13, 15, 20, and 33

On August 13^th, Melissa and I had been married for 33 years. And as of today, August 15^th, I’ve officially been employed at Friends University for 20 years (as the accopanying notification, given me this week, declares). Despite my occasional obsession with actuarial tables, I’m not a numerologist, and I have no idea how I might discover some mystical significance from those two dates and two anniversaries. But they seem to combine in my mind in ways important to me, nonetheless.

This has been a summer of challenges for me, health-wise (and since we’re talking about healthcare in America, money-wise too). It’s made me reflect rather intensely (probably too intensely, as both my wife and my cardiologist have frequently reminded me) on what I’ve accomplished and what I may yet accomplish—as a teacher, scholar, writer, citizen, father, husband, and human being—in however many years or decades I have left. Melissa and I have had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but I really do believe the ups, especially over the past few years, have outnumbered the downs. We’ve also been blessed when it comes to our four daughters—they all seem to genuinely like each other, and actually spend with and support and root for each another as they all, with varying degrees of success (though none have yet run up against any actually insurmountable obstacles; another blessing) navigate adult life. Mostly, whatever the financial struggles we over-educated, artsy, politically-radical-yet-culturally-bourgeois, suburban denizens of the (to steal from John Cleese) lower-upper-middle-class are facing, I think we’ve navigated past the worst of them, and things really will, probably, continue to get better (relatively speaking, of course).

As for my work as a college professor, I was lucky enough to find a job at a small liberal arts college that, while hardly a Swarthmore or a Pomona, seems situated well enough and lead wisely enough to be able to weather the demographic and administrative challenges facing it. As one of my colleagues said without a trace of irony at our recent faulty retreat, we folks teaching at Friends University are genuinely lucky people. Assuming I keep up my part of the bargain, and adapt as necessary to continue to teach those students whom arrive at this institution and want (or are required, as we faculty in our not-remotely-infinite judgment decide) to gain at least a little civic knowledge, to learn at least a little bit about the history and nature and functions of America’s political ideas and institutions, then I think that luck will hold out, and I’ll be able to do good work here for another decade or more. I have some ideas about pivoting, in the years to come, the major I’m in charge of—History & Politics— in the direction of something that more directly incorporates my long efforts to teach sustainability with what it means to participate responsibly in civic life; maybe those ideas will bear fruit, or maybe not. Either way, I can’t think of a better place to try.

As for being a Wichitan and a Kansan for two decades, I can’t separate that from my hopes to actually put my 20 years of observations together into a book, which is the whole point of my “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan” project, after all. (I note, upon linking to that introductory comment, that I’ve passed the then-years-in-the-future date which I stuck to it, so as to keep it at the top of the Substack. Obviously I must have figured out a way to maintain that even as the calendar has rolled on to 2026 and beyond. Good for me!) Sometime last summer, it occurred to me that framing my thoughts about mid-sized cities around a history of the past 20 years of Wichita as I have observed it might really work as a book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that incorporating other first-person observations, through interviewing people that I’ve gotten to know over the past two decades and who can share thoughts about this city and its politics, its music, its businesses, its culture, its art and artists, its partisan contests, its demographic changes (or lack thereof), its government, its religion, its bureaucratic infighting, its natural and agricultural environment, and much more, would be even better.

I am, in the end, a political theorist, someone who wants to think through things on a level which exists between fundamental philosophy and motivating ideologies; I still believe in the insight I had 13 years ago, that Wichita doesn’t fit the dominant urban metropolitan model, but neither does it fit the rural micropolitan one either, and I think that there can be a theoretical language which can inform and provide insight to the way all the disparate topics above operate in the Air Capital of the World, right here in Kansas. I’ve gone back through many of the thousands of words I’ve written which touches on this insight in one way or another over the years, and started to organize them; maybe, in the final third of whatever amount of time I will, in the end, have enjoyed on this planet—years that will almost certainly be spent in this frustrating, struggling, but also (to me anyway) always delighting mid-sized city—I’ll finally be able to find the time and discipline to put together my (and others’) thoughts about it all.

Well, that’s about it. And wow, I kept all this navel-gazing under 1000 words. Pretty good for me! Maybe all that time writing Insight Kansas columns has paid off.

Getting Direct About the Politics Behind Kansas’s August Amendment

Walking around my Wichita neighborhood over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed something about the yard signs encouraging people to “Vote No” on the constitutional amendment to allow for the popular election of Kansas Supreme Court justices come August 4. (Until just the past three days, I hadn’t seen with my own eyes any “Vote Yes” yard signs, but I have now seen a couple.) These yard signs are, in their color, font, and design, basically identical to many of the “Vote No” yard signs I saw around my neighborhood four years ago, when the vote to change the language of the Kansas state constitution so as to eliminate any judicial support for abortion rights was decisively defeated. Just look and see:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Relatedly, over the past few weeks my home has received about a half-dozen mailers encouraging a no vote this August. (We’ve received exactly one “yes” flyer thus far.) Two of those mailers were particularly emphatic, insisting that this vote is about keeping the Kansas Supreme Court “fair and impartial” and preventing “billionaire political donors” from influencing the justices by paying for the political campaigns judicial candidate would have to run to win a spot on the Court. I’ve no doubt about the sincerity of those who created these messages, and the arguments they’re making are entirely valid. But the fact that both were mailed by Planned Parenthood Great Plains, an organization dedicated to preserving abortion rights in Kansas, is worth noting nonetheless.

My point is simple. On the surface, the constitutional referendum Kansans will vote on this August 4 is simply a question about changing one of the elements of our state’s constitutional structure, a merit-based structure that emerged over 80 years ago, was first adopted in Missouri—Kansas adopted it about in 1958—and was quickly adopted by many other states concerned about corruption in partisan election judicial-selection systems that were then common (though in recent decades has been rejected by voters in multiple states seeking greater democratic accountability from their justices as well). But substantively, this constitutional referendum is actually a vote about possible policy outcomes—and while that’s usually not being said by those most engaged in the campaign both for and against the referendum, I suspect that pretty much everyone paying attention already knows it.

Earlier this month, Amii Castle, a law professor at the University of Kansas, said this quiet part out loud, using the very words of some of the strongest Republican backers of the amendment—Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson—to show that this proposed amendment is rooted explicitly in the failure of the 2022 anti-abortion amendment, and the desire to get different judges on the Supreme Court so as to get different rulings regarding abortion rights in Kansas. Knowing that, why shouldn’t those who want to defend those rights campaign on the same terms as well?

Castle, though, received some push-back on social media and elsewhere for being so explicit, with some of those opposed to the amendment insisting that constitutional principles of judicial neutrality supposedly protected through Kansas’s current, somewhat complicated system of choosing Supreme Court justices (nomination by a judicial commission, appointment by governor, and retention elections at the conclusion of a judge’s term) are the paramount concern.

As someone who teaches the arguments over those constitutional principles, I respect the claims of those—including some former members of the Kansas Supreme Court itself—who believe that Kansas’s procedure for choosing justices is worth preserving simply on its own terms. But as someone who is also theoretically suspicious of most efforts to keep the messiness of electoral politics out of the judicial side of our government, I find myself rather more appreciative of those who choose instead to present the possible policy consequences of electing the members of the Supreme Court more directly

Does this mean that I don’t respect Kansas’s system for choosing Supreme Court justices? Not at all—I can see the civic virtues of the prioritization of professionalism and at least nominal nonpartisanship in our selection process. But I can also see its democratic flaws. For example, the fact that despite numerous contentious decisions over the nearly 70 years during which this system has been in place in our state, not a single Kansas state Supreme Court justice has ever lost their retention election, provides—at least to my mind—just as much evidence of the limitations of the democratic checks upon our appointed state justices as do Kansas’s gerrymandered congressional districts when it comes to questions of democratic representation.

Many might challenge me right here—in what sense should “democratic checks” or “democratic representation” be at all relevant to the judicial branch in the state of Kansas, or anywhere else? Isn’t the judicial branch supposed to be counter-majoritarian, a set of referees and umpires who are not playing the political games of democracy, but who rather are simply imposing the apolitical rules and processes of the majesty of the law?

Responding to that challenge would require me to get into the “theoretical suspicions” I referenced above. Specifically, my two-fold suspicions that 1) the emergence of the idea of an independent judiciary actually does not match the historical struggle toward creating a system wherein the democratic sovereignty of the people was both recognized as legitimate and hopefully made somewhat compatible with good government (it is worth noting that, originally, judicial elections were seen as a way of ensuring judicial independence, by allowing “the people,” rather than legislative, professional, or political elites, to choose who will administer the courts); and 2) that the actual practices of preserving judicial independence from the messy political reality of a people working through their governing structure so as to exercise that sovereignty don’t actually accomplish what people—many of them judges—think they do. (As one scholar put it pithily over 25 years ago, stating calmly what millions who have watched the Roberts court rule on voting rights, presidential immunity, and more over the past 15 years, "The assumption that independent judges use their freedom to decide impartially according to the law is contradicted by the empirical evidence.")

But rather than hauling out my legislative supremacist bona fides and rehearsing my radical small-d democratic recriminations about judicial review and unelected and unaccountable judges, etc., etc., let me take the more reasonable route. If I might have at one time taken a more burn-it-all-down position, age—and the lessons of Donald Trump’s presidency—have made me more sympathetic to finding ways to preserve the accomplishments of bourgeois constitutionalism, even as we need to focus radical critiques more directly to where changes to its legal and socio-economic structures are most needed. In the meantime, I agree that it’s important that we retain at least some belief in the supposedly non-partisan, supposedly apolitical character of the judiciary—what another scholar called the “secular religion of constitutionalism,” the faith that the “rule of law” will continue to work so long as we “believe it works.” The complicated, practical question is, to quote one more legal theorist, “when (if ever) does the cost of enabling judges to act upon their political preferences or attitudes by insulating them from democratic accountability exceed the benefits of protecting them from threats to their tenure that compromise their capacity to adhere to the rule of law?”

Viewed this way, the proposed amendment to be voted on in Kansas this August really comes down to a specific accounting of likely political costs. For me, that means that Kansas’s merit-based system for selecting judges has, simply for a variety of unpredictable historical, political, and sociological reasons—the occasional tendency of Kansans, as an unconscious counter to the overwhelming Republican majorities elected to the state legislature, to elect Democrats to the judicial-appointment-making governorship? the concentration of Kansas lawyers (and thus possible members of the Kansas Supreme Court Nominating Commission, or for that matter actual possible Supreme Court candidates) in a handful of more urban, actually growing Kansas counties? something else?—worked pretty well, insofar as protecting basic liberal rights are concerned. Hence, my appreciation of those who look at the campaign over this proposed amendment, like the makers of the yard signs I mentioned above, and see it in terms of the substantive political possibilities inseparable from it.

When defenders of the current system make it a matter of high principle—judicial impartiality!—I can’t help but want to dive into the relevant theoretical and historical arguments, and ask for evidence why I should believe that the highest court in our state judiciary somehow would be fundamentally broken by obliging it to operate like the state supreme courts of more of more than 20 other states. But if you just make it all about the politics which arguably are unavoidably interwoven into any judicial decision anyway? Then my vote—especially since the language of the amendment gives no guarantee that any hypothetical election system that our Republican legislature may set up would be non-partisan or based on particular districts, both of which are in my opinion good balancing tools when it comes to electing judges—is clear. And my bet is that, remembering 2022, the votes of most other Kansas will be the same.

From Collective to Individual: Easter Thoughts on Constantine, Carrie Nation, and Changes in Christian Influence in Kansas (and Everywhere Else)

[A meandering and marginally holiday-appropriate extension upon my latest Insight Kansas column.]

Decades ago, the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas—a man who has made his name articulating, in his voluminous writings, a radical, pacifist, vaguely-Anabaptist political theology, one which is suspicious of Christians understanding themselves as a force for justice or morality in the modern world, but instead sees Christianity as a call to form communities which reject and propose a complete alternative to our world of competitive economies and militarized states— wrote an essay in which he made an odd confession. In recounting he and his wife’s honeymoon in Ireland back in the late 1980s, he talks how they stopped to shop in a small village near Kerry named Sneem. It was a Thursday in mid-May, and to his surprise the shops all started to close around 11am. When he asked a shop owner what was going on, he was told that it was the Feast of the Ascension, and the traditional day for first communion in that part of Ireland. Leaving the closing shop, he watched as “little boys and girls appeared from everywhere fitted with white suits and white dresses,” marching to the local church for Mass, after which they would come out of the church, circle the fountain in the center of the village square, “while everyone in the town cheered and clapped.”

Unsurprisingly, given his theological views, Hauerwas acknowledges, in writing the essay years later, that he’s pretty suspicious of the Catholic doctrines he was seeing entwined with the social life of the town. But he also wrote “I could not suppress the thought: ‘If this is Constantinianism, I rather like it.’”

My personal take on Christianity is far more compatible with Hauerwas’s radical writings than it is the village of Sneem, at least as it existed in 1988. I didn’t grow up with any familiarity with the traditional calendar or liturgy of Christian history, and thus have no nostalgic connection to any of it; Mormonism was and remains, for all its internal structures, bureaucracies, and hierarchies, a decidedly low Christian church. Even though Melissa and I have informally brought many Christian traditions and holidays into our family life over the decades, and even though my own communitarian sensibilities have led me to be a lot more sympathetic to civil religion than most of my religious community, I still can’t say that I feel any sympathy whatsoever for Emperor Constantine, who wedded the Roman Empire and Christianity into one politico-theological whole, and thereby changed the movement began by Jesus forever. And yet, I can understand where Hauerwas was coming from nonetheless. Because here in Kansas, for all my liberal Christian (and liberal Mormon)—to say nothing of outright leftist bona fides, there is one vaguely Constantinian-ish figure I kind of like nonetheless.

Carrie Nation is a figure of folklore in Kansas, but a rather stunted one. Her work on behalf of the poor and prisoners, her marches in support of women’s rights, and much more from her remarkable life are not part of her cultural legacy, in the same way that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which supported so many vital progressive causes and social reforms, is mostly reduced in America’s national memory to one thing alone: the drive to prohibit liquor. In the case of Nation, that’s not entirely unreasonable; if someone engages in violent “hachetations,” destroying the property of saloon-owners and getting herself arrested on the regular, the fact that she’s doing it in part as a protest against predatory capitalism is likely to get a bit lost in the noise. Still, while I have no great desire to live in the strict Protestant Christian world that Nation imagined as normative, and haven’t ever been inclined to take a hatchet to those establishments and interests that I might be tempted to sign up in support of a new Prohibition against, I still respect where she was coming from. The prohibition against the sale of alcohol for consumption was the law in Kansas at the time (the Sunflower State actually held to Prohibition longer than any other state, only ending it in 1948, and Sunday liquor sales only became legal here in 2005), so wasn’t she really just expressing a legitimate small-d democratic frustration at business owners (and those who patronized those businesses) for rejecting a popular majority of Protestant Christians across the state had demanded through the ballot?

This is where this conversation becomes one that dives deep into the meaning of democracy, and specifically the power of democratic majorities in pluralistic environments. The fear of the tyranny of the majority is central to liberal democratic formulations, of which the American Constitution is at least nominally one such; it is for that reason, or at least partly for that reason, that contemporary liberals in America are quick to see any kind of moralistic majoritarian movement as, by definition, a threat to liberal rights. I don’t think they’re wrong to hold to that fear; the threat (and now the damage) which Trump has brought against our constitutional order has made me a lot more sensitive to the “bourgeois ends” that constitutional protections provide. But ultimately, I remain a participatory democrat (along with being a Christian socialist and left communitarian); I think that a false idolization of and an obsession with protecting individual sovereignty can, and does, get in the way of collective civil expressions that ought to be taken seriously when it comes to defining—and, perhaps, even improving—our shared common life. The fact that those collective expressions might be—as they were in Sneem, and as they were in the mind of Carrie Nation—rooted in broadly (if not universally) accepted religious principles doesn’t strike me as an obvious argument against them.

Which, at last, leads me around to some current news from Kansas.

Recently Senator Chris Blasi (my own state senator, elected—though not with my vote—from our district in west Wichita) proposed an amendment to an education bill in the Kansas state senate. The amendment would have changed the law to mandate that Kansas schools never schedule games or other activities on Sundays, or on five days around Christmas, or on the four days of Holy Week beginning with Maundy Thursday and continuing through Easter, or on the week around the 4th of July—or on Wednesdays. Since the Kansas State High School Activities Association, a private body that has been licensed by the state to coordinate policies across Kansas’s public school districts, already functionally does nearly all of the above, it is that last mandate which drew the most attention.

The ideas behind the proposal were grounded in serious arguments over the time demands piling up in the lives of students, and I take those ideas seriously. Long experience has taught me that I am hardly alone in being constantly frustrated by the expectations which both competition over students (and thus state and scholarship dollars) and our tragically internalized meritocratic obsessions have done to what are supposed to be curricular complements to in-class education: sports and debate and theater and music and the like. And yet, when looked at in terms of its practical implications, the facts were immediately obvious: the proposed amendment would primarily serve the interests of churches (again, primarily Protestant ones, even though one of the originators of the proposal was a Catholic priest) and parents that want their children and students attending religious activities on Wednesday nights.

I’m familiar with that want—one of my first teaching jobs was at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro, AR, and I quickly learned there that keeping Wednesday evenings free for Bible study (including cutting back on mid-week homework assignments) was a local imperative. Perhaps not coincidentally, Jonesboro was also a dry community; alcoholic beverages were illegal throughout the city (as of 2019, they started to allow alcohol to be served in restaurants, but retail sales are still banned). Such—dare we call it…”Constantinian”?—social structuring around broadly shared religious principles obviously isn’t unknown in Kansas, given all I said about Carrie Nation above. But times have changed—mostly for the better, I think, but changed nonetheless. Hence my sympathy for state Senator Caryn Tyson, who commented “It’s a sad day that we have to legislate this….Years ago, it wasn’t even an issue. It was a standard and acceptable. But here we are.”

The movement of American society—or even just Kansas—towards a mostly more secular, and definitely less collective, way of thinking about religious influence in the context of democratic representation is, of course, not absolute. For example, here in Kansas, the Republican party has used its super-majorities in the state legislature to push harsh anti-transgender legislation, which have impacts on as ordinary functions of daily life as access to public bathrooms, high school sports, or using drivers licenses as a form of identification. This can absolutely be understood as a moralistic crusade that attacks individual rights. But completely aside from what I see as the serious flaws (indeed, arguably the evils) in the religious reasoning behind the justifications for these attacks is the methodological orientation of the attacks themselves.

In some ways, it is evidence of the way in which most religious majorities in my state and across the country—at least those associated with the politically conservative Christianity that has shaped so much of Republican politics over the past half-century—understand their democratic responsibilities. After all, the overall aim of these laws isn’t so much about transforming society through shared, legally mandated practices, but rather a clearing away from society (or from their preferred vision of it) those individuals whose personal actions of identification or participation or sanitation they see as a violation. Again, focusing solely on the how this thinking approaches the structures of social life, t would be as if Carrie Nation hadn’t attacked saloons, but instead had stood respectfully outside their door, and contented herself with chasing down individual drinkers after they left. Not much collectivity there.

So perhaps, given its incompatibility with how American Christians think about their place in civil society today, it wasn’t surprising how quickly the legislature abandoned this Wednesday restriction proposal. But then came another proposal, one even more revealing.

Overriding a veto by Governor Kelly, Republican majorities in the Kansas legislature guaranteed income tax breaks to those who join “health care sharing ministries.” These are private health care cost-sharing pools, ones usually organized by churches and not legally obliged to cover the conditions which publicly supported and regulated insurers must (this was the main reason for Kelly’s veto). They often restrict participation on the basis of one’s religious behavior as well.

In our late capitalist, neoliberal world, the idea that people will try to carve out for themselves, their families, their neighbors, and—yes—their churches a space wherein they can create their own alternative forms of mutual support is something I can only celebrate. All praise for decentralized, interstitial action, says I! And yet, the idea that such inter-personal associations ought to receive state support lands in my mind basically the same way other Kansas, GOP-led legislation has, such as their successful push to guarantee that students attending private religious schools and home schools will have the exact same access to publicly funded school resources that public school-attending children across the state. The goal, upon reflection, isn’t about working through shared institutions to find compromises that improve them (by their own moral and religious lights, obviously) for everyone. Rather, it seems mostly aiming to enable those living in accordance with what they understand their faith to require to escape the costs and complications of doing so in the religiously diverse America (and Kansas) of today.

So in the end, put it this way: once, Christians—which include up to 70% of all Kansans—would regularly argue and vote in ways that took seriously the shaping and the improving of the daily routines of our shared social life. But now, it’s more typical to argue and vote so as to make certain that believers can be included in all the benefits of that social life, while still maintaining some separateness from it. Call it a shift from collective aspiration to individual protection, perhaps. This is a shift which is entirely predictable, given the atomization and privatization of so much of American life. Why shouldn’t we accept that our political disputes over matters relevant to the living of a Christian life need to be—and, given the pluralism of American life, ought to be—expressed in terms of individualistic choices, rather than anything collective?

So yes, it’s a reasonable change. But still, this Easter, I’m not sure Carrie Nation would be entirely pleased.

Becky Elder, a Local Kansas Matriarch (and More)

Last week, on a clear and cold Friday afternoon, I joined a couple of hundred other people to attend, and pay our respects during, the graveside service of Rebecca Love “Becky” Elder, at Elderslie Farm, her family’s property in Kechi. She was a powerful and beloved Kansas matriarch, in the tradition of many others throughout the history of our state. She was also an inspiration and a friend, one that I will deeply miss.

I can’t remember when I first met Becky; it was likely a few years after my family moved to Wichita and I began teaching at Friends University in 2006. I know I was definitely aware of her by 2011; by that I time I had, after a slow start, begun to involve myself in local associations and arguments—I think my presentation on populism at the Wichita Pachyderm Club might have been one that really caught Becky’s eye—and as I became more familiar with different people, projects, and programs throughout Sedgwick County, I discovered that she and her family members were a thread which could connect almost all of them. People that knew Becky well could run down the same list of local endeavors she had her fingerprints on which my memory is calling up, and no doubt add many more to it: the Eighth Day Institute, the New Symposium, SunnyDale Community Library, the Friends University Neighborhood Garden (the only one of all these where my involvement actually preceded hers), Jubilee Presbyterian Church, and most importantly, Northfield School for the Liberal Arts.

The closest and broadest associations Becky had, at least from my observations outside the immediate Elder family and their church communities, were those that sprung, one way or another, from Northfield. Becky’s long crusade on behalf of home schooling, independent schooling, classical schools, micro-schools, and a half-dozen other overlapping alternative educational visions was central to her public identity. Becky's visionary aspirations perhaps put her more in the position of being an entrepreneur of teaching rather than a full-timer teacher herself, but as someone who has made the latter his career, my admiration for her skill with students is boundless. She was one of the purest believers in the ability of people to embrace the history, tradition, language, and culture they have inherited, simultaneously critique it, and through doing so make it part of their own civic and spiritual formation—the classical notion of humanitas--that I have ever known. While I never heard her quote it—and she quoted lots of authors, be they philosophers, theologians, economists, sociologists or more, to say nothing of dozens of figures from the literary canon—I cannot think of anyone I have known through all my decades in the classroom who more deeply embraced, as both a pedagogy and a telos, Goethe’s great celebration of self-discovery, and thereby self-revelation, from Faust:

 

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,

Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen.

Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last;

Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen.

 

(What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire anew, if you would possess it.

What is not used is but a load to bear;

But if today creates it, we can use and bless it.)

 

My wife and I were products of the public schools, meaning our education was not one informed by such classical assumptions and discipline. That doesn’t mean we were ignorant of the limitations of the public schooling model, with its centralized and standardized curricula and bureaucratic disciplinary regimes; my mother turned to home schooling my younger siblings soon after I left home, and that legacy has shaped the education of most of my nieces and nephews. Still, Melissa and I never considered any approach besides the public one for our own children, perhaps in part because we always felt relatively successful in working with the schools our daughters attended, finding ways to preserve the localist and familial elements that are always present in any actually neighborhood school, or at least so we both believed. (The fact that, once we settled here in Wichita, we bought a home where our children could easily walk or bike to their elementary, middle, and high schools was certainly a part of this.)

As I wrote over 20 years ago, at a time when our four children were still in the midst of their public schooling journeys, “I like the idea of the state being a partial agent of education.” Why? Because the liberal democratic order—whatever its many flaws as manifested in the United States—can and, I think, usually does add an egalitarian element to one’s education, and by so doing complement and enrich the traditions one receives from home and community. Too often the personal development which an embrace of one’s individual inheritance makes possible is warped by our globalized capitalist world into just one more instantiation of meritocracy; structurally weaving the imperatives of liberal egalitarianism into the mass public educational ideal can preserve something truly civic, at least as much as the classic ideal may.

All this, of course, meant that Becky and I had some very deep disagreements when it came to schooling. And yet those disagreements never got in the way of us conversing—always curiously and joyfully—about the potential for neighborhoods to reflect, and provide foundations for, the plurality of ways in which people can learn and grow, and thereby sustain one another, their communities, and their natural environments. She embraced and was always looking to share with her students and me and anyone else who would listen those authors and intellectual models who tied their stories to the socio-economic and environmental conditions that made real localism possible. She was instinctively sympathetic to deeply Kansan anti-government, anti-union attitudes she had inherited from her family, but she took up those arguments in a populist, even radical way. In that way, her Old Right libertarianism and my anarcho-socialism met on common ground. The first time I was invited to speak at Northfield (back when the school met in the old Love Box warehouse on 37^th St. in north Wichita), I walked into the makeshift classroom, saw quotations from McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers all around the walls, and assumed I was entering a traditionally conservative environment; but after a day of presentations and discussions with students of all ages, conversations which had ranged from town meetings to backyard gardens to the interstate highway system to oil monopolies to climate change to do-it-yourself-tractor repair, I saw the truth: Becky Elder was a hippie. God bless her for it.

The hippies get a bad rap, to be sure, and much of it is deserved; so much of the counter-culture a half-century or more ago turned its back upon tradition entirely, and assumed that a new civilization could be simply willed into existence, through communes and co-ops, from the ground up. And too many of the wrong lessons of that counter-cultural vision continue to inform the transhuman delusions of the Silicon Valley elite, whose understanding of the DIY mentality focuses more on venture capital and AI technology than practical crafts and community sharing. But the best aspects of hippie-dom, especially when conjoined with the kind of deep Christian faith and agrarian practice that Becky’s whole existence reflected, are profoundly wise. It is a good thing to insist on developing real local knowledge, on breaking away from larger systems and getting down on one’s knees instead, whether to weed a garden or pray to God or read a text closely (or ideally, all three). While the political culture of Kansas may on the surface may seem to be anything but friendly to this kind of deep, loving, local engagement, I think that Becky’s example of rooted, trusting, make-it-up-as-you-go-along activism actually only adds to our state’s long tradition of local matriarchs making the most of the soil and situation around them, and making history as they do so.

I’m thinking here of Mary Skubitz, a Slovenian immigrant to Kansas who was brought to the coal mining country of Crawford County by her parents as a child in 1890. Decades later, she helped organize other wives and mothers into the “Amazon Army” of 1921, a mass protest of women, marching from mine to mine, facing armed threats from the owners, demanding improvements of the terrible conditions their husbands and sons suffered in the mines. Or I’m thinking of Minnie Wish-Ken-O, a Potawatomie woman in Jackson County who took up the leadership in her tribe during the 1930s, in the midst of the dissolution and despair brought on by drought and the Dust Bowl, and from her farm led the fight against the national government’s efforts at tribal re-organization and termination over the subsequent two decades.

Even more humbly, my colleague Ken Spurgeon has resurrected—through his film Sod and Stubble—the story of Rosa Hagg Ise, a new bride who settled with her husband Henry and raised a family in Osborne County in the 1870s. The frontier challenges she overcame made her a determined believer in education, and her children in turn graduated from some of the most prestigious schools in America (as well as telling their mother’s story in what became an early Kansas classic). Unsurprisingly, education is a constant in so many of these stories—which just brings us around to Becky again. Her great-grandmother, Eldora Dugan Love, settled with her husband Charles in Butler County in the 1870s; from her homestead, Eldora published a women’s journal which made educational and religious improvement its central message. And three generations later, that message continues on.

Towards the conclusion of Becky’s graveside service, the pastor invoked Becky’s commitment to “place,” both in terms of landed particularity (the family had made arrangements beforehand, in accordance with Kansas state law, to bury Becky without embalmment on her own property, which they did), and in terms of an attitude towards our part of God’s plan—loving where we are planted, and looking forward to that heavenly place of love and grace where we can reside after our earthly sojourns end. As I watched her body lowered by her sons into the grave, I could help but think of my own mother’s recent passing, and also think of how this great matriarch of the Elder clan was still teaching. By example, she was showing us how one puts down roots, and becomes part of an ever-growing, ever-revealing bounteous creation. She lived a Kansas life, and a Christian life, and a life that found and shared freedom and opportunity and insight in fertile minds and fertile ground. What could be more graceful, and more local, than that?

 

 

 

Could President Trump Take Over Policing in Wyandotte County? (A Brief Primer on Presidential Power at our Current Moment)

[An expanded version of my Insight Kansas column, which appeared in Kansas newspapers this weekend.]

Three weeks ago, President Trump declared that "the District of Columbia has lost control of public order and safety," and ordered armed troops into the streets of Washington DC to fight crime. His additional comments--that the nation’s capital is filled with "violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people"—were all basically>untrue; while there are plenty of disputesover how to measure DC’s violent crime rates and how to interpret the data we do have, it seems clear that Washington DC is actually experiencing lower crime rates than it has in decades. But my primary interest here is more local than that. 

At the time Trump spoke, the FBI listed the District of Columbia as the 29^th most violent city in the U.S., with an average of 926 violent crimes per each 100,000 residents. That’s above the national average—but also well below Kansas City, KS, which the FBI ranked 21^st, with an average of 1047 violent crimes per 100,000 people. (Kansas City, MO, is ranked higher still, all the way up at 9^th place.)

So…could Trump invoke emergency authority to send troops into Kansas City, KS (and possibly KCMO, Overland Park, Olathe, etc.)? After all, KCK has seen two law enforcement officers killed just this past summer, and its police department has a sad legacy of corruption. Maybe the Unified Government of Wyandotte County has "lost control" as well?

My response to this speculation is: highly unlikely, but unfortunately not impossible.

President Trump likes declaring emergencies (ten so far in his first seven months in office; counting his first term in office, he’s issued 20 of the 90 presidentially declared emergencies since the process was codified over a century ago, more than one-fifth of the total). In his mind—and, sadly, in the minds of many of his supporters—these declarations allow him to take action without any supporting legislation from Congress. When he’s done this to federalize National Guard troops and use them for domestic enforcement purposes without any request from the state’s governor—as he did when ICE agents faced public opposition in Los Angeles—it likely violated the Posse Comitatus Act (and possibly the Declaration of Independence—which condemned King George III for imposing "Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures"—and the 10^th Amendment—which stipulates that powers not specifically mentioned in the Constitution are "reserved to the States"—as well).

Much of this doesn’t apply to Washington DC; it’s a federal district, not a city within a state, and consequently the president has complete control over its National Guard, though many constitutional questions remain. (It's also far from clear that the troops Trump has sent to Washington DC actually have anything to do insofar as the safety concerns he ranted about are concerned.) Still, it appears to be at least putatively settled law that were President Trump to do what he did in DC in KCK or more broadly, beginning with federalizing the Kansas National Guard, he would be on very shaky ground legally, assuming Governor Kelly hadn’t contacted him for help. (Though of course, how the Supreme Court will rule on this issue of presidential power, given the support for Trump’s expansive claims which the conservative majority on the court has already shown in multiple cases, is not something anyone who cares about the traditional interpretation of the separation of powers should count on.)

In any case, it’s fairly obvious that political calculations are often trumping (pun most definitely intended) legal considerations as the president and his inner circle make decisions. In this specific case, the cities that Trump has mentioned sending;specialized military units into are all Democratic-leaning ones in mostly Democratic states: Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Baltimore, MD, etc. Kansas, of course, is not a mostly Democratic state. But Wyandotte County is—having elected Sharice Davids, Kansas’s lone Democratic Congressperson, four times in a row—and Kansas City, MO, is even more so. And Trump has been pretty explicit about seeking to change the prevailing politics in the Kanas City area.

So could Trump’s desire to turn up the heat on urban areas that have protested, pushed back, and voted against his policies (as Kansas City definitely has), and thereby put pressure on their internal political dynamics and boundaries, extend to the KC metro region? Kelly, who has walked a moderate line throughout her time as governor, would surely rather avoid a fight with the president (unlike California Governor Gavin Newsom). But I’m also sure that, absent a truly unprecedented emergency, she’d deny him access to Kansas’s National Guard. How would the Republican supermajority in Topeka—led by representatives strongly supportive of President Trump’s policies—respond to that?

Let’s hope we never find out.

Defending Superman's Sentimentality

[Note: Spoilers follow.]

I’ve seen James Gunn’s Superman, and I’ve written up my take on it on social media: I thought it was absolutely wonderful, one of the very best super-hero movies I’ve ever seen, on the same level as—or maybe exceeding—such movies as Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2, Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Jon Favreau’s Iron Man, even Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie. Some disagree with that assessment, which is fine; there are all sorts of ways, both stylistic and substantive, to judge big pop entertainments like these, and I’m not inclined to argue (much) with folks whose takes differ from mine.

But a politico-theological argument? That I can absolutely get into.

Given that Superman, no matter how one tells his story, is by definition a hero of the underdog, someone who saves lives, stops disasters, and fights those who oppress and terrorize, it’s always going to be easy to fit him into a particular political narrative, and certainly there’s been plenty of that in the wake of the visuals and narrative choices which Gunn employed in making Superman. (As one of my friends said regarding Vasil Ghurkos, the evil ruler of Boravia who is central to Lex Luthor’s scheme to destroy Superman, Gunn made him look like Benjamin Netanyahu, but sound like Vladimir Putin.) From what I can tell, the lazy political attack on the movie—that it’s “woke” and therefore nothing but progressive propaganda—doesn’t seem to have legs; multiple conservative, Trump-supporting friends of mine have loved the movie, loved the humor and action and heroism the film contains. Another, slightly different attack caught my eye, though, and I want to say why I think it’s completely wrong.

It's an attack made by Daniel McCarthy, the editor of Modern Age, a rather idiosyncratic conservative journal. In a column titled “What Trump Knows About ‘Superman’ That Hollywood Can’t Comprehend,” McCarthy writes that attempts to hate on Superman because of its presumed (and I think actually quite obvious and accurate) messages regarding immigration and respect for civil rights and the rule of law are side issues, at best; the real problem with Superman is its “bland and demoralizing vision” of an America without values. He describes the film’s Jonathan and Martha Kent at “ludicrously folksy stereotypes”; he condemns the fact that this Superman “doesn’t utter a word about ‘the American way,’” but instead “when he confronts Luthor at the film’s climax…insists his failings are what makes him human”; and that Superman’s core replaces patriotism with sentimentality: “Superman hasn’t assimilated to America, but to an unplaceable idea of niceness and self-affirmation.”

Well, as Jules Winnfield once said, allow me to retort.

I called this a politico-theological argument, because it is: it is an argument which is built out of assumptions about the moral importance, perhaps even the moral centrality, of being a part of a national community, a community that itself posits its own character—its own “way”—as reflecting, perhaps even instantiating, something unique and higher. Without being attached to a people and place, moral positions become bland: “niceness” is a characteristic which anyone can possess, and it betokens no sense of strength or specialness. Superman is, McCarthy is saying, just this guy with powers; he does not inspire, unlike Trump, who understands that the point of national leadership is to never be humiliated, to be “so strong” he doesn’t need to engage in violence (unless he chooses to, of course).

Thankfully there are at least some conservative Christians who still haven’t forgotten that the theology which actually emerged from the stories of the Bible, both the Old and New Testament, and in contrast to the idolatry which motivates so much of the MAGA cult, isn’t at all about strength but rather is all about acceptance: acceptance of individual choice and accountability, acceptance of one’s common and flawed mortality, acceptance of the equal dignity of all persons, good or bad, weak or strong, journeying through this earthly life. On that reading, Gunn’s Superman is a deeply religious film, telling the story of the struggles and the triumph—for the moment!—of a tremendously gifted man who cares deeply about his fellow beings (regarding Krypto: “He’s not even a very good dog—but he’s out there alone, and he’s probably scared”), despite his own many limitations (his final words in the movie, after Mr. Terrific leaves Superman in a huff: “I am such a jerk sometimes”). But I think we can go even deeper than that.

Long ago, back when the Blogosphere was a name that was actually recognized by many, I was part of a long discussion over what some scholars of religious belief and practice had terms “Moral Therapeutic Deism.” My engagement in that debate touched on Barak Obama, Rod Dreher, civil religion, and more, but I’d like to draw out just one element of it: the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if McCarthy had been actually subtly signaling to all the Rousseau-haters out there when he described the “sentimentality” of Gunn’s Superman as consisting of “niceness and self-affirmation,” because that’s just a step or two away from one of Rousseau’s key claims: that modern morality is built, first, upon pity or compassion for others, and second, upon amour de soi, a concept usually translated as “self-love,” but which really connotes a positive sense of dignity, self-care, and accountability.

In any case, for Rousseau, modernity has robbed us of the possibility of a genuinely organic connection to a national community, or really any community identity at all; to take its place, there is the need to educate people in a religious sensibility that arguably is a direct ancestor of MTD. “The Creed of the Savoyard Priest” is a central text here; its ideas were foundational for much 19^th-century liberal Christian theology, and frankly, that theology is as American as apple pie: God loves you. God has given you an inner sense of decency; don’t allow learned rationalizations to distract you from it. On the contrary, God wants you to follow your conscience, as that will allow you to best respect and serve and build community with others. As the Priest writes: “Feeling precedes knowledge. Since we do not learn to seek what is good for us and avoid what is bad for us, but get this desire from nature, in the same way the love of good and the hatred of evil are as natural to us as our amour de soi.”

I don’t deny for a moment that there is a potential for moral individualism here that can be, and in some ways absolutely has been, devastating to the moral conditions of modernity. And yet, modernity means more than just the worst aspects of individualism; it also means (as I wrote in that blog post 16 years ago) “the global regime of human rights, worldwide activism on behalf of the indebted and the poor, volunteerism and service in tens of thousands of places across the globe,” etc., etc., etc. How much are all the undeniably limited but nonetheless still real ways in which the world has improved, at least insofar as slavery, coverture, torture, and genocide, over the past two hundred years the result of “people absorbing anemic liberal doctrines about not shooting people who just want to get a better job or to express themselves, about recognizing the need to actually sit down and speak with and learn from those whom you had previously oppressed”? To connect this back to Superman, our hero’s defense of his involvement in the Boravian attack on Jarhanpur ultimately comes down to—and his contentious interview with Lois Lane makes this clear—one simple moral reality: “People were going to die!” Using super-powers to stop (again, for the moment!) a conflict because you don’t want people to die is, surely, pretty simplistic, pretty basic. It is also, well, compassionate; it is sentimental, it is nice.

And this, really, takes us back to the people, the community, that Gunn’s Superman does belong to: his parents in Smallville. As has been noted, past comic and cinematic incarnations of Jonathan and Martha Kent have tended to present them as “paragons of a certain kind of Americana nobility; strong, proud farmers from the heartland,” teaching their adopted son “all the right values and the responsibilities that come with his incredible abilities.” But Gunn makes them “normies” (by the way, this was something, as a Kansan, I recognized from the very first trailer; far from the stereotypical red barn with windmill and grain elevator, miles and miles from town, these are two far more typical rural residents of small-town Kansas in 2025, where the grain fields are overwhelmingly owned by large corporate actors: the Kents have a suburban ranch home and run cattle, and probably both have jobs in town on the side). Are they church-goers? One would guess. But churchgoing in small-town Kansas in the 21^st-century isn’t and can’t be imagined as being what it was when Glenn Ford’s Jonathan Kent clapped young Clark on the shoulder just before dying of a heart attack in Donner’s 1978 Superman: The Movie. For better and for worse, that stoic, American Gothic image of the heartland has now all but disappeared. What’s in its place? A lot of good people (even if they are Trump votes, as Jonathan and Martha Kent almost certainly are), who go to church and embrace a message of Christian decency and sentiment—the sort of message that would lead Pa Kent to say, it what was clearly the moral center of the Superman, whatever anyone else might say later:

Parents aren’t for telling their children who they’re supposed to be. We are here to give y’all tools to help you make fools of yourselves all on your own. Your choices, Clark. Your actions. That’s what makes you who you are. Let me tell you something, son, I couldn’t be more proud of you.

Right there, we have parental love, we have tolerance, we have individual responsibility, we have dignity and respect. Perhaps theologically those virtues are “bland” enough, in McCarthy’s words, to not provide a foundation for strength; on the level of philosophy, I’m open to that argument. But insofar as actually lived lives are concerned—particularly the lived lives of Kansans that I know, including many whose politics I think are appalling, but whose support for families and friends and civic work are rock solid—I think this kind of morality, Superman’s morality, a morality that saves dogs and squirrels, a morality that refuses to cause harm to others, fails to prevent all possible harm, but then keeps on trying again and again anyway, is a damn good one. Sentimental yes, but inspiring too, I think. (And from all the memes that are apparently out there celebrating the wonderful, stupid, absolutely Superman-ish line "Kindness, maybe that's the new punk rock," maybe there are more people out there who agree with me, rather than McCarthy.)