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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Theses on Kansas, "Popularism," and Value Them Both

Well, my predictions from yesterday were wrong (mostly; I was still right about Kris Kobach getting the Republican Attorney General nomination). And while the image I used yesterday to reflect the diversity of the No campaign here in Wichita didn't unintentionally predict the final state-wide vote totals (59% voted No, not 75%), the fact is it was a lot closer than I or any other serious political observer here in Kansas that I'm aware of actually believed was possible. So what more is there to say.

Well, a few things, anyway:

1) Let me repeat what I just wrote: nobody I am aware of who as at all seriously engaged in following these campaigns--and I've talked to people at the Kansas Reflector, at Vox, at Newsweek, at ABC News and KAKE News locally, and many more places about all this--was predicting that in an August primary election, in a strongly Republican state, would result in a win for abortion rights by 10 points, much less nearly 20 points. As the very first election to take place anywhere in America after the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the ending of a national constitutional guarantee of at least limited access to abortion services, the size of the Value Them Both amendment's defeat is bound to create a lot of political noise.

2) Political noise...but maybe not immediate political changes. Political parties are mighty beasts, and different factions or interest groups that have put in years of work and money and organizational strategy in shaping their platforms, and thereby socializing and contributing to the further self-sorting of voters who look at those parties and platforms, aren't going to want to see them make an about-face after just one election. Here in Kansas, I would expect that Governor Kelly will express gratitude for the results, and then proceed to run her re-election campaign in with the same wonky focus on Medicaid expansion and other nuts-and-bolts issues that she's always preferred; similarly, I bet that Derek Schmidt will prefer to say as little as possible about the failed amendment, and run the same "Governor Kelly serves the radical left in Washington DC" ads that he's team has no doubt long since prepped, only with references to abortion very much cut back.

3) Why? Because Schmidt will know, as will leaders of the GOP's current super-majority in Topeka, that there is simply no honest way to parse these numbers without acknowledging that there were a good number of Republicans--including at least a small-but-nonetheless-meaningful slice of Kobach-supporting, low-propensity, normally-November-voting-only, self-identifying conservative Republicans!--who voted against the amendment. The majority of the Republicans in Topeka come from safe enough seats not to worry about alienating those Republicans who wandered off the anti-abortion reservation this particular election...but there are at least a few who will worry about them, and Schmidt, who needs to hold on to votes in the same urban counties which Kelly won in 2018, will worry about them as well.

4) So I suspect that the short-term consequences of this vote won't be especially visible. It's the medium-term consequences, the post-November 2022 consequences, which could potentially put some real force behind all the chatter which Value Them Both's defeat is generating. I could be wrong, of course; my track record suggests I probably will be. Maybe the Kansas GOP will immediately throw all their efforts behind voting to unseat state supreme court justices in November, and immediately start talking about taking another shot at amending the constitution, this time grudgingly including language about how the Kansas constitution does guarantee that there cannot be a total, no-exceptions-for-rape-or-incest-or-medical-emergency abortion ban. But I doubt it; rather, I think they're going to want to wait to see how this vote is reflected in other votes nationally, and how the overall abortion discourse continues to evolve.

5) After all, in the meantime there is probably going to be a small, perhaps invisible, but almost certainly nonetheless viscous, fracture within the Kansas GOP to deal with, all while the gubernatorial election is going on. Because there will be Republicans--the small-government, business-oriented, libertarian-inclined, individualistic Republicans from rural Kansas, the pragmatic folks that, before Brownback and Trump would have been considered the backbone of the party--that will have serious questions for why their party essentially out-sourced themselves to Kansas Catholic archdioceses for this election, and why they ended up (by driving all the cultural conservatives to the August voting booth) saddling themselves with a three-time loser like Kris Kobach as their attorney general candidate. That fracture doesn't exist in isolation, of course; the divide between the numerous micro-factions that make up the much-declined (but not extinct) moderate bloc of Republican voters and the even more numerous micro-factions that make up the dominant (but not completely unobstructed) conservative, Trumpist bloc of Republicans, has been a feature of Kansas politics for decades, and this internal fight will be folded into it. Will it push the party towards a new balance? Dion Lefler, who has watched Kansas politics as closely as anyone I know, thinks it might; we need to wait and see.

6) As we wait for the medium- and long-term consequences of a strongly Republican state voting in a way that actually reflects the existing polling data here in the state, as opposed to being led by party allegiance to support the much more extreme positions adopted by minority anti-abortion factions in their parties, to play themselves out, one note about "popularism." While there are many ways to make use of this wonky idea which has emerged among Democratic activists over the past couple of years, the basic idea is that Democrats hurt themselves when they allow their party to become associated with liberal or progressive or radical or socialist ideas that don't poll well, even if their purported consequences are ones voters clamor for. The question, as my old friend Damon Linker posed months ago, is whether the insights of popularism--that is, building campaigns around those ideas which poll well with ordinary voters, keeping the question of whether or not they are truly empowering or "populist" insofar as the interests of ordinary people are concerned as a secondary concern ("normie politics," as Freddie deBoer put it)--apply to Republicans as well. Noting the extreme abortion bans popping up through legislative action throughout the country in the wake of Roe's overturning, Damon wondered if Republicans are "governed by the principle that there are and can be no negative electoral consequences from moving too far to the antiliberal right on cultural issues." If so, then the defeat of Value Them Both might be seen as sign that some Republicans had had enough, or at least were content with what they had (abortion is already quite heavily regulated in Kansas), and didn't want to see the status quo disrupted, even if that meant challenging their own party's priorities in this primary election.

7) Finally, if nothing else, let's enjoy a couple of news cycles where people wonder how on earth an anti-abortion referendum could have lost in Kansas. The context is totally different, but I can’t help, as I look at the incredulity around me, but remember an exchange during the debate over the non-discrimination ordinance adopted here in Wichita by the city council last year. City ordinances to explicitly list and defend the rights of LGBTQ citizens had been pushed by many groups throughout Kansas for years, and Mayor Brandon Whipple made supporting such a priority. It passed by a 6-1 vote, but not before much argument on the council, some of it contentious, and two marathon open city council meetings that went on for hours, with dozens of people showing up to elaborate about how an NDO was an attack on religious freedom. At one of those meetings, a woman showed up and looked at the council (which ultimately, after many delays, voted for the ordinance by 6-1), shook her head, and said, in essence, “this isn’t the Kansas way, this isn’t the Wichita way, I don’t know who you people think you’re representing.” When she saw Mayor Whipple roll his eyes, she zeroed in on him, observing that her grandchildren deserved to grow up in a Christian world, "not Brandon Whipple’s world." I’ve never heard the conviction held by that shrinking-but-still powerful segment of Kansas voters that true “Kansas values” can’t possibly include abortion rights, LGBTQ protections, etc., expressed so pithily. Until today, that is.

On Medicaid Misinformation and Missed Opportunities

[When my own west Wichita representative in the Kansas House, Dan Hawkins, laid out some misleading and vaguely paranoid claims about Governor Laura Kelly's push for Medicaid expansion in Kansas, I knew what my next Insight Kansas column had to be about. Here, as tend to do, is a slightly longer and updated version.]

With the end of sine die on Monday afternoon, the 2022 Kansas legislative session has finally, officially, come to an end. As Clay Wirestone put it in the Kansas Reflector, it could have been worse. Still, once again, Medicaid expansion didn’t pass, and that's a frustration.

True, the legislature took the the important step of expanding the postpartum health coverage offered by KanCare to new mothers, an action which found support from Republicans and Democrats alike. But the money for that additional aide comes from the state’s own budget, not money which the federal government would provide, as would be the case with Medicaid expansion. The fact that this health care reform has nearly 80% popular support among Kansas voters, yet continues to face opposition from the majority of the Republicans those same voters elected to control the legislature, is a puzzle. Party polarization is one explanation; ideological divides that allow cultural issues to dominate media narratives and voters' headspace is another. And then there is the misinformation about Medicaid expansion frequently spread by Republican leaders--often intentionally, but also sometimes due to their own confusion.

The traditional conservative line against expanding Medicaid to help those people who have no medical insurance through their low-paying jobs, and cannot afford private insurance, but still aren’t poor enough to meet KanCare’s strict requirements, is two-fold. First, there is the libertarian booga-booga talk of the "risk" that Medicaid expansion "will cost state taxpayers more than initial estimates indicate" (ignoring the fact that those estimates show such drastic savings that even significant cost overruns would leave taxpayers in the black), or that Congress will change the law to put all the financial burden for Medicaid expansion on the states (ignoring the fact that representatives from the 38 states which have embraced Medicaid expansion would vote against such), or old reliable fear-mongering about America's debt levels. Second, there is the allegation that expanding Medicaid would increase the number of “able-bodied” Kansans receiving government assistance, and if one believes in up-from-your-bootstraps individualism, that’s a bad thing. There’s plenty to argue with both of these lines of argument, but at least they reflects a consistent (and for Kansans, familiar) ideology--the libertarianish position that Sam Brownback pushed so hard during his seven years as governor, with what most Kansans recognize today as terrible results.

Of late however, some leading Republicans in our state--perhaps because like Republican gubernatorial nominee Deterk Schmidt wants very much to distance himself from Brownback's legacy?--have taken to making what can only be called a pro-welfare argument, claiming that by fighting Medicaid expansion, they are actually the true defenders of Kansas's poorest and most needy citizens: specifically, the disabled already on Medicaid. Representative Dan Hawkins, the Republican majority leader in the Kansas House, recently made this case, insisting that in states which have expanded Medicaid (a total of 38 so far, including every state that borders Kansas), high enrollments have “crowd[ed] out other state budget priorities,” lengthened waiting lists, and left those states with “less to spend on things like education and public safety.” These claims either lack proper context or are outright wrong.

It is true that Medicaid enrollments in the states which have expanded their programs have been far higher than anticipated, especially during the pandemic. But the evidence for Rep. Hawkins’s claims about Medicaid expansion forcing cuts in other sorts of welfare support is very thin. Medicaid expansion, it must be remembered, was part of the overall reform of American health care which the Affordable Care Act created over a decade ago, and ties by law (and thus, of course, to the political interests of every elected representative from those states who accept it!) federal resources to state expansions of Medicaid. Admittedly, those ties require some changes in Medicaid policies, and those bring with them some other statutory costs. But still, when the non-partisan Commonwealth Fund conducted a very extensive review of the budgets of all the states which have expanded Medicaid and aligned their health care policies with the ACA's insurance exchanges and more, their conclusion was that the budgetary burden of traditional Medicaid payments in most states actually declined, even with higher than estimated enrollments. It also determined that the statutory costs which came along with national ACA requirements simply were almost never significant enough to require spending cuts or tax increases for states to maintain existing programs and a balanced budget.

Hawkins’s warning about ill people dying while on Medicaid waiting lists in expansion states sounds worrisome—until you wonder how many may have died while on waiting lists in non-expansion states. When dealing the health needs of the working poor and disabled, there’s always plenty of frightening statistics available, but pitting those currently receiving KanCare assistance against those Kansans struggling to survive on incomes that put them below the poverty line, but not far enough to qualify under current law, misses the whole point of Medicaid in the first place. Keep in mind that whatever the impact of Medicaid expansion on the insurance policies currently available--thanks to the exchanges set up by the ACA, which Medicaid expansion was designed to be part of!--to low-income Kansans whose jobs put them barely above the federal poverty level, there remain even poorer working Kansans, struggling to survive below the poverty line and yet still not poor enough for KanCare. They're worth caring about too.

Ultimately, when Hawkins writes that “expansion in Kansas will result in the same outcome as it has in every other state where it has been implemented,” he’s actually arguing in favor of a positive change. So my recommendation to anti-expansion, politically conservative Republicans like Hawkins is to stick with their usual anti-welfare,small-government, conservtives-hate-welfare, libertarian arguments, much as they might see political advantages in not doing so. In the end, trying to turn the policy changes which Medicaid expansion would entail for some of those already receiving it into an argument for denying of its benefits to many more, often equally needy people, simply doesn’t work.