Hoping to Take Home Rule Seriously

Many Kansas Republicans likely guffawed in disbelief when Governor Laura Kelly recently insisted "I am a major local-control advocate" and that she was opposed to "usurping" the power of local governments. The stereotype of Democrats as always favoring centralized government programs, with Republicans always fighting to keep government small and local, is deeply entrenched in our national political discourse, and it's an image which the Kansas Republican party fully intends to make use of this election year. The language of the state GOP, which dominated much of the spring legislative special session, presents Kelly’s emergency orders during the pandemic as examples of one-size-fits-all overreach, thus building on this stereotype expertly.

The truth, of course, as always, is more complex. And here in Kansas, that complexity--the product of trends in platform development and political socialization rooted in constitutional disputes over federal versus state power going back to the civil rights movement and before--is inextricable from the fact that the localities which the "small government" rhetoric of Kansas Republicans seems most often focused upon are the spacious, rural, and increasingly empty ones which cover most of the state's territory. Whereas to allow the local governments of Kansas’s few growing cities and urban areas to take care of themselves, by contrast, is often seen as a threat. When Kansas Senator John Doll (R-Garden City) recently commented “I think we [in the legislature] just do so many things to curb the power of the municipal,” his frustration was justified.

This session included two major examples of this dynamic. First, a bill to prevent Kansas cities and counties from banning, limiting, or even taxing plastic bags. This bill, which doesn't quite have enough support in the legislature to overturn a veto by Governor Kelly, emerged mostly in reaction to, not any actual local regulations, but rather just the successful environmental activism here in Wichita which led to the creation of a task force to explore and make recommendations regarding such regulations. Second, a bill to prevent Kansas cities and counties from issuing municipal IDs to undocumented residents so as to provide them with some protection from federal immigration enforcement. This bill, which does appear to have enough support to overcome an executive veto, and which rushed through the Kansas Senate with barely any debate at the urging of Attorney General (and all-but-officially the Republican candidate for governor this November) Derek Schmidt, emerged mostly in response to the passage of a local ordinance in Wyandotte County, which itself was the result of five years of conversations and negotiations driven by concerns over the public health and safety needs of many of the county's diverse, long-time, yet often unregistered residents. With both bills sitting on Governor Kelly's desk she thus finds herself in the position of potentially being able to use her veto pen to defend of local democracy, at least a little bit.

(Also, it's worth noting that these two examples are not alone, though they are the most prominent. There was also a bill, which the governor allowed to become law without her signature, that restricts the ability of cities or counties to impose limits upon individual citizens' use of natural gas, a bill which emerged in part when the city of Lawrence committed to switching entirely to green energy by 2035, and there remains a bill in committee that would prevent local government entities, including school districts and college and university boards, from responding to pandemic concerns by imposing mask mandates; that bill has strong support in the Republican caucus, and might yet come up for a vote at any time.)

Now anyone who has spent time watching the patterns of Kansas politics through the frame of the rural/urban divide, and how that plays out in shaping the electoral interests of legislators, can’t find this surprising. Over the past decade and a half, there have been many similar conflicts, with most Republican legislators consistently rebuffing the concerns democratically voiced in Kansas’s (very slowly, but nonetheless surely) liberalizing urban areas. There have been state laws which overturned city efforts to keep their insurance costs low by preserving gun-free zones in municipal buildings, and state decisions which have blocked city efforts to lower or eliminate the criminal penalties attached to medical or recreational marijuana use.

Federalism has always been, and always will be, a messy area of American politics, and extending the subsidiarity idea supposedly implicit to the federal principle further down the ladder, to the municipal level, obliges us to think hard about a host of theoretical, demographic, legal, and socio-economic matters relevant to what we really mean when we talk of "democratic sovereignty." After all, calls for “small government” or “local control” are often more self-interestedly instrumental rather than morally principled, and state legislatures dominated by Democrats don’t necessarily have a better record when it comes to respecting municipal democracy (as Eric Levits notes, "progressives are wont to frame popular democracy as morally sacrosanct even as we carefully guard our preferred exemptions from it"--though he argues, reasonably enough, that such inconsistencies don't reflect a foundational problem with democracy so much as a recognition that, practically speaking the "myriad obstacles" to true popular democracy in the United States require constant work-arounds). Still overall, the "populist" (or, specifically, anti-intellectual elite) character of much contemporary Republican rhetoric, while it does potentially have a localized, small-d democratic aspect to it, so consistently overlaps with a general anti-liberal, anti-urban, and anti-majoritarian position that it's easy to conclude that American conservatism today has, in Alex Pareene's words, "no philosophical commitment to localism," but rather "an instrumental attachment to federalism, and to the state form of subgovernment," because it is "the form best suited to maintain, at the local level, the dominance of the suburban and rural over the urban, and, at the national level, the dominance of geography over people."

Given all of that, why expect the Republican-dominated Kansas legislature, or the mostly Republican Kansas electorate in general to take more seriously sincere efforts by the citizens in Kansas's cities to govern themselves? Partly, perhaps, because Kansas has a literal “Home Rule” provision written into its state constitution, thereby is formally--if not necessarily effectively or coherently, as debates here in Wichita over popular protection of historical buildings demonstrates--committed to recognizing the self-governance of Kansas's towns and cities. Also, perhaps one could hope for some recognition of the value of allowing localities the liberty to govern themselves as many Kansas Republicans have felt driven toward (or have chosen to present themselves as pursuing for partisan reasons) an arguably more pluralistic, libertarian, "pro-choice" line--not regarding abortion, of course, but definitely when it comes to matters of public health and therefore, at least potentially, other policy concerns as well. The link between libertarianism and localism isn't a necessary one, of course, even assuming that either ideological position is rooted in actual beliefs. (The fact that Lawrence passed an ordinance motivated by concerns pretty much identical to Wyandotte’s with no reaction from the legislature--at least not initially--suggests that the Kansas Republican opposition to local urban governance is more a matter of political timing than legal interpretation.) Still, it's something that we left-leaning urban localists (there are some of us!) in this majority Republican state can hope for, at least.

Truthfully, there's probably no chance of Kansas losing its historically rural reputation and character, and the deep attachment to voting Republican which has come along with it, any time in my lifetime. But the fact remains that the state’s continued economic development, given that a revolution in the direction of autarkic agrarianism and anarcho-socialism is highly unlikely, is and will overwhelmingly in the hands of those urban parts of the state where the population is growing and connections to the actually existing nationalized and globalized economies of late capitalism are being maintained. There is just no getting around that plain fact. Hence, the local governments in those places, in particular, need a free (or at least a freerer) hand to respond to the interests and beliefs of their citizens, thereby enabling-- and, in fact, inducing--them to be that much more committed to our shared home. To treat urban Kansans’ efforts on behalf of public health, environmental stewardship, and civic life in the places they live with dismissive inconsistency, whether for sincerely state-centric ideological reasons or (more probably) for self-interested partisan ones, is no way to keep Kansas’s sunflower blooming.

Two Pedantic Problems with Representative Estes's Post

Dear Representative Estes,

Thanks for sharing your reasoning about your January 6 challenge to the Electoral College results, thus your challenge to the certification of President Biden's election. I am in complete sympathy with your statement that "all of us are appalled at the violence, destruction and loss of life that took place at the Capitol on January 6," and I heartily endorse your closing call for your readers to "join me in praying that our country has a renewed commitment to civil discourse." That is all very well said, and I appreciate your including it.

However, you also included a couple of statements that trouble me. Once is simply wrong, and the other misunderstands something that is implied by the first. So forgive me, but I feel a need to play the professor here for a moment. You wrote:

"The Founding Fathers did not want Congress to select the president. Nor did they want the judicial branch, or even governors to do so. That was the responsibility of the state legislatures."

Of course, this isn't correct; the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution stipulated that it was the members of the Electoral College chosen by the states that would select the president of the United States. Those electors are chosen in accordance with procedures established by the respective state laws which obtain in the different states, and since those laws are written by elected state representatives, I suppose you could argue that "state legislatures" are ultimately doing the selecting. But by jumping those steps, you set up the foundation for your action (specifically that "I, along with a majority of the Republican Party in the U.S. House of Representatives, raised objections in regards to what we believed was evidence that several states violated their own laws in administering the 2020 election as they pertained to the office of the president") in a way that side-steps an important truth.

That truth is that those state laws regarding the appointment of electors, just like the state laws regarding all electoral matters--voter registration, absentee ballots, etc.--are subject to constitutional challenge, such as any citizen (including yourself, Representative Estes) may bring. The rights laid out in the amendments to the Constitution have been extended and applied by the Supreme Court many times over the past 232 years to enable citizens to defend the principle self-government. And, of course, when citizens, or their elected representatives, bring forward such constitutional concerns, it is the place of judges in our system to make an adjudication as to the validity of the concerns so expressed.

What is the point of emphasizing this? Simply that when you allege that state legislatures "violated their own laws," what you are actually doing is alleging something constitutionally nefarious when elected representatives, or the election officials they appoint, adjust their statutory requirements (including deadlines and the like) regarding mail-in ballots, or ballot drop boxes, or more, during the pandemic. They did this not just to compensate for the change in voting patterns which the health concerns of the pandemic introduced, but also because if they didn't make such adjustments, they would be subject to exactly the sort of legal challenges which your own column vaguely refers to (though I note that, while you invoke the Constitution multiple times, you only ever call what the state legislatures or state election officials did "improper," not "illegal"). The whole point of these election laws is to support the exercise of constitutional voting rights by the people; when circumstances stand in the way of the exercise of those rights, officials of government are obliged to act. 

Now, if those actions themselves violate someone else's rights (as apparently former President Trump believed they did, since he insisted over and over that he'd won the election by a landslide, and had been robbed of his victory by electoral fraud), then they need to go to a judge and make their case. Which Trump's lawyers did, dozens of time, with a total of 46 out of 54 lawsuits being almost immediately dropped, dismissed, or ruled against for a complete lack of evidence (the rest are currently in the midst of the appeals process). Meaning, in short, that the system which we have determined, over and over and over again, that the claim that state legislatures had vacated their responsibility in regards to the means by which appointed electors make their selection is simply groundless. Rather, it was their view that election commissions, governors, state judges, or even committees of legislators themselves, in these several states, had acted responsibly in the determinations they made about statutory election requirements. In the eyes of the courts, there simply was no demonstrable constitutional harm done here. Which means that, strictly speaking, in accordance with how our constitutional system is supposed to work, your belief that, for example, "the Democratic majority of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania unilaterally violated the U.S. Constitution," is simply nonsensical, because the Supreme Court of the United State itself said so.

Of course, if you want to insist that your love of the U.S Constitution obliges you to disregard the judicial functions which that same constitutional system sets up, that's a political belief which you have every right, as a citizen, to advocate for, and you'd find me agreeing with you partly as well. (You and me, Representative Estes: down with the imperial judiciary, and down with the power of judicial review!) But note that I called that a "political belief," because that's what it is--a belief about what ought to have happened in our polity (which presumably is, in your case, at the minimum: "election officials shouldn't adjust statutory requirements for ballots in the name of supporting voting rights during a pandemic without a complete change in state law"--though maybe, to be frank, the political belief here is actually just: "Donald Trump should be president"). Which leads me to another concern I have with your column. You write:

"In America, we must be able to use the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution without fear of retribution by those who hold the levers of political power."

In your column you speak on a couple of occasions of the "legal and political processes" of government, and as a way of expressing a general point, that's fine. But if you're going to specifically refer to "the legal processes prescribed in the Constitution," then I have to remind you of everything in the previous five paragraphs: the actual "legal processes" which follow from applying the Constitution as written involve petitioning judges to consider potential constitutional violations, and they didn't find any (in fact, usually Trump's lawyers, knowing they had no evidence that met the standard of scrutiny and not wanting the get disbarred for lying to a judge, mostly averred that there wasn't any fraud at all). So you may want to rephrase this to speak of "political processes" alone, rather than legal ones.

Am I saying that when you and other House Republicans objected to certifying the Electoral College votes, that you were doing something illegal? Of course not; as a member of Congress, it was perfectly legal for you to vote however you wished. But the idea that you were legally obliged to so act, or that your actions followed any kind of legal necessity, is silly. You made a political stand, as is your right, but you had no legal rationale for doing so.

And remember, that making political stands--that is, standing up on behalf of a political belief--is a symbolic action. It's not necessarily just symbolic, of course: when one votes, or engages in a protest, or writes a column for a local newspaper like you did (or writes a blog post in response to it like I am), there are often real-world consequences in play: someone might get elected or not, someone might be arrested or not, someone might be persuaded or not. But even those real-world consequences exist in relation to the symbols and associations which surround them. You recognize this yourself; you associate your action with enabling "millions of Americans the ability to voice their opinion" and with honoring "my constituents and the Constitution." So let's think about the particular moment, and some of the other associations which were in play at that moment, when you stood up to be counted as challenging the legitimacy of electoral votes which dozens of courts (many of them filled with Republican judges) had found legitimate.

The Capitol Building, just hours before you voted, had been attacked by a mob determined to do what you did, only much more violently and directly: oppose the certification of President Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Five people died as a result of that violent attack--the worst which the Capitol has experienced in over 200 years. There were people looking for the person who is in charge of the House you are a member of--Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi--with the apparent intention of kidnapping or killing her. Are you responsible for them? No! (Or at least, certainly not nearly as much as former President Trump, who fed them the delusional nonsense which led them to make the attack.) But in the final moment, I fear your actions fell symbolically on the same side of the rioters. After all, you were, at the very least, being motivated (or at least so you claim; I'm writing all this under the assumption that you were sincere in your column, and not just covering up the simple self-interest of keeping the Trumpist voters in the Kansas Republican Party on your side) by the same legally groundless political convictions about supposedly "improper" state electoral determination which Trump employed to fire up the mob in the first place. You may say that you were solely acting on behalf of Kansas Republicans who embraced Trump's dismissed claims about fraud, and you may genuinely believe that. But you can't wish away the symbolic weight which the House carried at that moment, in the wake of insurrectionary violence which was only a few steps logical steps removed from your political cause.

You could, I suppose, embrace this association, and simply insist that while the rioters were utterly wrong in their methods, they were not utterly wrong in their cause. I suspect you'd denounce that as a terribly unfair connection to make, and you'd probably be right. But is it an unreasonable connection to make? That, Representative Estes, I don't think is the case at all.

Religious Liberty and Joseph Smith in Park's Kingdom of Nauvoo

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Benjamin Park's Kingdom of Nauvoo: The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier is going to be released in two weeks. You should buy it and read it. It's a first-rate work of Mormon history--the best book about this era I've read since Richard Bushman's Rough Stone Rolling--and if it doesn't quite become the work of intellectual history that I think Park sensed writing the story of Joseph Smith and the Council of Fifty could become, it's not for lack of trying. Park takes up the many radical threads--political, economic, racial, and sexual--which were part of Smith's final, and greatest, effort to establish his vision of a distinct community, and weaves them together into a compelling, fascinating tale. And now that Park has provided an interpretation of Smith's kingdom-building which no previous historian was capable of--with the minutes of the secretive Council of Fifty only finally being made public in 2016--early Mormonism will likely soon find itself occupying a new and even more important conceptual place in the never-ending academic arguments about American democracy, religion, liberalism, and pluralism. Nerds like me who delight in such arguments will keep coming back to Park's work as a foundational treatment, and we'll be rewarded for doing so by Park's delightful read.

Those with more familiarity with the history of Mormon polygamy or economics might well have some bones to pick with Park's work. For myself, I just want to elucidate one particular thread. Central to Park's overall argument about Smith and the Council is what seems to me to be, in effect, a critique of Bushman. Bushman--who explicitly noted in his 2005 book that he's been denied access to the Council of Fifty minutes--developed an interpretation of the Nauvoo years of Smith's life as one of hurried, almost stereotypically American-style busyness. While Smith's concerns--building the temple, acting as a civic leader, receiving revelations, suing and being sued by his enemies, managing (and hiding) his polygamous marriages, plotting a run for President of the United States, etc.--were hardly those of a typical mid-19th-century American resident of the frontier, there was a similarity there all the same. Bushman's Smith, in the 1840s at least, no longer spoke of “an immediate end to the wicked world,” or of Zion as "refuge"; instead, more often than not he presented himself as a true "son of America," looking to build (or, if necessary, flee to) a power base from which his community, rather than enjoying a communal reprieve from the complications and inequalities of the world, could build something great (Rough Stone Rolling, pp. 415, 513). Bushman gave us, on my reading anyway, a Smith who had become, after Ohio and after Missouri, an American entrepreneur, engaged in political and economic and theological and sexual speculations until the very end.

Park does not dispute that the Smith of Nauvoo, IL, was looking to make something (and himself) great, not does he deny his speculative character. Park's access to the Council of Fifty minutes, however, allows him to bring in new details about the various political positions and arguments made by Smith and other Mormon insiders in the crucial year of 1844. Park presents a persuasive case that Smith's kingdom vision was, broadly speaking, far more illiberal and apocalyptic than Bushman's account implies. Not that Smith routinely trafficked in predictions about the end times, as so many other 19th-century frontier Christian leaders did; he was in fact quite notable in generally refusing to talk that way. But his conviction was that the existing American--and thus modern democratic--order was something that needed to be scrapped, and that the Mormon faithful needed to prepare themselves to step into the role of modeling for others--or even directly leading others into--what God next had in mind. As Park summarizes his argument in the book's prologue:

Mormons [in Nauvoo] rejected many laws that they saw as oppressive or unfair. Most fundamentally, they rejected the separation of church and state.....The beleaguered "saints," as they styled themselves, had concluded that democratic rule led to the oppression of marginalized people and voices....Rejecting democratic freedom, the Mormons felt the need to establish a new political order....Faced with the disarray brought by the voice of man, Mormons hearkened to the stability promised by the voice of God. This promised included priestly administration, coordinated voting, and patriarchy....They sought a Moses who could lead modern-day Israel out of its wilderness; the saints desired nothing less than to transform the world  (Kingdom of Nauvoo, pp.9-10).

The language there of "leading modern-day Israel" and "hearkening to the stability of the voice of God" could easily put you in mind--or, at least, it put me in mind--of Marvin S. Hill's 30-year-old treatise, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism. Though dated (and rather dry) in many ways, Hill's great theme--that Smith was an anti-pluralist almost from the beginning, dreaming of a "theocratic empire" as early as the 1830s, all as part of his longing to put an end to the squabbling voices and petty violence that constantly attended the early church--has resonance with Park's. Except, however, that Hill associated Smith's discontent with a "Calvinistic-like skepticism" of the ability of people to govern themselves; to Hill, Smith's treatment of dissenters, his presidential campaign, his endless (and almost always unwise) financial investments, could all be related to his desire to see power concentrated, opposition sidelined, and the threat of faction ended--to, in short, "dissolve all distinctions between sacred and secular and make them one" (Quest for Refuge, pp. xvi, 93, 97, 138, 148). For all the insight which Hill's research provided, I think Park's analysis provides a somewhat different and more intellectually rich take. Park's description of a key meeting of the Council of Fifty captures much of what is new and theoretically interesting here:

Though he was appointed "Prophet, Priest & King" at the morning meeting on April 11, that afternoon he delivered a discourse more traditionally republican in nature and centered on religious liberty. His new council would rule the world under the auspices of God's priesthood, but Smith insisted that they should always include non-Mormons within their ranks, as the Kingdom was separate from the church. Smith even initiated three non-Mormons into the council. He declared his intent to allow any citizen to think and worship as they please, as long as they worked within the boundaries of divine law. That citizenship in the kingdom required allegiance to Smith's prophethood did not seem to throw off that balance, at least in his view. To him, it was the only way to preserve order and reserve the religious liberties to the saints that he felt they had been deprived of. Smith became so animated during his discourse that he swung around a twenty-four inch ruler and broke it in two. In response, Brigham Young said, "as the rule was broken in the hands of our chairman so might every tyrannical government be broken before us." The world was theirs for the taking (Kingdom of Nauvoo, p. 204).

Park's description of this discourse, and of others subsequent to it, helps us see Smith's vision for the early Mormons as occupying a nuanced space between Hill and Bushman (though more cynically, one might say that a historical interpretation which places Smith in such a position is just an attempt to make consistent what were, on the basis of the evidence, arguably incoherent perspectives). Rather than Smith accepting the necessity of making himself into a player on the American scene, or Smith imperially insisting that all differences of opinion are threats to the truth, Park's Smith might be seen as suggesting a kind of rationalization of republican and religious principles. His rejection of liberalism and democracy in the Council of Fifty's records was not premised upon a denial of individual and collective rights and differences, but rather an attempt to discipline them to an overarching and divine necessity. Put another way, Smith could be seen here as proposing that people in their communities (their publics, in republican terminology) enjoy specifically situated freedoms under God's rule, but only insofar as such has been worked out within the particulars of His kingdom on earth--which meant, of course, by the mouth of Joseph Smith.

An interesting parallel might be the protected--though clearly distinct--dhimmi communities of Christians and Jews that existed under Islamic caliphate rule. Pluralism in belief, according to this way of reading Smith's formulation, would be both expected and tolerated, but also necessarily accepting that such diverse interests themselves would play no role in government whatsoever. Smith saw in such factionalism only the threat of popular majorities--and the travails the Mormons had faced in Missouri, including both violent mobs and what can only be called state terrorism, clearly taught them to fear that. Hence the need for an indisputable source of authority--what Smith called, referring to himself, the "proper source" (p. 206)--to put an end to divisions which, from Smith's point of view, simply gave license to those who use their local power to suppress others, either directly or through capturing weak law-making institutions. (It's notable that Smith proposed in his presidential platform that the size of Congress be reduced by half--p. 188.) But nonetheless, that indisputable authority would also be committed, as a matter of faith, to republican principles that respected the self-government of distinct (perhaps even, if Smith's late statements are to be taken as a guide to how his ideas were developing, sovereign--see p. 218) communities.

It's not hard to see this address and others pointing in the direction of William Richards later recommendations to the Council of Fifty after Smith's death. Since democracy, Richards argued, only works among groups of "men of congenial religions," it's right for the Mormons to separate themselves; to continue to tolerate the "promiscuous intermixture of heterogeneous bodies" is "distant both from pure religion and sound philosophy" (p. 250). Following these fragmentary thoughts to their conclusion, it is reasonable to read Smith's kingdom vision as one which asserted that to do otherwise than the above--that is, to centralize all communities together, or to allow for the violence of factional pluralism--would, either way, be tyranny.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as, at best, a clever bit of utopian rationalization. Still, genuine concerns held by the Mormon faithful--concerns about ineffective governments and hostile neighbors--lay behind these ideas, and unpacking their implications is worth doing. Interesting, both Park and Hill turn to Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America as part of their unpacking. Specifically, both find Tocqueville's warning about the tyranny of the majority to have direct relevance to the story they tell; Hill quotes from that section of Tocqueville at the very end of his book (Quest for Refuge, p. 181), whereas Park sets it up at the very beginning (Kingdom of Nauvoo, p. 10). It's a connection worth making--certainly Smith's mature (however undeveloped) political thought absolutely deserves to be put into conversation with Tocqueville's canonical work on what it means to exercise power democratically in a diverse society. As a final point, though, it would be interesting to imagine Smith's response, in the midst of the heady imagining going on in the Council of Fifty, to the observation about intellectual uniformity which Tocqueville included as part of his warning. In this passage, speaking as an aristocratic foreigner taking in the very America which Smith and his followers struggled with and against, he strongly implied that the threat which he agreed factionalist majorities presented in American life was directly connected to the very American rationalist impatience with confusion, or really with anyone who disagrees with you--an impatience which Park's Smith shows on more than one occasion:

I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America. There is no religious and political theory that cannot be preached freely in the constitutional states of Europe and that does not penetrate the others; for there is no country in Europe so subject to one single authority that he who wants to speak the truth does not find support capable of assuring him against the consequences of his independence. If he has the misfortune to live under an absolute government, he often has the people for him; if he inhabits a free country, he can take shelter behind royal authority if need be. The aristocratic fraction of society sustains him in democratic regions, and the democratic fraction in others. But in the heart of a democracy organized as that of the United States, one encounters only a single power, a single elements of force and success, and nothing outside it (Democracy in America, vol. 1, part 2, chp. 7, p. 244).

In the end, Park's great work of history has given us the tools we need to start fitting Joseph Smith in with other American 19th-century radicals, and thus bring Mormon thought into dialogue with arguments over the history of, the limits of, and the importance of, liberal rights in a pluralist democracy, and whether or not a single divine law--even if "congenial" throughout a particular community!--can be part of the answer. Perhaps what I see in Park's interpretation as Smith's somewhat rationalized system of religious and communal political protections will be judged over time to be best forgotten (as, obviously, the church itself has; whatever lurking theocratic sensibilities exist in the church today likely owe far more historically to Smith's electoral machinations in Illinois--see pp. 154-160--than to his sermons before the Council of Fifty). But you can't forget something without knowing it in the first place. Park's book opens our eyes up to the goings-on in Nauvoo close to two centuries ago, for which we readers and Mormon history nerds owe him much thanks; what we do with it now is up to us.

Just a Quick Note About "Local Solutions" and Guns

Of course there's a "national conversation" taking place over guns; is there ever not in America, no matter what the most recent mass shooting atrocity, no matter how many were killed, no matter how those numbers compare with any other atrocities in American life? I've partaken in that conversation before, and I'm reluctant to do so again; the last time I wrote at length about my relationship with guns was nearly 10 years ago, and my thoughts have changed quite a bit since then. Maybe sometime I'll sit down and think through where I stand now on the appeal and the idolatry of guns in America today; for now, though, just a quick, local note.

Yesterday, Kansas's new governor, Jeff "Brownback" Colyer, spoke with an NPR reporter about the meeting of governors which President Trump called together for the purpose of talking about gun violence. You can read the transcript here. What really stands out is how frequently in this brief, 4-minute interview, Colyer refers to the need for "local" solutions. Not only does he explicitly refer to trusting in localism a half-dozen times, he very pointedly talks about how what's appropriate in "western Kansas," or in Garden City or Topeka or Kansas City, might not be appropriate elsewhere. And, as if people hadn't gotten the message, he baldly states that, in regards to guns, "I don't see a specific, statewide thing to do." In a follow-up to that interview, he went even further--insofar as Trump's idea that maybe teachers ought to be paid extra to arm themselves in preparation of the next school shooting, Colyer said he was intrigued, but that "local school districts should make that call."

Now, you might consider all this wise and responsible, or you might consider it foolish and dangerous. What you can't call it, though, is consistent--because it was Colyer's administration, while he was lieutenant governor, that forbade Kansas municipal governments and other local bodies, including our state universities, from interpreting state laws regarding the concealed carry and open carry of firearms in accordance with their own local needs and preferences. So, yes, the governor supports local decisions...but apparently, unless he's suddenly changing his tune (and he's not; when the NPR reporter asked explicitly about revisiting "statewide laws saying that cities and counties cannot pass gun restrictions that go beyond state law," Colyer gave an unambiguous "no"), then it appears the only local decisions that really count are those which the National Rifle Association supports.

This isn't surprising, of course. Kansas is a pretty conservative state, and Republican politicians around here likely see only positives coming their way when they curry the favor of the NRA. (Though it's worth noting that Carl Brewer, former mayor of Wichita, Kansas's largest city, and a Democratic candidate for governor, is specifically targeting in his campaign this unfunded mandate, in the form of millions of dollars in increased insurance costs, which Brownback and Colyer forced upon Kansas's cities by robbing them of their "local" judgments about guns.) More importantly, as with so many things, when many self-identified conservative Americans speak of "local solutions," what they frequently mean is "states' rights," and specifically the rights of states that tend to support conservative causes and elect Republicans. Of course, employing constitutional language in an incoherent and essentially partisan way is hardly unique to the Republican party--but when it comes to guns, at least here in Kansas, such confusion has a long history, and probably will long continue.

Election Reflections, 2016 (Part 2)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Yes, I know the election was a month ago. What can I say; I needed time to recover from getting everything entirely wrong, didn't I?

1) Except, maybe I didn't quite get everything entirely wrong. I mean, all my predictions were wrong insofar as the national contest was concerned, but here is in Kansas it was a different matter. Governor Brownback's financially blinkered conservative Republican majority in the legislature continued the shrinkage which worried Kansas Republicans began to deliver in the August primaries, with over a dozen new Democratic faces elected, and leaving him overall with perhaps 30 fewer reliable votes in Topeka--not enough to overcome any vetoes he may issue, but enough to cause him serious (and much deserved) headaches. Solidly partisan states like Kansas go through periodic corrections in their dominant parties slowly, so I didn't really expect for much more than than what we saw, but that didn't stop me from being pleased. Certainly, for myself at least, it was a bright spot in an otherwise perplexing night.

2) Bright not simply because, as much as I'm willing to grant validity to the populist concerns that Trump and his followers crudely and clumsily piggy-backed upon, Trump himself--a self-aggrandizing tycoon and political neophyte with a history of narcissistic, undisciplined, self-serving, and sexist behavior-- is an appalling person to be installed in the White House. No, bright also because it provides a small bit of counter-evidence to the depressing reality that many political scientists and journalists coming to document: that local and state politics are driven by national concerns and trends, and not just in terms of the partisan incentives which guide so many seeking office, but also in the awareness of voters themselves. As Craig Ferhman observed "state races correlate largely with presidential politics--whether the voter approves of the president and whether the legislator belongs to the president’s party." So the fact that in a state where registered Republicans outnumber registered Democrats two-to-one, in an election where Trump won beat Clinton by over 20 percentage, we could still see the largest swing against the supporters of an incumbent Republican governor in 25 years, suggests that there still can be circumstances where local and state politics are not entirely dependent upon what party leaders and media bigwigs cook up in Washington D.C.

3) All of which, unfortunately, doesn't change the fact that a clown car is going to arrive in the nation's capital on Friday, January 20, 2017. We've seen indications of what we can expect already--some smart promised appointments, some predictable ones, and others that range from goofy to sleazy to frightening. Tweeting falsehoods late at night, foreign leaders buttering-up to the president-elect's real estate holdings, and trumpeting state-provided tax-breaks as part of his plan to defend the working class (a prospect frustrating to both the left and the right): this is what the election of 2016 has brought us. One of my fellow Front Porch Republic scribes see Trump's victory as signaling, to at least some limited degree, the triumph of "Buchananism," which strikes me as a pleasing prospect only if one is confident that plenty of troops exist to support one's side in the culture war Buchanan so defiantly diagnosed decades ago; furthermore, the notion that Trump's election expresses the Buchananesque, populist, working-class, rural and isolationist sentiment that "our country is a real thing, not just an administrative unit and place holder until the global superstate can unite us all in perpetual peace and harmony" seems to me at least a little like the weird expression of top-down nationalist, patriotic, communitarian optimism that I remember many of us (myself included) being swept up in after 9/11, as President George W. Bush took us on a well-intentioned but atrociously planned and essentially unjustified pious crusade down a Middle Eastern rabbit hole. Under Trump, maybe it'll be East Asia? He's got a head start...


4) The arguments over the flawed political science and predictions (my own most definitely included) which left so many flustered that night and somewhat hysterical in the month since are far from resolved, and academic arguments being what they are, probably won't be for years to come. Obviously race and gender played a role in Trump's election, but what role and to what extent remains a source of dispute. Given Trump's harsh words for undocumented (and, it can't be denied, invariably non-white or non-Christian) residents of the United States, and given Trump's history of words and actions that often appeared to be anything but respectful of women as sexual equals, the assumption that this election would see a massive doubling-down of the coalition (African-Americans, Hispanics, single women, college-educated urban cosmopolitans, etc.) that had a lot of us, eight years ago, thinking about the emergence of a new "liberal America." Well, that didn't happen (though to what degree it didn't happen remains a matter of much dispute). The Obama coalition, for better or worse, didn't show up for his anointed successor, now matter how strongly he pushed for her. Misogyny? Voter restrictions? A case for the explanatory power of both exists, and I don't dismiss them; I want to remain conscious of my own blindness when it comes to evidence for certain explanations that I don't at first see.

5) Beyond the arguments over voter suppression and Clinton's lack of appeal as a candidate to a great many voters, though, there remains, I think, a key transformation in America's political culture that the Democratic party, nationally at least, has still failed to connect with, and which Trump only accidentally benefited from this time around. Until there is a party platform that can really give it life on the national stage, we can't know how pervasive the support for it may be, though the Sanders campaign obviously at least touched upon it. Two years ago, I mused that "There is a different mix of the progressive-libertarian and the populist-egalitarian out there, a different mix of what seems to be done best locally and what needs to happen universally." Keep in mind that, at the very least, overlapping majorities of voters in various states (though not overall) chose embraced the Republican Trump for president, and embraced what most of us would presume to be decidedly non-Republican policy changes by referendum: effective minimum wage increases in five states, and marijuana decriminalization or legalization in eight more. Many people are frustrated by systems--global and governmental--that continue to empower the few and exploit the many; maybe not a majority of the people, at least not everywhere or all the time, but a solid and electorally significant number of people who want change nonetheless. So until such a time that these views can be articulated broadly--and that time may never come; maybe technology and economic stratification have just changed the structures of our political culture too much for parties to perform that work any longer--we just have to put together localist defenses of those programs and opportunities which can allow for those kinds of creative, cooperative changes as best we can. As I concluded my post a month ago: "The localist alternative to federal decline will exist whomever wins tomorrow." Now that we know the winner, our angle of approach, as people concerned with building neighborhoods and communities of real mutual support, should change as needed--but not our direction. My old friend Matt Stannard put it well:

We have to keep building, building, building. Keep creating and converting worker-owned cooperatives. Keep creating and strengthening eco-villages, income-sharing communities, and community land trusts. Keep reminding cities and states that public banks offer independence from a federal government owned by Wall Street. Keep fighting every attempt to privatize the commons. Keep building cooperative culture, local currencies and time exchanges, strong social service networks and resource-sharing programs. Every time we demonstrate that cooperation works, the forces that gave us President-elect Trump lose.

Localists, unite! (I mean, what else can we do until the 2018 midterms, right?)

Three Ways Sam Brownback Could Keep Gay Marriage Illegal in Kansas: Some Free Advice

In the few days since the Supreme Court declined to review the decision of the 10th Circuit Court that Utah’s same-sex marriage ban was unconstitutional, there has been a great deal of talk about how Kansas’s own same-sex marriage ban must fall, since we are under the 10th Circuit’s jurisdiction.

Governor Brownback is, at present, resisting that talk. Referencing the popular vote back in 2005 which defined marriage in the Kansas state constitution so as to exclude gay and lesbian couples, the governor said: “I don't know how much more you can bolster it than to have a vote of the people to put in the constitution that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.”

Well, I’m here to help. I know of three strategies that could bolster Brownback’s insistence on standing metaphorically before county clerks’ offices across the state, refusing entrance to both the interpretations of the federal judiciary, and the gay and lesbians citizens of Kansas who hope their way of life, or at least the domestic side of it, has finally achieved some legal recognition.

1) Invoke the 10th Amendment! This would be the constitutionalist/Tea Party approach. The 10th amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Many legal scholars argue that, with a few notable exceptions, this amendment is mostly a dead letter, especially ever since the American people supported legislation during the Civil Rights movement that empowered the national government to stop individual states from discriminating in education, public accommodations, housing, voting, and–yes–marriage.

Still, that doesn’t mean it can’t be tried. The preferred response by many to the Affordable Care Act–namely, to call for the creation of a multi-state “health care compact” that would operate without federal involvement–already borders on embracing state sovereignty, so it would be interesting to see the Brownback administration pursue that option fully.

2) Abolish marriage! This would be the libertarian approach. Complete the separation of church and state by ending all legal marriage entanglements with all religious bodies in Kansas. If churches want to offer something which they call “marriage” to their followers, they can do so, entirely on their own terms, without any state recognition whatsoever. On the other side of things, if the national or state constitution requires (or if individual legislatures decide) that some provision be made for recognizing any number of different types of couples for tax purposes or reasons of inheritance, custody, etc., the secretary of state’s office can issue a bunch of unceremonious licenses to that effect.

Given the rising influence of libertarian-inclined conservatives, I imagine this approach might result some surprising left-right alliances being formed here in Kansas. But unfortunately for the governor, embracing it would also probably scandalize the social conservatives upon which his re-election probably depends.

3) Secede from the union! This would be the ultimate combination of both the above two approaches. You would shrink the federal government’s influence–and thus the reach of the federal judiciary’s constitutional interpretations--by escaping it entirely, and follow through on the principle of state sovereignty be declaring independence–thus allowing Kansas to define citizenship and marriage as it sees fit. Texas would be so jealous of us getting there first.

I suppose I should note that, as a (late but now firm) supporter of the recognition of same-sex marriages, I am personally opposed to pursuing any of the above responses to the legal actions surely waiting in the wake of the 10th Circuit’s decision--and, more importantly, in the wake of United States v. Windsor. Also, I strongly doubt any of them would be successful anyway. But as a political scientist who enjoys a good argument, and--more importantly--as someone who overall thinks our increasing dysfunctional democratic system needs a serious constitutional challenge, I say: bring them on.

Just Another Day, Just Another Example of Judicial Imperialism

[Cross-posted to Political Context]

This morning the word came down from the Supreme Court: in the matter of Shelby County v. Holder, the landmark (and often-renewed) 1965 law, the Voting Rights Act, survives....but the law's crucial Section 4, which was the formula by used by Congress determined the range and extent of "preclearance" coverage which they'd long judged to be necessary in order to guarantee federal-level protections of minority voting rights against state and local discrimination in certain parts of the country (currently these), is unconstitutional. It no longer matches, in the judgment of five of the nine members of the Supreme Court, the racial realities on the ground (even though in 2006, after an enormous amount of research and testimony and backroom dealmaking, Congress decided that it still did), so it's gone. And that means that Section 5 of the VRA, which is where the whole process of preclearance is spelled out, is essentially defunct. The ability of the federal government to provide some real support to racial minorities who believe they have a legitimate complaint against unfair voting rules is now mostly gone, because five judges wanted to absolve certain states and localities from constitutional obligations in ways which our national legislature had determined they still needed to do.

Absolving states from constitutional obligations? Is that a too-extreme description? Perhaps, a tiny bit--after all, there are other mechanisms in the VRA to enable the federal government to respond to claims of voter discrimination (the means for pressing federal lawsuits on behalf of voters is spelled out in Section 2 of the law), and it is true that most of what the Section 5 has been used to address in recent years as been matter of unfair representation outcomes, rather than actual, direct, voter discrimination (and that, admittedly, has its own problems as well). But on the other hand, the whole reason that Congress came up the preclearance process and a formula for determining what was covered by it in the first place was that making these determinations lawsuit by lawsuit, across thousands of jurisdictions, is incredibly messy, costly, and time-consuming (meaning that it will be usually the marginalized voters who will suffer). Civil rights organizations insist that, with Section 5--and the Section 4 which makes it operable--gone, they will have lost one of their strongest tools for maintain a certain level of equal civic access and representation in this nation. And that is a constitutional concern.

The usual defenses will, of course, be trotted out: times have changed, the South has changed, so shouldn't the Voting Rights Act change as well? That's an excellent question--which is why Congress has to regularly renew the Act. Which it did, after many weeks of testimony and investigation and debate, resulting in some fine-tuning, only seven years ago. (Jacob Levy sees an excellent opportunity for snark here: Justice Scalia, a self-proclaimed textualist who insists that the language of the law doesn't change to fit social realities, signed on to the majority opinion shooting down Section 4 of the law, which concludes its undemocratic decree by simply stating "our country has changed"; this makes Jacob want to ask, "Justice Scalia, when did the evolving standards of the living constitutional text of Amendment 15 section 2, change to make the VRA Section 4 unconstitutional? Can you give me a date on that?") I realize that this is a constant obsession of mine, but that's only because the cause of the obsession has no intention of going away: we have a Supreme Court (and particularly, these days, a pseudo-composite conservative/libertarian/originalist five-judge majority upon it) who are possessed of a certain kind of constitutional fetish, one that leads them to insist far too often that the deliberations of our legislatures, however subject to critique they may be (and believe me, I have many critiques I can make of our Congress!), ought to be not merely reviewed for the sake of addressing specific concerns about ensuring certain constitutional guarantees, but substantively investigated, measured against whatever sociological or ideological or historical predilections happen to possess the nine (or, more usually, some combination of five or more) people currently sitting upon it, and if found wanting, carefully parceled out and then flushed down the toilet. The idea that the U.S. Constitution needs to be kept, as much as possible, unsullied by the messy process of democratic decisionmaking and dealmaking on the federal level strikes me as entirely incompatible with the realities of self-government in a nation like our own--and hence the fact that the animating concern behind Shelby County v. Holder was clearly an overwrought and somewhat twisted devotion to minimal government and state sovereignty is that much more frustrating.

Final words to Justice Ginsberg's strong, calm dissent from this latest bit of depressing news:

After exhaustive evidence-gathering and deliberative process, Congress reauthorized the VRA, including the coverage provision, with overwhelming bipartisan support. It was the judgment of Congress that “40 years has not been a sufficient amount of time to eliminate the vestiges of discrimination following nearly 100 years of disregard for the dictates of the 15th amendment and to ensure that the right of all citizens to vote is protected as guaranteed by the Constitution.” 2006 Reauthorization §2(b)(7), 120 Stat. 577. That determination of the body empowered to enforce the Civil War Amendments “by appropriate legis­lation” merits this Court’s utmost respect. In my judg­ment, the Court errs egregiously by overriding Congress' decision.

True enough. But hey, the term isn't over yet! Let's see what the Supremes will have for us tomorrow.

Brownback's Intriguing (and Possibly Incoherent) Gun Rights Crusade

Last week our governor, Sam Brownback, signed into a law a bill titled "The Second Amendment Protection Act," which the bill's proponents trumpeted as "the strictest Second Amendment protection law in the nation." Others suggested that it was a pointless law, really just political chest-thumping and nothing more. You can read the whole thing here (it's not that long) and make up your own mind; for my part, I think it's kind of a fascinating document--and likely a deeply confused one as well. Let's run through the possibilities:

1) The law is designed to substantially expand the rights of gun owners in Kansas.

The problem here, though, is that the law never really talks about what any of those rights are. It does spend a great deal of time--all of sections 6, 7, and 8 of the law--claiming how, under this Kansas law, "any act, law, treaty, order, rule or regulation of the government of the United States regarding a firearm" will be "null, void and unenforceable in the state of Kansas," but all of that is simply a negative, stating that such and such people or agencies won't be allowed to enforce gun laws; it never actually explains what Kansas gun owners themselves actually have a legal right to do. The closest it comes to actually spelling out anything substantive is when it references the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and section 4 of the Bill of Rights attached to the Kansas Constitution as guaranteeing "the right to keep and bear arms"--but as it does not assert anything beyond those statements (and indeed, it goes out of its way to emphasize a kind of simplistic literalism in reading those words, stating that this right to keep and bear arms exists "as it was understood at the time" in 1861 when Kansas officially became part of the United States), it doesn't provide any way for Kansas gun owners today, in 2013, to know what their legal rights (regarding gun licensing, or or gun usage, or anything else) positively are. They just know that--according to the state of Kansas, anyway--the federal government can't do anything to their guns, pursuant to the 2nd Amendment and the Kansas Bill of Rights. As one commentator put it, all you really get out of this law when it comes to substantive gun rights is that "federal measures that violate the Second Amendment will be ignored in Kansas." Or, in other words, that unconstitutional gun laws will be considered to be unconstitutional gun laws. Not a whole lot of new substantive defenses there.

2) The law aims to deny the authority of the national government when it comes to guns, and possibly much else.

Perhaps this law isn't really about the defending the rights of gun owners at all, but rather is all about attacking the legitimacy--or at least the reach--of the national government, and maybe the U.S. Constitution itself. The sounds extreme, but still, it's hard to come away from reading the lengthy section 2 of this law, with its rather ornate and very literal references to the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution (both of which, according to the law, reserve rights and powers as "a matter of contract between the state and people of Kansas and the United States...as they were understood at the time that the compact with the United States was agreed upon") and not imagine that the authors perhaps wished we were still governed by the Articles of Confederation. Or, if not the Articles, then at least a reading of the Constitution--one that grants to the states the right to nullify and ignore national laws, given that they are only part of the American "compact" by choice--which has regularly been invoked but has never had much lasting political or legal acceptance in all our post-ratification history. (The one arguable exception to that judgment, of course, was the Civil War, when nullification led to its logical conclusion of secession, and that did enjoy a fair amount of support across the American south, until four years of war and over a half-million deaths led to the idea being basically buried for close to a century.) Personally, I'm rather dubious that Brownback himself actually wants the argument over gun rights to become another Nullification Crisis, or for this law to become another Virginia Resolution, or for him to go down in recent American history as a half-baked John Randolph of Roanoke. I would actually have greater respect for him if any of those possibilities were true, but the fact is his overall policy positions don't seem much at all like those which a supposedly committed states-rights localist or classical republican would hold to. There are, I'm sure, old-school conservatives around him who really are committed to challenging over two centuries of fairly consistent constitutional law (I hear you, Caleb!), but I doubt he's one of them.

3) The law is just trying to attract gun jobs to Kansas.

Some of the proponents of this law are convinced that manufacturers of guns and gun components will want to relocate from Colorado or Maryland or wherever else to operate in a "pro-Second Amendment state." The evidence in support of this assertion is weak at best, especially given the fact that this law itself requires some extensive (and possibly expensive) documentation and labeling of any guns or gun components manufactured in Kansas in order to satisfying the requirement that the items in question be "declared by the legislature...[to] have not traveled in interstate commerce." Whether such contortions could prevent the guns in question from being subject to any hypothetical laws justified under the national government's commerce power is unlikely and at this point impossible to know. More curiously though, it's worth noting that this aim conflicts with the previous one. After all, if you're really trying to draw gun jobs from across the national marketplace to your own state, then presumably you can't really at the same time believe in challenging (or even just getting around) the national government's authority, since it is that authority which makes possible a national marketplace in the first place. A country of state-by-state nullification is also a country which would likely have diverse, state-by-state banking and currency systems, taxation and investment regulations, and quite possibly even internal tariffs. (Many of which characterized life in American under the Articles of Confederation.) I suspect that there is an unreflected-upon intellectual tension here inside the Kansas Republican party. On the one hand, there are a handful of Tea Party quasi-populists who truly embrace the idea of "small government," understanding that to mean leaving government power in local and state hands so as to protect economic sovereignty from overarching national agendas; on the other hand, there are a handful of committed libertarians who also truly desire "small government," but in their case understand that to mean a low-tax, minimal-regulation national government that will enable the marketplace to flourish free from any obstacles...including the priorities of local developers and industries. You can't really satisfy both these groups at the same time, though it may be that some of the superficial thinkers behind The Second Amendment Protection Act somehow think they can.

4) The law simply signals an allegiance to conservative voters, rallying them to Brownback's cause.

So this brings us back to this rather cynical, but also likely, explanation for the law. Obviously, the politics of anything which allows a Republican legislator in Kansas to label themselves as more pro-gun than their hypothetical opponent is easy to understand. Probably Brownback & Co. don't actually have any new and brilliant legal arguments to expand the protections to individual gun owners already provided by the 2nd Amendment and by the Kansas Constitution; probably Governor Brownback (perhaps unlike some true believers around him) isn't really all that enamored of the idea of a radical, Constitution-challenging, states rights/nullification crusade; and probably it's a given that, realistically, gun manufacturers are going to make their decision on the basis of economic conditions and workforce availability, not on the basis of how much the state government claims to be able to legally defend their products. If so, that leaves us with the plain truth that uninformed defenders of gun rights--and reflexive Republican opponents of anything the President Obama has spoken in favor of (including a few fairly reasonable gun control measures)--will probably love this law, no matter how lacking in substance or motivationally incoherent it may be. This law essentially comes from the same place as those posters put up at gun shows and shooting ranges thanking Obama for the great work he's done as a gun salesman. Brownback and his allies may not have any real alternative in mind to our current constitutional order, and most of them almost surely don't want one anyway, but they surely politically benefit from making as though they believe (as some no doubt genuinely do) there is a constitutional crisis at hand regarding gun rights. What more explanation do you need for this strange document than that?

The Kansas GOP has Thought Itself Out of Another Good Politician

[This is a submission to the Wichita Eagle; we'll see if they take it. Update, 9/7/2012, 1:00pm CST: a shortened version of the article was printed in the Eagle here.]

When state Senator Jean Schodorf read the article in Sunday’s Wichita Eagle about her announcement that she’s leaving the Kansas Republican Party, and saw herself quoted as saying “There’s no room [in the party] for people who actually think in moderation,” she probably shrugged her shoulders, figuring that informed readers will understand what she meant.

And of course, they will. After losing her place in the party in last month’s primary election to the strongly conservative Michael O'Donnell, essentially for failing–at least in the eyes of many riled-up, activist voters–to be sufficiently committed to the hard-right, pseudo-libertarian-constitutionalist ideology which Governor Sam Brownback has helped to triumph over Kansas’s long-standing moderate conservative faction, her frustration with the lack of respect in today’s Republican party for “moderation” in government is obvious.

Those happy about Schodorf’s defeat will chuckle over her word choice, which suggests that the party doesn’t welcome those people (presumably like her!) who think too much. And those frustrated with a Republican party now cleansed of many of Kansas’s traditionally moderate voices will point to her departure from the GOP as evidence of the reality of her meaning.

But before the news cycle moves entirely beyond this misquote, let me make an observation on its behalf. I think that Schodorf unintentionally made an important point about the role of “think[ing] in moderation” in our political system.

Our national government, and our state governments, follow a separation-of-powers model of democracy, not a parliamentary one. That is, we have different branches of government, filled with representatives who are elected on different cycles. Strong party unity, an essential feature of successful parliamentary democracies (where the whole legislature and executive is elected at one time), has been only an occasional feature of our system; the incentives which motivate politicians rarely point in the direction of strong ideological uniformity.

Recognizing this fact, generations of political leaders in the U.S., on both the national and the state level, have developed practices to make the “checks and balances” of our system into an invitation to compromise. Real statesmen and women, throughout our history, have almost invariably been pragmatic deal-makers, who borrowed ideas as appropriate to craft legislation that could both address real political problems and minimally satisfy all the different politicians needed to pass the bill. Almost never has any elected party governed effectively over real political problems while also pushing forward a unified ideological agenda.

The Republican Party today, nationally as well as here in Kansas, has become a vehicle for a small group of wealthy, determined people who are enamored of just such a unified ideological agenda. Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney may not represent that movement terribly well, but his VP pick, Rep. Paul Ryan, a self-described intellectual and devotee of Ayn Rand, certainly does. Brownback, with his embrace of the supply-side economics of Arthur Laffer, does as well. And those high-paying interest groups which rolled out all sorts of ads to convince Kansas voters that Schodorf was on the wrong side of a desperate ideological struggle against impending socialism–they don’t just reflect that movement, they embody it.

Whether one likes or hates this anti-government agenda, one can’t deny that it is simply besotted with ideas. It is a movement which insists that one must get one’s thoughts right: get them in line with the Founding Fathers (or a small select portion of them, at least), in line with Ronald Reagan (the popular myth of him, that is, not the actual historical record), in line with a certain understanding of the purported anti-Americanism of the Obama administration.

The problem with all this high-end ideological thinking, however captivating it may to those engaged in it, is that it doesn’t match the structure of our system. Our form of democratic government almost never works properly if those elected to power see themselves as intellectual revolutionaries. The separation-of-powers, if it works at all, works best when elected representatives are willing to “moderate” their thinking at times, and get pragmatic, practical, solution-oriented, and compromise for the sake of getting things done.

It is possible that this particular intellectual crusade, unlike almost every other previous one, will actually be good at solving real-world problems, at negotiating differences and finding effective compromises. I have my doubts, though. When Schodorf talked about the need to “think in moderation,” she wasn’t just making a point about the need for sensible, balancing voices in government, she was also unintentionally pointing out that, under our system, ideological pre-occupations and litmus tests rarely keep the gears of government–the paychecks for soldiers, the refunds of taxes, the parks and schools and roads–in working order. For that, you need practical people, not Constitution-waving fanatics. Schodorf, a smart and experienced political leader, understood that. I strongly suspect that relatively few of this new bunch of Republican winners here in Kansas who identify with this latest purifying movement do as well.

Ill Fares the Land of Kansas

Frequently over the years, but especially since Thomas Frank's bestseller What's the Matter with Kansas came out, my adopted state has been written off by various secular and liberal writers across the United States as zealous backwater, a place run by religious fundamentalists and fanatics that have purposely chosen to keep Kansas impoverished and unenlightened for the sake of protecting doctrinal purity. Despite my sympathy for Frank's politics, I never liked his thesis, nor those of many others who have repeated it: it's condescending and reductive take on the people who live here, one that fails to respect their own actual reasons for voting the way they do. But as of this morning, I have to give Frank & Co. some credit: they got the bit about zealotry and doctrinal purity right--only not exactly in the way they might have assumed.

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback came into office with the explicit intention of pushing our state's moderate conservative status quo in some extreme directions. He wasn't alone in doing this; he had our congressional delegation on his side, and the Kansas House of Representatives, and powerful interest groups like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the Kansas Chamber of Commerce--given the weakness of the state Democratic party, really only the Kansas Senate, which remained in the hands of moderate Republicans, stood in his way. Ultimately, though, that didn't slow him down much. The Tea Party-motivated conservative caucus mostly fawned when Browback's team brought supply-side guru Arthur Laffer to town, selling his (completely discredited) gospel of how an abandonment by government of public responsibilities will result in a surging, libertarian economic paradise. Our governor, piggy-backing on Laffer's ideas, pressed forward with an extreme plan to lower income taxes, gut or privatize social services, and radically change the relationship between Kansas citizens and the state they have built. He didn't get everything he wanted--he failed (for now) in his push to move the developmentally disabled off the state's Medicaid program and into the hands of private insurers, for example--but he got enough, signing into law yesterday massive tax cuts (which he and state house had outmaneuvered the senate into passing) that will reduce state revenues by nearly $4 billion over the next five years. Given that Kansas is prohibited by its state constitution from producing anything but a balanced budget, and given the political reality that Brownback and his devoted co-religionists will make any further change income taxes next to impossible, this means only one of two things: devastating further cuts to education and social service funding (the local school district here in Wichita will likely lose over $100 million alone), or property tax increases to desperately attempt to contain the hemorrhaging. Probably we'll get both.

Just what kind of gospel is it that holds to a frankly mad idea that will likely result in our state government, under pressure from public schools and state courts, raiding essential highway funds and watching its credit ratings tumble as we potentially head towards California-level fiscal dysfunction? Could it be called a "conservative" ideology? I suppose if you define a word as meaning whatever you want it to mean, you could call it that. But of course, it isn't, not really: "conservatism," if it means anything, should mean prudence, and preserving that which has been accomplished. And Brownback's drive to break down and cut back and privatize the operations of the state, all to make possible enormous business-friendly giveaways (and which will have minimal to almost non-existent benefits for the working poor), is hardly prudent. So what is it? My own local congressional representative, Republican Mike Pompeo, perhaps unintentionally clarified this religion when he described his ideology as a "leave-us-alone conservatism." That desire to be left alone leads in the direction of remaining socially and fiscally untouched, unrecruited, unobligated--what Tony Judt called, in his last book before he passed away, "The Cult of the Private." In the face of a state government which has demonstrated again and again a near-fanatical devotion to a gospel of individualism, independence, austerity, privatization, market triumphalism, and self-help, I can't do better than to just quote from Judt here: 

The reduction of "society" to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers....Governments that are too weak or discredited to act through their citizens are more likely to seek their ends by other means: by exhorting, cajoling, threatening, and ultimately coercing people to obey them. The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually increases the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state.

There is nothing mysterious about this process: it was described by Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be "disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality." By eviscerating public services and reducing them to network of farmed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state. As for the dust and powder of individuality: it resembles nothing so much as Hobbes's war of all against all, in which life for many people has once again become solitary, poo, and more than a little nasty (Ill Fares the Land, pp. 118-119).

Brownback, Pompeo, and the rest of Kansas's emergent conservative Republican majority would, of course, deny this: they would insist that it is they who are truly supporting the traditional "conservative" cause of defending the communitarian, cooperative, and charitable power of churches, neighborhoods, and families by trying to get government off their backs. And admittedly, it is a little strange to see a social democrat like Judt quote Burke, the patron saint of traditional conservatives. But there is a real logic behind what he is doing. Our governor, and our congressional delegation, and all of Kansas today, is not (however much some might want it to be) the agrarian world of limited technology and established churches which Burke knew. We are--even here in Kansas!--a highly mobile and diverse place, deeply implicated in an economy of change and "creative destruction," as the economic Joseph Schumpeter put it (and as any Wichitan who has followed the ups and downs of the aerospace industry can tell you!). In such a world, people have democratically organized themselves to provide, through state institutions and taxation, social goods that, at one time--before modern hospitals, before the interstate highway system, before globalization and multiculturalism--churches and families provided to communities that were much more stable, local, homogenous, and limited than ours today.

In other words, in today's late capitalist world, the operations of the state are themselves the trusted forms of community support--and moreover, Judt feels at least, the only ones which are genuinely capable of dealing with our diverse and disparate lives. To attack the state, then, is not the way to conserve what is best about the state of Kansas; it is, rather a way to break it apart, to reduce even further those feelings of trust and attachment which still remain across our state. Look at it this way: if taxes and systems of common provision, which were once the shared reality of everyone from Topeka to Wichita to Dodge City, are to be seen wholly as an interference is the lives of individuals who prefer to be left alone, exactly what would be this "Kansas" thing that you claim to be trying to serve and conserve? Certainly it wouldn't be a state in the "traditional" sense--but then, the evidence points toward Brownback & Co.'s conservatism being anything but traditional conservatives. Business-friendly free-marketers perhaps, economic libertarians maybe...but not conservatives, not unless conservatism has suddenly come to mean the individualistic "take care of yourself" rather than the community-oriented "let's build something together."

To be sure, Judt's analysis of the culture- and community-conserving role of the state may seem perverse to many, and there are many ways in which his consideration of politics today doesn't fit Kansas at all. (For one thing, like many secularists, he assumes that religion can't truly bind people together in ways that serve diverse needs; he really ought to have read some Lew Daly on faith-based initiatives to gotten straight on this point.) And it is possible to read the business-besotted libertarianism of our governor as only the first step towards the revival of a genuine Jeffersonian localism--but that would assume that he and his supporters in the state government also have a plan to break up our large city centers, to wean our farmers off subsidies and diversify agriculture with a return to small and mid-sized farms, to reduce outward migration (and resist immigration), to restrict and reduce the size of corporations, to accept local limits upon our production and wealth, and to greatly democratize our politics and our economic policies. If I could actually believe that Brownback's aim was to generate a kind of localist revival here in Kansas, with real attention being paid to economic sovereignty and democratic participation and freeing us from the grips of global capitalism, I might look more kindly upon his efforts to starve the state. But given that this whole risky plan has been conveyed with promises of "growth" and "job creation," and has been identified from the very beginning as being in agreement with the agenda of interest groups very much in the pocket of powerful business corporations, all that seems unlikely. So even if you don't agree with the criticisms someone like Judt lodges against this oppose-the-state mentality (remember, as Governor Brownback himself commented as he signed the tax cut bill, his "faith" is in "people of Kansas"--not the government which, those people, you know, put him in charge of), the one thing you can't deny is that it's not any kind of conservatism at all. It is, instead, a rather intense, individualistic religious conviction. Pity Kansas for having unintentionally fulfilled Frank's warning, and given so much power to bunch of rather intense true believers.