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.)

Minding Laurie Johnson’s Gap

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic] 

President Trump has been in office a month as of today, and the maelstrom of orders and actions which he has taken has elicited delight, horror, and/or confusion from many. In the midst of it all, I find myself still thinking about the Never Trumpers. I live in a mostly conservative state, and am a life-long member of a mostly conservative church; hence, the relatively small number of Republicans I know who still dissent from the faux-populist posturing, paranoid postliberal muttering, and borderline criminality that has overtaken most of what passes for politically “conservative” thought these days tend to really stand out. They’re honorable folk, these teachers and police officers, filmmakers and military veterans, farmers and parents and good friends, and the criticism they receive from their supposed ideological allies when they refuse to celebrate the latest mad (or Musk-influenced) order from Washington DC is painful to watch.

I don’t know if recommending Laurie Johnson’s fine book, The Gap in God’s Country: A Longer View of Our Culture Wars, to them would provide them with much solace, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Johnson identifies herself at the start of the book as “an early ‘never Trumper,’” a registered Republican who broke from her party as she saw the conservative movement she’d long identified with turn into a “right-wing capitalist-friendly ethnically based populism” that idolized “an ill-equipped, seemingly unbalanced nationalist” (who also just happened to be a “narcissistic and unstable reality TV star”—p. 11). If you find such language describing the current occupant of the White House inaccurate or indefensible, then Johnson’s book probably isn’t for you. But that would be unfortunate, because the book—which was written and came out before the 2024 election—actually gives a pretty balanced assessment of Trump’s appeal to the sort of culturally conservative and rural voters whom Johnson (who, like me, lives in Kansas; she teaches at Kansas State University in Manhattan, while I teach at Friends University in Wichita) knows well.

Johnson’s book is sometimes meandering, but always thoughtful; as she writes at the outset, she thinks that the time for “narrow but safe and sure scholarship” (p. 12) is past, at least for her. Her overarching aim is to sketch out the long history of intellectual developments which have, in her view, turned inside out the positions she once held to, positions which most long assumed were deeply rooted in the cultural practices and perspectives common to our shared home in the Sunflower state. In turning to radical thinkers both right and left, Johnson's account of these developments turns primarily on, first, a process of “dislocation”—both material and moral—which has uprooted the cultural foundations for diverse, stable lives and sustainable living environments which were built up over generations, and second, a process of “strong-arming”—both ideological and religious—by which we submit to or participate in a collective attempt to paper over deep disagreements or deeply inhumane assumptions about the lives we live. I think her account is, ultimately, a wise one—but as someone who thinks Trump’s presidency was and will be appalling, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

Johnson is a complicated thinker and a careful writer; those looking for facile diagnoses and easy prescriptions also won’t find this book to their liking. She interchangeably employs both political psychology and political philosophy in building her arguments, making use of everything from sociological examinations of cults to complex agricultural economic data to the history of Bible translations to reflections on television sitcoms along the way. But consistent throughout her analysis is the attention she pays to “domination,” and particularly the cultural and social effects of economic dominion.

Johnson does not frame that domination in terms of class; she’s no Marxist, though she thoughtfully explores what she thinks his philosophy both got right and got wrong. Rather, the domination that she feels far too many of her fellow citizens have chosen not to see or have failed to see clearly is primarily ideational. American individualism, she argues, has been led to its current alienating and disempowering state by the way market-oriented and technology-obsessed thinking has come to permeate even the most basic institutions and practices of ordinary life—in our schools, churches, families, and communities. The domination of the calculating liberal individualist model has not only pushed us away from one another; it has cramped our appreciation of the real-world diversity and richness which open cultural engagement and collective action ought to allow. The omnipresence of “free-market liberalism,” in Johnson’s view, has reached the point that it “shares some of the totalitarian aspects of more openly apocalyptic revolutionary regimes,” with its insistence that “marketplace thinking works equally well for all people in all times and places” (p. 33).

The alarm she expresses at the effects of the homogenizing success of the so-called “American way of life,” as she has come to understand it, is present in every chapter, whatever its specific focus. She sees our valorization of this image in “the imperative to be efficient in the making or acquiring of …goods and services” (p. 99) when writing about human anthropology and psychology; and she sees it in the “politicized Christian opinion leaders” that focus parishioners solely on “worldly ends” (p. 228) when writing about political theology. Near the book’s conclusion, she puts forward a lengthy jeremiad that perhaps comes closer than any other single passage in the book to being an overall thesis statement about how she sees this constrained notion of liberal freedom and economic success as having warped American life:

Let me be perfectly clear. If you are concerned about the current state of our culture because of its contentiousness, seemingly amoral nature, the way it breaks up families, our loss of community, and the every-swifter march of secularization, look no further for the cause than the economy that thoroughly dominates us. Our “freedom to choose” does not stop at our toothpaste brands, though it apparently increasingly does stop at being a small businessperson or a small farmer. We are also free to choose to stay married or not, depending on how we feel. As we have less real choice due to our mounting social stratification and precarity, our “freedom to choose” necessarily gets more and more intensely expressed in our personal moral choices and lifestyles, as well as our stylistic choices. If you don’t like the way the kid down the street dyes their hair purple and wears tattoos, remember that they’ve been taught that the pinnacle of American freedom is in accumulation and personal expression. In effect, we are all in a constant state of flux, and yet we are taught to fear the actual trans person, the one who has the courage to disregard the superficial freedoms most Americans “enjoy” every day because they feel in their interior person that they are not what their exterior says they are. Before we launch any more assaults on our trans neighbors, we need to consider the largely life-frittering ways in which the rest of us are inauthentically fluid, and change our own ways if we do not like what we see (pp. 274-275).

The language by which Johnson condemns the consequences of liberal capitalism--its competitive demands, its expectations of constant change, its condescending charity, its mentality of disposability, its victimizing of those who fall behind, and most of all (echoing Wendell Berry here) its stultifying assumption of “inevitability”--has many echoes, and she does a superb job integrating the many facets of this sort of non-Marxist (though clearly Marx-influenced) cultural critique together. While her analysis mostly bypasses recent integralist critiques, Johnson is clearly respectful of those Christian thinkers who have called for a collective retreat from our corporatized capitalist state. However, reading through her broad-ranging assessment of how the dominance of market values and personal choice has warped American life, and torn a “gap” in structures of community life—a gap which, in her view, Christian churches and those who populate them have overwhelmingly failed to sew back together—makes it pretty clear that she has no interest in fleeing towards some reactionary religious position. (Some of this is plainly personal; twice in her book she details ways in which church communities she was part of simply failed to address the needs of suffering parishioners or to even understand what those needs were, in ways that both involved and affected her directly.)

Johnson’s training as a political philosopher was grounded in the classical liberal tradition, and it’s one she holds to. As such, she blanches at the idea of “a return to some sort of benevolent aristocracy/oligarchy” (p. 231). For her, religious strong-arming and economic domination have mostly developed in tandem, in opposition to a proper articulation of the rights we can exercise in communities built through work and cooperation, free from the worship of political saviors or Silicon Valley “innovators.” That freedom—a small-scaled civic one—won’t be achieved through revolution; as much as she clearly appreciates Marx’s assessment of power under capitalism, she’s not looking for any new vanguard (much less new government programs) to lead us forward.

Rather, Johnson’s hopes—to the extent they exist; her writing is more realist than romantic, and she is better at providing information than inspiration—lay in a different sort of movement, one more focused on recovering habits of work and association than affirmations of identity or authority. Her concluding chapters look closely as distributism and the Catholic Worker movement; she has praise for both, but also gentle criticisms, partly because she is clear-eyed (in ways that more than a few of their advocates are not) about some of the bottom-line realities of exploring these alternatives to capitalism: that is, having less money, less resources, less “stuff” all around. But making due with less is one thing that Johnson can speak to as something more than an academic and critic.

Johnson was instrumental in setting up the Maurin Academy, a multifaceted organization which includes both a farm and a school, one which seeks to provide both content online and food in-person, all in a way which challenges both profit-mindedness and state dependency. Inspired by the legacy of Peter Maurin (the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, along with Dorothy Day), the idea is to provide a place for the kind of “persistent, often unglamorous work” that she believes—and, I think, has argued persuasively for in her book—is “real and compelling” in the way that life defined by our corporate capitalist and governmental masters is not (p. 269). She recognizes that what they are doing could easily be categorized—especially in the absence of shifts in the state and federal money which keeps our exploitive food systems operating as they have for decades--as just more “quixotic attempts at economic and social experimentation,” but what else, she says in her conclusion, can we do? “We can smile and talk all we want about the benefits of localism, farmers markets, and mutual aid, but how many of us even remotely approach consistently adopting those practices?” (pp. 286-287)

Johnson’s book may not be the antidote to the Trump years which her (all too rare) sort of small-c conservative might need. But she is at least living out, in part, her own retreat from the corporatizing of disruption that seems to be the American lot, at least for the next four years. She is walking her talk, and as much as there are ideas and arguments her book that I admired and learned from (including a few I strongly disagreed with), I find the person she actually is even more admirable still.

On Substance and Signaling, in Trumpland, Topeka, and Beyond

[This is an extensively rewritten version of an essay I wrote for Kansas newspapers last Sunday.]

In a recent substack post, my old friend Damon Linker made an obvious, but still important, observation:

One thing I think I and many others got wrong during the first Trump administration was to spend far too much time allowing ourselves to be triggered by things the president was saying—in his social media feed, at rallies, and in press conferences….[T]here’s a reason why journalists…began to joke about the importance of taking Trump seriously but not literally. That’s because he frequently communicated in a very different way than presidents usually have, often speaking from anger and in an off-the-cuff and ill-informed way. In many cases, his primary goal was to trigger the libs rather than clarify what his administration would be doing in the near future. That made his comments a distraction from what his administration was actually doing or aspiring to do.

Trump is, in many ways, a unique case (though it seems likely that such won’t be the case in the future, unfortunately). Generally speaking, our democratic political culture, in terms of how the public and the mass media internalize and reflect the ways in which representatives--both those in office and those hoping to be elected to such--seek votes and articulate priorities, has organically come to recognize that some statements from politicians are “mere” signaling, whereas others are “actually” substantive.

I put those qualifiers in quotation marks because, among the many other democratic ills which Trump’s influence on our political culture over the past decade has introduced, the recognition of even basic value distinctions like those—specifically, the idea that signaling a position to one’s political allies is, well, just that: a matter of positioning, rather than a matter of substantively working towards an actual, achievable solution--is harder than ever. Still, the assumption that some statements made by politicians need to be taken literally, even if they aren’t serious ideas, remains a hard concept to many voters to accept without resistance, because it runs directly against our inherited experience, going back through the whole history of America’s struggles to make mass democracy work, regarding what responsible government even means.

This may seem like I’m dressing up a mundane reality of democratic politics into something more weighty than it deserves to be. Because all politicians lie, right? So who cares that the lies of Trump, and an unfortunately large number of those who have followed his example, seem categorically different? Elected representatives spending their time on meaningless bills or resolutions that show their support for causes promoted by major interest groups or another donors, rather than getting down to the business of building actually substantive legislation—isn’t that just to be expected?

Maybe. But still, I care in particular about these sorts of lies, because they help to make the distinctions upon which much of the public’s ability to connect to their own elected representatives depend upon even harder, necessitating both 1) changes in the way the media does its work, such as Damon describes in his above-linked post, and 2) even more work on the part of those who the substance of legislation affects more directly.

As an example, consider the ongoing arguments over medical support for individuals who identify as transgender, since these debates are particularly rife with serious concerns that are based on matters that are not, in fact, literally true. To put it another way, these are our elected leaders taking actions that some might justify as “merely” signaling serious intent, even though there is little or no literal substance “actually” behind their intentions.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson recently affirmed that, with the Republican legislative majority even stronger after the 2024 elections, the leadership will bring back the push to ban, among other types of gender-affirming care, transgender surgeries sought by those Kansans who are under 18 years old. The last effort to do so ended with a veto from Governor Laura Kelly and a veto-override attempt which failed by only two votes. It’s reasonable, now that they have additional votes on their side, that the Republicans would try again. Why? Because the significance of the signal doing so would send, a signal of their “seriousness” about the threat of young people being pushed into receiving surgeries when they’re too young to know whether it’s what is best for them, hasn’t changed.

Of course, the literal reality of the situation, the actual substance of the subject of the proposed legislation, hasn’t changed either. (Note: I recognize that there are other gender-affirming concerns tied up with this, regarding the availability of puberty blockers and other medications to minors, but since Masterson himself led with the extreme issue of transitional surgeries, I’m comfortable treating that as a separate issue.)

I know many legislators, and I sympathize with how difficult their job can be, particularly those on the state and municipal level. On the one hand, they are closer to their constituents, and can more directly hear and respond to many diverse local appeals. But on the other hand, their funding, the parties which structure most of their ability to reach out to voters (and thus both do good work as well as protect their jobs), so profoundly entwined with America’s nationalized media environment, and with major interest groups and organizations that usually care little for specific local budget or policy matters, and instead are focused on creating signals that serve primarily to rile up or placate key donors and constituencies across the country. I can understand a politician coming to the reasonable conclusion that have to play the signaling game, if only to make sure they have the opportunity to also focus on the difficult, substantive matters that may actually affect those whom they represent most.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t members of the Republican super-majority in Topeka who, for a variety of reasons, may well be sincerely concerned—maybe even horrified—by the prospect of someone under the age of 18 receiving gender modification surgery, and see banning such as a necessary action in the name of public health or morality. I’m sure more than a few fit that description. But most of them, I suspect, are actually well-read enough to recognize that they are crusading symbolically against an almost non-existent concern.

Here is where the literal substance of the matter gets serious. There’s no definitive evidence of any Kansas medical center ever performing complete gender transition surgery on a minor, and nationally the numbers for such surgeries, according to data reported by the American Medical Association, are incredibly low: out of all gender-affirming surgeries in the United States in recent years, perhaps 2 out of every 100,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 15 and 17, and 1 out of 1,000,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 13 and 15. Beneath that age, the number is zero. So, as I wrote, an almost non-existent concern.

(Another note, for the record: after an earlier version of this piece was published in Kansas newspapers, I was contacted by a concerned individual who insisted that my information was wrong; that gender re-assignment surgeries have in fact been performed on Kansans under the age of 18. The data which this individual relied upon had been collected by Do No Harm, an organization devoted to “protecting health care from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Their reported information on Kansas lists a total 22 “surgery patients”(though their breakdown of hospitals actually record a total of 25; I’m unsure why three are excluded); they obtained that information by looking at insurance records, focusing on claims that involved procedure codes which are used for “confirmed surgical gender transition procedures,” though they allow that those procedure codes could have been used for “surgeries related to intersex conditions” or “congenital conditions or other non-gender transition-related reasons.” I appreciate the additional information, but 1) since I don’t see any breakdown in the ages of the minors who supposedly received these surgeries, unlike the information from the AMA, and 2) since there is apparently no way to effectively distinguish between corrective and elective surgeries among these numbers, to say nothing of there being to no way to capture the individual complexities and differences present in any of these instances, and 3) since a total number of 22, or even 25, surgeries performed in a state with a total of nearly 706,000 people under the age of 18, is a number so much smaller than even the national number, that I can’t see how sticking with my judgment of this proposal being an act of signaling in regards to an essentially non-existent phenomenon can be faulted.)   

To return to my main point: when Senator Masterson says that the Republican super-majority are going to do something, we need to take him seriously. There’s a serious message they (the Republican leadership, certainly, and presumably at least some other members of the caucus) want to send regarding the disapproval the Republican majority feels toward “transgender ideology,” and connecting it to the issue of minors receiving gender-affirming surgery is a major part of the signal they intend to send. But is there an actual, literal, substantive basis for them spending time on sending this message? The answer there is, on my review of the data, no.

This pattern—when the data and the message don’t match--holds for many other issues as well. The number of transgender athletes seeking to play sports competitively in the category of their chosen gender is tiny, yet everyone seems to have a story about some transgender woman with an unfair advantage at their daughter’s high school. It’s the same for illegal immigrants, who are far more law-abiding than the rest of the population, yet every story about an undocumented resident who commits a crime will be shared over and over and over again.

On a certain level, one must simply accept this as a political reality, one that the type of lies and misinformation which our President-elect has specialized in, is only making more complicated. It is true that most people, lacking both the time and inclination to become experts regarding any given matter, depend upon—and make decisions upon—the conveying of key signals, whether involving law or morality or anything else. This is something that interest groups have long known and made use of—and which too many politicians have come to rely upon in preference to the unglamorous, necessary work of finding substantive compromises on actual, literal concerns. As for those who do have expert information on what is literally happening—often because they actually are one of the people being symbolically discussed (a person with sexual dysphoria, perhaps, or a Dreamer, or more)—the battle to call attention to the actual data, and introduce substantive arguments to push back against the signally, is never-ending. But also necessary, all the same, and never more so than today.

Some Thoughts on the Republican Donald Trump, and All the Other Republicans, Mormon or Otherwise, I Know (and Sometimes Love)

[Note: this is a long and very party-centric set of musings for the day before the presidential election ends and the real electoral and legal chaos begins. For many, that’s a turnoff. But I’m both a scholar of American politics as well as a politics nerd, so that’s what you get. Read on, if you feel so inclined. And yes, this an expansion/revision of a piece published by Insight Kansas, in The Wichita Eagle and elsewhere, over a week ago. Cross-posted to By Common Consent.]

For a great many people—though not, I think, quite as many as some people suppose—in America over the past eight years or so, the problem of Donald Trump and the Republican party is entirely straightforward. Trump is an awful person, who represents awful things—as my fellow Kansas writer Joel Mathis summarized it on Saturday, his whole approach to representative politics has always involved divisiveness, cruelty, and threats of (and sometimes actual) violence--and so anyone who supports him, and any party he is part of, must be, by definition, awful, full stop.

Both personally and professionally, I have a hard time imagining how anyone with a lick of political sense could fail to recognize how potentially counter-productive doubling-down on that attitude is—to say nothing of how arguably un-Christian it is for those of us who take the command to love one’s enemies seriously, and who therefore should be very conscious of the costs to our ability to draw a line between our opinions and electoral divisiveness, cruelty, and possible violence, when it comes to labeling any other human being or group of human beings by definition “awful” (or “evil,” or “garbage,” or “scum,” or "demonic," or “deplorable,” or whatever you prefer). I’m not denying that it’s hard to avoid that doubling-down; civil discourse, maintaining a full-throated defense of one’s beliefs while showing love and respect to others, is really hard when basic civic norms seem to have collapsed. But still, I think that is what both democratic citizenship and Christian discipleship call on us to do. The fact that many smart and good people I know, who appear to me in all other areas of their lives to sincerely affirm both of those aforementioned principles, apparently do in fact double-down on all-or-nothing anger nonetheless, just shows that it’s my imagination that’s lacking. 

Do I think Trump is an awful human being? Yes, absolutely; my opinion of him—“personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, stupidly (and often gleefully) divisive, and politically destructive”—hasn’t changed in the past four years. Do I think that everyone that supports Trump is therefore also awful? No, because “supports” is a broad term, one which technically includes everyone from Stephen Miller, a convicted felon and an unrepentant racist immigrant-basher, and my mother, a wonderful 79-year-old woman whom I love dearly. I mean, they both voted for Trump, so QED, right?

There is a cohort of the politically awoke and online—though again, I am convinced, by both the data on split-ticket voting and personal observation, that the polarizing “Big Sort” of American voters into two rival tribes hasn’t eliminated cross-party familial and social relations nearly to the extent some believe—who might well insist that, whatever the manifold differences between my mom and Stephen Miller, in the present environment they belong in the same category. I can understand that formulation, in the same way I can understand—and even defend as coherent—that formulating of political opinions which leads people to become single-issue voters: that literally nothing else matters except where a candidate stands on stopping abortion, or where a candidate stands on ending the war in Gaza, etc. But however coherent it may be to conclude that if X is awful—a fascist, perhaps, or even, in Trump’s maddeningly nonsensical claim, a “Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist”—then everyone who does something so extreme as to cast a vote in favor of X must therefore be fully baked into X’s awfulness, no matter what they claim, it remains, I am convinced, a deeply unhelpful and, frankly, immature thing to believe.

 [Note: in terms of Trump himself, I continue to think “fascist-adjacent” remains the best label. He isn’t the only authoritarian-wanna-be to have occupied the White House or tried to do so, but the cult of personality, exclusion, and resentment which his rise has lent dominance to within an major political party is, I fear, quite arguably unique in our history (Huey Long, maybe? or Theodore Bilbo?), and deserves to be noted, and feared, as such.]

So, a little pedantic social psychology here. Human beings, both singly and in groups, always act in ways that can be assessed on multiple planes of judgment: historical, religious, strategic, aesthetic, and more. To ignore those different planes—which usually means ignoring all the sorts of things you can know about a person that you’ve actually spent face-to-face, real-world time with, someone you’ve listened to and lived alongside, and instead just focusing on random statements forwarded on social media—is to do something intensely reductive, and therefore almost certainly something that fails to take your fellow human beings seriously, in the way that I think the fundamentals of Christianity, to say nothing of the basic premises of any belief in democracy, particularly of the participatory sort, necessitates.

True, the too-often evil vicissitudes of political life sometimes necessitate reductive, immediate distinctions; you can’t save someone from a lynch mob if you insist upon deliberating as to whether or not extra-judicial mob action might be necessary in any given circumstance. But casting a vote simply isn’t the direct equivalent of that, because absent a voter explicitly affirming such, I just don’t see how someone can meaningfully—in the sense of providing evidence which proves a particular conclusion—discover in the casting of a ballot the same intentionality as swinging a rope over a branch. Passionately insisting on the contrary, that actually every vote fully incorporates the most extreme intentions that anyone can historically connect to said vote, only suggests that one must believe we’re at the point where the electoral agency expressed by actual voters no longer matters—that the incorrect yet sincerely believed intentions of my mother and every other Trump-supporting Republican I know is wholly irrelevant. And if that’s the case, why are you worrying about votes at all? Best of luck with your revolution, I guess. (Though I hope you’ll choose to retreat and form an intentional commune rather than engage in armed revolt, because the record of the latter is atrocious and while the former is often inspiring.)

My mom’s vote for Trump (she believes he’ll keep America out of foreign wars) doesn’t surprise me. She’s a life-long American Mormon, and American Mormons who were born in the 1940s and committed themselves to the socially conservative family model that mostly took over American Mormon culture during the 20^th century, particularly after World War II (the Old Right-style anti-communist paranoia of Mormon leader Ezra Taft Benson being the key factor here), were pretty consistent supporters of the Republican party, and that has only very recently slowly begun to change. My father was a life-long Republican too, and while I want to believe that he would have been like a number of other Mormon Republicans I know—my wife’s parents, some of my brothers, a couple of my oldest friends in my local Mormon congregation here in Wichita, to say nothing of Mitt Romney, the most famous Mormon Never Trumper of them all—and recognized the awfulness of Trump and voted against him accordingly, I actually suspect that he would have stuck with the GOP until the bitter end. Socializing one’s voting history, religious beliefs, and regional environment together can do that, sometimes.

This is the sort of thing that leads some to insist on the terribleness of party politics and partisanship in general; in particular, in the case of my religious tribe, it leads some of those of us who want to nudge the great bulk of the Republican-voting Mormon faithful in a properly anti-Trump direction (especially if they live in Arizona!), to double-down instead on the curious statement the Mormon church leadership made in 2023: that in addition to encouraging members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the official name of my church) to be active citizens and affirming the church’s official neutrality—positions they emphasize every year—the church leadership insisted that “members should…vote for those [candidates] who have demonstrated integrity, compassion, and service to others, regardless of party affiliation. Merely voting a straight ticket or voting based on ‘tradition’ without careful study of candidates and their positions on important issues is a threat to democracy.”

In the same way that I can recognize as coherent (even if stupid) single-issue voting, I can recognize that straight-ticket voting, just supporting every Republican or Democrat down the line, can seem a coherent response to certain conditions—like, for example, party having been so fully captured by single cause or candidate that attempting to stop that party on every level seems like the only reasonable way to express one’s discontent. But thankfully, ticket-splitting is something that, in this moment of intense polarization, is very much an active variable in trying to understand the shape of the 2024 elections. That’s true even here in Kansas, where the historical dominance of the Republican party—there is very close to 2 registered Republican voters for every 1 registered Democrat here in the Sunflower State--exceeds the levels of the Mormon corridor.

A month ago, I spoke at the Dole Institute at the University of Kansas about “The Ticket-Splitting Voter.” (You can watch the whole thing here.) One of the other speakers at the event was Stephanie Sharp, a Republican who served three terms in the Kansas House, who is one of the prime movers behind Women 4 U.S., a national organization of self-identifying conservative women determined to work against Trump’s return to the White House. Meeting and talking with her put me in mind of Mormon Women for Ethical Government—an officially non-partisan body that does not engage in any political recruitment, to be sure, but it’s impossible to read their recent defenses of the election system and condemnations of any refusal to accept election results as anything except a rebuke of Trump, what with his constant lies about the 2020 elections and his preparations to lie some more starting this week. MWEG’s membership obviously includes many Democratic and unaffiliated voters, but given its grounding in American Mormonism, and the fact that it got off the ground essentially as a direct response to Trump election in 2016, the sense in which it, like Sharp’s group, and like dozens of other groups like it, all aim to connect with Republican women turned off by Trumpist Republican leaders whose message of protecting women comes off as condescending is hard to deny. Hence, the essential split-ticket voter of the 2024 election: the Republican woman who supports conservative candidates down the line, because that’s what she believes, but votes for Harris at the top of the ticket, because what he represents takes their party in a direction they don’t want it to go. There won’t be remotely as many such split-ticket voters as there will be women—or men, for that matter—who vote a straight-party line, but there may be enough of them to make a difference.

Parties have always included within them various factions, and party leaders—whose primary aim is to win elections, of course—will always be incentivized to paper over those divisions, insisting that their party is a “big tent” which can handle dissent over various issues. But dissent over the party’s own presidential candidate? The Bernie Sanders faction of the Democratic party, despite its grievances, made its peace with and grudgingly supported both Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden, and it seems likely the same will go for Kamala Harris. Yet the complete absence of anti-Trump Republicans of real national prominence from the current GOP campaign, from the 2012 Republican nominee for president Mitt Romney to Trump’s own vice president Mike Pence, as well as multiple important Republican voices essentially washing their hands of the GOP, all suggests an even deeper problem on the Republican side.

Even here in Kansas, with its Republican dominance, Trump is commanding only 48% support in the polls, far less than the 56% he won in both 2016 and 2020. The final numbers when all the ballots are counted will almost certainly be above that—I don’t know anyone who thinks there is even the remotest chance Trump could fail to win Kansas. (Ditto for Utah, where Trump’s approval rating stands at a low but still solid 54%.) But the Republican party is facing a real problem here as well as nationally, whether or not it is a problem that will be manifest in the next Tuesday’s results. It’s a problem evident in the decision of a close friend of mine here in Wichita, a deeply conservative man who has voted Republican his whole life, and has basically no political agreement with any of the policies and proposals of the Democratic party, and yet is going to vote, however symbolically, Harris—because of the January 6 riot at the Capitol which Trump abetted, because he is convinced that Trump is going to allow Putin to do whatever he wants in Eastern Europe, because of his personal corruption and disrespect for the rules of the office, and much more. How can a party present itself as representing his preferences, and at the same time that of another friend of mine, a man who—much more typically for Kansas Republican voters—has gone full MAGA, and is convinced that not only did Trump win in 2020 but also that every action he took or winked at in the wake of that election, including the violence of January 6, was entirely justified?

Some Republicans are responding to this divide by denouncing Trump, like Stephanie has, and organizing to help stop his re-election—but that’s exceptionally rare. More common, among those at least willing to speak are, are Republicans like Steven Howe, a current member of the Kansas House, who back in January condemned Trump’s “deceit and lies” and plead with his own party to turn away from their support for the former president, but then came back around to his party and fell in line when November loomed. And then there is U.S. Senator Jerry Moran, the only one of the Republicans Kansans have elected to Congress who has declined to endorse Trump for president. While he’s never condemned Trump directly either, this is a man who, if you’ve paid attention to his careful speeches over the years, clearly has little respect for the nominal leader of his own party. Again, there is basically no chance any of this electorally significant in either my state, in the same way the pleas of well-connected Mormons in Utah will have basically zero chance of moving the great mass of Republican voters in the Beehive state. But it simply underscores a partisan difficulty that will have to be addressed, one way or another.

Parties have endured in American politics because there is no better way to respond to the incentives of our political and electoral system than by organizing into groups which reflect particular interests by promoting particular candidates. The fact that those parties, once their candidates are elected, are going to work to entrench their influence by fully socializing themselves into the institutional and ideological structures through which those who voted for those candidates operate, is simply a by-product of the logic of our constitutional system itself. I’m fully on board with imagining alternatives to that system—but in the shorter term, the reality of cross-party voting, and the potential rise of fusion voting, might be the only routes available to making parties, which at one time genuinely did, however indirectly, manage to reflect and moderate and promote the best versions of the preferences of those who voted for them, do so again.

Of course, in my view, the even shorter-short term solution to the partisan dilemma both posed by and facing (to whatever degree the leaders of the party are willing to admit it) the Republican party is the defeat of Donald Trump. Which, across this country, hundreds of thousands (and potentially even more) of registered GOP voters will contribute to—but many millions more, including my mother, and most of the members of my Mormon congregation, and much of my family and most of my friends and neighbors here in Kansas, won’t. That’s okay. Frustrating, depressing, potentially frightening, but okay, and I mean that—I’m convinced that if Trump becomes president as a result of either outright Electoral College votes or whatever legal and electoral chaos will almost certainly erupt in less than 48 hours, the country will stumble forward (though whether the legitimacy of our constitutional democracy will remains to be seen).

But will the Republican party? Will those stymied Republicans return to the GOP, or join the Democrats, or push for some other yet unforeseen party or party-like formation? I don’t know. But I suspect that any Republican--particularly those of the Mormon persuasion, given that the party re-alignment this division may potentially give rise to could well, given the processes of socialization, impact religious and cultural assumptions which play major roles in one’s church affiliation and much more—who thinks the era of Re-Elected-Trump, or Post-Trump, will be an easy, or easier, one to navigate are probably in for a surprise. (Hopefully whatever surprise the first of those possibilities might pose for the United States won’t be a whole lot worse.)