best-funded business development organizations in Wichita lined up to protest the designation of Century II as historically significant, tying the future economic health of the city to a new and expanded convention center, a new and redesigned riverfront, with all sorts of new construction (some already finished, some projected far into the future) in the place of Century II connecting it together. And while a few of the large business interests which contribute to those groups had also spoken out in support of the mask mandate, the broader conversation about masks (both nationally and locally, as was demonstrated as recently as the Sedgwick County Commission's meeting two weeks ago) tended to focus on the sacrosanct right of business owners to open up, send their employees back to work, and allowing them to make whatever decisions they thought best for themselves and their customers. So in this sense, both the mask vote and the Century II vote reflect a prioritization of health and civic interests over those of business profit. So...a populist or civic republican sensibility, perhaps?

Or consider, as another example, that both of these unexpected votes were rooted in local, Wichita-based (small-d) democratic action. In the case of the city's mask mandate, the pressure on Mayor Whipple, who called for the emergency vote, arose directly from the realization that county-level decision-makers were acting on the basis of interests and information that did not reflect what was happening in the cities of Kansas, in the urban hospitals and government offices which provide essential services to the population of the whole state. Suzanne Perez and The Wichita Eagle, to their great credit, kept local data in front of its readers, and gave regular voice to the local doctors and medical authorities who could speak forcefully as to what was happening throughout the city.

In the case of the Century II vote, the grass-roots efforts of Save Century II, led by Celeste Racette, have been tremendously effective, collecting thousands of signatures from Wichitans with a great variety of concerns (economic, fiscal, political, cultural, as well as historical) about the proposed layout for Wichita's downtown, and pulling them together into a movement which has been flexible enough in its arguments--expressing no opposition to the widely accepted need for new performing arts venue somewhere in the downtown, and insisting on no specific limitations about what might be someday accomplished under Century II's dome--as to attract far more supporters than the critics first supposed. So in that sense, both the mask vote and the Century II vote reflect a somewhat radical, bottom-up challenge to larger government bodies and economic expectations. So...a localist, municipalist movement, one might say?

You can't read too much into these speculations, obviously. The very distinct contexts of these votes, and the very distinct political processes they emerged as part of, to say nothing of the brute demographic distinctions characterizing the likely supporters of either side in both efforts, make it all but impossible to hypothesize some kind unity between them. But maybe not entirely impossible. Student of political ideas that I am, I can't help but be intrigued in the glimmer the last two weeks, and these two votes, have provided me of a different Wichita, a more community-oriented and less conventionally business-oriented one. I have no reason to believe that those glimmers will turn into anything more broadly, much less politically, actionable anytime soon--but for someone of my preferences (both pro-mask and pro-Century II, if you haven't guessed), they were nice to see.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: The First 100 Days

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

This past Saturday was more than just the summer solstice, the longest day of the year and the official start of summer (astronomically speaking, if not calendrically). It also marked the 100th day since the coronavirus pandemic formally began in Kansas, with Governor Kelly having issued her state of emergency order, in response to the first covid-19 death in the state, on March 12th. Wichita and Sedgwick County began to follow suit the same day, and just as USD 259 students were beginning their spring break, our long Covd Spring started.

Now, our Covid Spring has become a Covid Summer. What’s different, what’s the same, and what, if anything, has been learned? I have some thoughts about how the panic, uncertainty, and defensiveness which the pandemic brought out in too many of us unfortunately undermined the priority which our elected leaders ought to have given to the need for responsible deliberation during this season on increasing distrust. Maybe that couldn’t have been avoided, especially given that this is an election year. Still, have we done any better locally, as a city or a collection of neighborhoods?

It's easy to think: no, we haven't. Social media is rampant with fights, accusations, and counter-accusations over who is or isn't wearing a mask, or following social distancing guidelines, or spreading conspiratorial nonsense rather than taking seriously the best recommendations out there. The Sedgwick County Commission has waded into these fights, largely dividing itself along party lines, getting called out by Governor Kelly, Mayor Brandon Whipple,  and local observers for their lack of seriousness, and often treating their long-suffering health official, Dr. Garold Minns, as a bit of a punching bag. While various restricts are still formally being "advised," they aren't really in place in any substantive sense any longer--not unless residents themselves put them there.

Which some do! There are many businesses across the city that do a very good job making it clear to their employees--by both policy and example--that health precautions must be followed. There are some that even take the harder (but probably even more necessary step) of keeping their places of business, where people gather, as contagion-free as possible, requiring shoppers and buyers to wear a mask if they intend to come inside. (Watermark Books & Cafe, the city's premier general independent bookstore and a long-time neighborhood gather spot in East Wichita, is exemplary in this regard.) Most, unfortunately, aren't going that far. Thus does the information about where precautionary practices are widely embraced, thus creating new local norms, and where they aren't, get passed through word of mouth and Facebook and Twitter. (Super-concerned about staying virus free while needing to do some shopping for home and yard repairs? Stick with Menard's and Lowe's; watch out for Home Depot and Ace Hardware. Or conversely, filling oppressed by the mask and the judgment who feel it entails, all while needing to support your local farmers market? The downtown market, rather than the Kansas Grown market at the Sedgwick County Extension Center, is probably the better bet.)

But the way we've collectively and probably insufficiently responded to health warnings and contagion restrictions is really only one small part of our covid-19 story, and maybe not even the most revealing. As so many of us have struggled, some with greater success than others, to deal with social, financial, and familial changes as businesses and schools and churches were closed or shifted online, what can we see?

I don't know, obviously: I'm just one person. But for whatever it's worth, I can say the following (and I know, from conversations with others, that I'm not the only one who can say it):

--While walking our dog morning and night, as my family has done for years, we have consistently run into more individuals and groups--sometimes families with children, sometimes couples, sometimes solo walkers--taking their animals out than I can ever remember seeing before, in all the six springs and summers we've had our pet.

--While biking to work and around the city, as I have ever since we moved here in 2006, I've seen more cyclists, in more parts of the city (bumping into people I know from across Wichita on bike paths out west where I live no longer surprises me), biking together or singly, than I can ever remember before.

--As a longtime gardener, I've always kept an eye and ear out for other local gardeners, looking and listening for what I can learn from them. This year, I've seen and learned out more new gardens going in, and more local people seeking (and offering!) information about those gardens, than I have in any previous growing season.

--And beyond all of that, I've lost count of the number of informal gatherings, of chairs set up on driveways and in cul-de-sacs, that I've seen become regular and predictable around our neighborhood, with people hanging out and talking and drinking from cans kept in a cooler, during the warm (and now usually hot) evenings of May and June, every weekend or sometimes even every night.

There are easy, even cynical, explanations for much for much of this, of course. The bars were closed, so of course people would go knock back beers on their suburban sidewalks! The pandemic began with shortages in the stores, shortages that many fear (with good reason) will return, so of course everyone who had ever told themselves that they ought to plant a garden finally was impelled to do so! And of course everyone, stuck at home and with the YMCAs closed, was desperate to get outside, to get into shape, etc. We're just responding to our environment, that's all--meaning that, as Wichita returns to a normal summer, or finds a new kind of summer normal, that all the changes I and others have observed, whatever their reality (as opposed to their merely anecdotal nature) will slip away. And of course, maybe I'm just fooling myself in thinking that what I'm seeing is at all representative of Wichita in the first place.

Maybe all that is the case. But I hope--and I would expect many others similarly hope--that the reverse is true. Maybe this spring really may have taught us some things; maybe it really did introduce, however subtly, some real concerns about sustainability and simplicity into the lives of many. Maybe what we've seen, when we turn away from the too-often frustrating slowness and suspicion and paranoia of too many of those with the responsibility of making decisions for us all in city hall and the state legislature, can be held on to as a hopeful sign. Yes, the months to come, as the economic costs of the coronavirus in Kansas grind us down ever further, are not going to be easy. But maybe this summer will also be a time when we can double-down on our personal and neighborhood accomplishments, and let those hopes lead us through the next 100 days, and beyond. It's a possibility, anyway.

The Invaluable Inefficiency of Neighborhoods

[This is a shortened version of my recent Mittelpolitanism post, up on the Strong Towns website.]

The death of suburbia has been predicted many times, and yet suburban development endures. Will the current pandemic finally make the difference? Strong Towns president Chuck Marohn suggested it might a month ago, for two reasons.

First, in the wake of the economic wreckage of COVID-19, governments may just be too broke to handle the fiscal liabilities and infrastructure costs of suburbia—and when those costs are more immediately felt by residents, they'll leave. He pointed out that “the North American development pattern is built with an assumption of permanent affluence”—something that the economic consequences of the current pandemic may finally disabuse many people of.

Second, even if the suburban experiment doesn’t economically collapse, he suggested it may do so because the closures and restrictions necessary to keep people alive have made suburban limitations manifest as never before. "Those of us living in cities can hear the birds instead of car horns,” Chuck wrote. “The air seems cleaner. The city, more human." So we may see a critical mass of people pushing against cities sacrificing their urban neighborhoods for the sake of enabling suburban commuter ease.

Both of these speculations could be countered, of course. In the first case, will the economic devastation of COVID-19 really be sufficiently devastating, and does anyone actually want it to be? Even setting aside the unfortunately enduring appeal of having one's own (heavily subsidized and mortgaged) castle on a cul-de-sac, the suburbs are central to school district competition, socio-economic sorting, and what David Imbroscio has called the logic of "liberal expansionism," the linkage of suburban development with the push for ever-greater regional investment in a city, whether corporate or governmental. With all that in place, isn’t it likely that the means to keep suburban costs steady will somehow be found, absent a truly total economic collapse? (Note the Republican support in Congress for a second round of pandemic-related stimulus, this one focused, predictably, on infrastructure projects which historically have primarily served suburban commuters.)

As for the second case, will the mere experience of a healthier urban environment with fewer cars really lead people to decide against them? That's a change much longed for by anyone who worries about either the environmental health or the cultural strength of where they live—but when you place it against the delight of record low gasoline prices, and rates of infection which make urban density quite reasonably seem as something to fear, I'm not sure how much I would count on it.

During a Eutopia Workshop discussion organized by the good folks at Solidarity Hall, Chuck suggested that, whatever our speculations of a post-suburban future, the pandemic is going to force nearly every American city or town into one of two camps. Cities that take what he labeled "option 1" would be those who dare not contemplate real economic collapse, and thus will instead insist that residents be provided with every economic opportunity for continuing suburban and auto-centric ways of life, no matter what. As for "option 2," that would be the cities which do what is necessary to adapt to the reality of suburban costs in the face of the economic recession we are almost certainly facing—including doing the work to build up those civic strengths which will enable their residents to follow through on what the restrictions we have been operating under have hopefully allowed most of us to recognize.

What might those civic strengths be? In a word, they’re neighborhoods.

Note that “neighborhoods” are not necessarily “communities.” Community feeling and friendships can obviously exist among neighbors, but they don’t have to: what really matters to a neighborhood is proximity. Neighbors, because they live nearby each other, end up creating public spaces that can be mutually shared, and forming (both with and sometimes against one another) routines around and in the midst of those public spaces which bring richness to ordinary patterns of life. As Nancy Rosenblum wrote in her superb book, Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America, neighbors exemplify “weak ties.” Neighbors regard each other as "decent folk" (or at least aspire to, and commiserate with other decent folk in the neighborhood about those bad neighbors who choose to not so aspire). They show reciprocity, speak out when necessary, but also abide by the rule "live and let live." Hence, the neighborhood is a place conceived in light of at least a degree of pluralism, mobility, and anonymity, with proximity being the essential bond: 

To moral philosophers committed to more demanding expressions of mutual respect or principled toleration, live and let live falls short. To disparage it is a mistake, however...."Weak ties" based on infrequent interactions are...[themselves a] critical resource....[O]rganizations where neighbors develop the capacity for collective action are key...a close cousin to the...rudimentary cooperation in countering people who flaunt reasonable expectations for "for what anyone would do, here" (pp. 113, 139-140).

Understanding the central role in distinguishing between different cities, and especially between different city approaches to dealing with the pandemic crisis, is crucial. In a small community of friends, of people committed to a shared (but more often than not also quite exclusive) faith or ethos or way of life, encouraging people in recognizing that which Chuck pointed out, and supporting one another economically in making the adaptations he suspects may be mostly unavoidable, would presumably go much more smoothly than it likely will in the pluralistic cities which 80% of Americans live in. The Strong Towns aim, as I understand it, is to nudge the urban environments we have to greater sustainability, and thus greater local empowerment, within which a whole host of particular communities can play their organic role. To the extent that we can build up the "weak ties" of our neighborhoods, build up their shared spaces and the trust they inculcate, build up the opportunities they provide for people to see the costs and opportunities of collective life directly, the more likely option 2 will become.

A central part of that building involves the "social infrastructure" that Elias Crim, the director of Solidarity Hall, wrote in his response to Chuck's presentation. He discussed the "traditional economy of cooperation," which has parallels in various distributist, socialist, and communalist institutional forms—none of which are particularly efficient, at least not from a market perspective. They allow for overlapping and conflicting responsibilities, tradition-bound forms of interaction and service, complicated collective decision-making practices, pricing mechanisms and welfare policies that reflect localized information, and more—all of which will make for economic forms which are more resilient when disasters occur, but in the meantime do not maximize efficient results.

What does this have to do with neighborhoods? In a sense, everything—because in many ways, the weak ties of neighborhood associational life and routines are the very definition of "inefficient." Marc Dunkelman, in his book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, makes this his central thesis: that the routine, repetitive, inefficient, and overlapping encounters and social constructs which emerge from ordinary proximity with other people form a desperately important “middle ring” of casual trust and mutual support. Quoting Jane Jacobs’s line about neighborhoods being "valuably inefficient," he draws upon the work of Sean Safford to consider two different Rust Best cities—Youngstown, Ohio, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. In the latter, “neighbors attended a variety of different colleges and worked in different mills. They were congregants at different churches and regulars at different bars.....[This] random intersection of individuals from different pockets of society spurred big new ideas—even when they appeared to waste resources. Regions focused too exclusively on efficiency may have been able to produce more with less, but...[faced] an insufficient capacity to adapt to new circumstances" (pp. 171-172, 176).

If the current pandemic demands anything, it is certainly the "capacity to adapt to new circumstances." So as economic suffering and new realizations open up the possibility for a truly post-suburban future, however minimally, with such possibilities confronting all sorts of contrary pressures along the way, a focus on "weak," neighborly ties is crucial, as whatever transition may be in the offing may well depend upon those distinctive civic resources. What should such a focus look like? Much like some of the principles which Strong Towns has laid out in their Local Leader's Toolkit. In particular, for the enriching proximity of neighborhoods to function, the people living there:

*Need to have some basic food and housing security, especially at this time of economic insecurity and pandemic fear; they’re start hoarding, or pillaging, or simply leave otherwise.

*Need open spaces and alternatives for getting around; without them, the assumption that all their interactions should be conducted over a distance via the automobile will seem, whatever else their experiences with stay-at-home orders might be telling them.

*Don’t need invasive regulations interfering with their commercial and residential adaptations; the “live and let live” aspect of effective neighboring is never more important than when families shelter relatives, students, or co-workers during a time of lockdown, or start new businesses from their garages to replace lost income.

*Need, most of all, the cash to address those immediate local needs—the potholes in the street, the lack of bike racks at the grocery store, the vouchers for the bus ride to the farmers market or cross-town hub—which will reward the “decent folk” of a neighborhood for the work they’re doing in their places.

Not every town or city is an Allentown; every place has its unique social architecture. But wherever we live--which means, at present, wherever we are sheltering in place, wondering what comes next, and, quite possibly, relying upon our church and work communities, our family and friends, and our neighbors to get through the day--there are neighborhoods which need our help. Those overlapping, inefficient, weak ties between all of us, living next door or down the block from one another, are important for getting our places to make the beneficial shifts away from suburbia which this terrible pandemic makes possible. We should all find a good place nearby us to start.

The Coronavirus and County Authority

[This is a slightly updated and extended column of mine which ran in The Wichita Eagle on May 14, 2020; I'm late in getting it copied to here.]

Throughout this pandemic, we’ve gotten used to waiting on, listening to, and then either criticizing or thanking our elected leaders much more than usual. The reasons for this are obvious: during a public emergency we all, like it or not, depend upon those with governing authority who impose restrictions, provide support, and make decisions regarding public health.

What many Kansas have discovered, however, is that such authority isn’t always located where they thought it was. A lot of it, in fact, lies in the hands of Kansas’ 105 county commissions, probably the most often overlooked of all the state’s governing institutions.

To be fair, the same can be said for counties all across the United States. It’s common, in the political science literature, for scholars to admit that our knowledge of how county commissions make public decisions is sorely lacking. There’s no good reason for this, of course: County commissions adhere to the same public meeting requirements as other governing bodies. And yet, unlike the contentious fights that occur in city halls or the grandstanding that takes place in state legislatures--to say nothing of the constant attention focused on Washington D.C.--the day-to-day administrative work of counties often goes unnoticed by scholars and the media alike. Until, that is, a pandemic forces commissioners directly into the spotlight.

With few exceptions it is American counties, not cities, which have the ground-level responsibility for collecting data on health, overseeing the distribution of welfare, conducting the electoral business of democracy, and much more. But since county lines were historically drawn by state governments, dividing up their rural space without attention to the urban communities that later grew within them, it’s not unusual for those who seek and win county elections, and the officials they subsequently appoint, to become disconnected from the contentious, pluralistic reality they oversee.

There are, of course, plenty of contrary examples. In Johnson County, Public Health Director Sanmi Areola and his team have fought to communicate clearly across a complicated metropolitan area with many rival jurisdictions, as they have addressed Governor Kelly’s stay-at-home orders. In Shawnee County, the commission has mostly responded to County Health Officer Gianfranco Pezzino concerns positively, even contemplating, in the face of worrisome infection numbers, an unpopular extension of local lock-down orders as he recommends.

Still, examples of the occasional disconnect between Kansas citizens and those who run our counties aren’t hard to find. It’s not just a commissioner in Riley County attributing Manhattan’s low COVID-19 numbers to its lack of Chinese residents or commissioners in Sedgwick County joking about needing to talk more about the pandemic to justify the money they’ve received from the federal government. It’s simply the fact that in counties across Kansas, from Finney to Leavenworth, it has too often been the commissioners themselves criticizing state--or even their own county--health experts, playing to business or suburban communities that appear unaware of or unconcerned about what is happening in the downtown hospitals they depend upon. (It is worth noting that in 103 of Kansas's 105 counties, matters of public health are solely the province of county-level officials; only in Douglas County--with the city of Lawrence--and Cowley County--with the city of Winfield--are public health decisions made by a body that is jointly staffed and supervised by both the county and its primary urban area.)

The very shape of political institutions help form the beliefs of those who work within them. Consequently, as Kansas attempts to rebuild a new normal beyond the pandemic, thinking more seriously about home rule and the way cities, counties, and the state share governing authority should be near the top of every elected official’s list.

The Coronavirus in Kansas: Wichita's Weaknesses and Strengths

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When it comes to the coronavirus pandemic, it's sometimes easy, here in Wichita--a large city nonetheless somewhat isolated and disconnected from the larger metropolitan areas of the country, a city which centers a largely rural and therefore much more low risk part of the state--to be unclear if we're overreacting or not reacting enough.But feeling as though we’re stuck in the middle, feeling divided, is nothing new for a mid-sized city like ours.

In general the news for Kansas overall seems to be pretty good. It is looking like the spread of the virus, as it peaks in April, won't be as deadly as we feared, almost certainly in part because of Governor Laura Kelly's (and locally, Sedgwick County Commissioner Lacey Cruse's) insistence on pushing for stay-at-home orders as early as possible. But is it true that, in taking these actions, Wichita will suffer even more than it would have had the city, and its surrounding county and state, not shut things down? Obviously you can find folks who self-righteously insist upon just that. The evidence suggests otherwise--but all the same, there's reason to worry. My best guess, on the basis of both observations and ongoing research, is that Wichita, and most of our state generally, will be able to weather this month, and the next, relatively well--but that rebuilding afterwards may be confronted with some real difficulties.

On the positive side, comparative data provided by Wichita State University shows that, as Kansas’s economy is generally much less dependent upon service, entertainment, and tourist sectors than is the case elsewhere, we haven’t seen quite the same level of job losses and business closures statewide. The mainstays of Kansas’s economy–food production, manufacturing, education, and health care–are broadly considered essential, and thus have mostly been able to continue to operate.

That’s no comfort, of course, to the many Kansans who are suddenly facing unemployment and real economic distress. Nor does it lessen the fear which so many of us have here about the possible loss of so much that adds to the quality of life here in Wichita–the restaurants, the theaters, the bookstores, the "third places," and so much more. And that is what puts a question mark beside this otherwise good news for the folks in this city--Wichita is actually enough of a metropolitan economy that it does, in fact, include significant service and entertainment sectors. Not nearly what New York City or Los Angeles or Chicago or even Kansas City has, of course, but still, enough that, as the Wichita State study shows, a few of the negative economic effects (like regarding air travel) which are below the national average for Kansas, are slightly above it for Wichita. Not much, but slightly. This is why it is vital for Wichita to take seriously questions about how to keep money in the pockets of as many Wichitans as possible (providing maternity leave for city workers whose vacation and sick leave are being used to help support their fellow furloughed workers is one good idea) that probably aren't even on the radar screen in many smaller cities. Small actions, such are withing the jurisdiction of the mayor and the city council, may make all the difference in enabling Wichitans to enjoy the same lower level of economic pain and disruption which will likely characterize the rest of the state for the duration of the pandemic.

Something similar might be said regarding psychological pain and family disruption. Nowhere in Kansas--and certainly not even here in Wichita, the largest single city in the state--do we see the kind of urban density which characterizes those cities that have seen the largest outbreaks, and thus have had to take the most extreme actions for the sake of public health. But even if such measures become necessary here--and again, given the success that we've had in flattening the curve they hopefully will not be--they still wouldn’t play out the same way that they have in larger urban agglomerations. Simply put, Kansans--and Wichitans too--generally have easy access to rural space. When it comes to mental health and minimizing domestic conflict, that matters. As one writer suggested in The New York Times, social distancing in an environment when families have gardens, fields, and locally grown food readily available to them, is a very different prospect from social distancing when three people in a cramped downtown apartment have to maintain 6 ft. distance from one another, and when even the parks and sidewalks are often so crowded with people trying to find some openness that they become sources of stress and have to be subject to further regulation.

In a way, it might be Wichita's very in-betweeness which will make this city a real model insofar as such matters are concerned. We have a genuinely large population with a low enough level of density that nearly all of its residents can take advantage of rural space for physical and mental rejuvenation relatively easily. That's not to say that there aren't problems which some Wichitans could face in this regard; one may think of transportation and access to some of that (mostly privately owned, and sometimes fiercely patrolled) open space, particularly for poorer Wichitans in the downtown and southern parts of the city. And of course, the safety and maintenance of the trails and bike paths and road shoulders by which we can make use of that space once we get there is a question as well. As city leaders take a look of where to cut costs in the face of the financial hit the city is taking, and will continue to take, one hopes they're recognize that is, also, is part of the value and resilience of the city, and will attend to the costs of those easily overlooked resources accordingly.

Still, in general, it would be fair to conclude that Wichita, and south-central Kansas overall, has available to it the opportunities and the resources keep the economic damage and the social consequences of the pandemic minimal. But that, unfortunately, is not the whole story. We have to think about long-term impacts, and not just short-term ones.

As the same Wichita State study warns, food production and manufacturing in Kansas is heavily dependent upon supply chains in equipment and trade that the overall economic health of the nation effectively determines. Service workers and others who work in more creative or information-dependent sectors of the economy can snap back as soon as paying customers return; the same cannot be said for larger industries that need to wait for raw materials to ship or are dependent upon extended networks of specialized workers. The fact that Wichita, as mentioned above, actually does have a decent-sized service sector, will mean that, as the larger mainstays of Kansas's economy slowly struggle back to life, it may be the collective action of activists, entrepreneurs, and urban creatives in our city that will be end up being essential to whatever support will be needed for workers in the aircraft industry and others in the meantime. Of course, given how much of Wichita's workforce is tied up in heavy manufacturing, which over the past year has already taken many 737 Max-related hits, maybe the best we can hope for is a wash.

Agriculture may be another problem. True, the likelihood of the virus spreading widely in isolated Kansas farming towns is quite small. But as the work force in Kansas’s rural counties is also quite small, and as many of those counties–thanks to Republican opposition to extending Medicaid—lack basic health care resources, even a small outbreak could be devastating. The resulting could be a domino effect, with unproductive or failed farms and feedlots forcing closures in ancillary food industries across the state, many of which are concentrated in south-central Kansas, with Wichita as their hub. Ultimately we may see a hastening of the already underway rural population collapse in western Kansas, with long-term social, economic, and political consequences for our city, as more and more people throughout the region come to Wichita seeking medical care and basic economic opportunities, contributing our aging population and probably not adding much to the overall tax base. It's a good thing that Sedgwick County's population is just over the half-million mark, thereby qualifying it for at least a slice of the $150 billion the federal government has earmarked to help out state, county, and municipal governments; in the months to follow this pandemic, with so many liabilities building up and so much potential revenue off the table, it's going to need it.

As we wait to see what this plague brings into our lives, our task as Wichitans must be to use the resources we have–a large population, one which is likely to find ways to remain relatively stable, socially and economically, in the short-term–to reach out and help make more resilient those places likely to struggle the most as Kansas recovers from this pandemic, whenever that recovery fully comes.