What Hath Bernie (Ideologically) Wrought?

[The online magazine Current asked me to write something about Bernie Sanders, so I did. This is a slightly longer, slightly different, and more personal version of that essay. Consider it my benediction on the first genuine passion for a presidential candidate I have ever experienced as a voting, adult citizen--that is, a benediction on my own weirdly populist/localist/communitarian take on the Bern.]

With President Biden strongly pushing for trillions of dollars in covid relief, infrastructure building, education funding, health care support, and more, the support his progressive agenda has enjoyed both among his fellow Democrats and in national polls has been seen by many as at least partly the result of Senator Bernie Sanders’s transformative runs for the presidency. The argument is that Biden, because of his reputation as pragmatic centrist and a reliable member of the Democratic party establishment, can move forward with essentially the same rather radical (and mostly quite popular!) agenda which Sanders developed in a way that Sanders himself, with his proud “democratic socialist” self-identification and his independent (though inconsistent) refusal to ever formally join the Democratic party, never could have. As The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch put it, repurposing the old saw about how President Nixon’s anti-communism made it politically possible for him to open up diplomatic relations with communist China, “Only Biden Can Go to Norway.” 

For those who view ideologies as tools, with moral principles and social theories packaged together solely for the purpose of advancing political policies, this is fine. In fact, they might even say it’s the best possible result: radical ideas becoming sufficiently normalized that someone without any attachment to the socialistic ideology through which they were articulated (which certainly describes Biden) can advance them under a different label entirely! Arguably, that's the story of all radicalism movements in American history. But for those whose commitment to their ideological preferences is great enough for them to persevere through opposition and actually shape those ideas in the first place--and obviously, for anyone who has read the stuff I write more than just once over the years, this is where I would intellectually situate myself--this kind of result may generate ambivalence.

Sanders himself is not at all ambivalent about Biden’s efforts thus far: he fully supports them and hopes to build upon them further. Among the aforementioned true believers though, or at least a few of them, this complicates Sanders’s relationship to the ideological package which he has trumpeted more successfully than any other American politician since Eugene V. Debs a century ago. If Sanders’s “democratic socialism” is the sort of thing which he can endorse as being effectively, if not entirely, advanced by an American president with no interest in socialist analysis and no intention of thoroughly democratizing wealth in America, then just what was the ideological distinction of his socialist claims in the first place?

The responses to this question range from those on the left who insist Sanders was never a true socialist anyway (and thus is a distraction), to those on the right who are delighted to paint Biden’s progressive liberalism with the same socialist accusation they’ve employed against Democrats for close to a century (and thus should be denounced). In the midst of these responses, though, there is the fact that over the years of Sanders’s presidential campaigns there have been significant increases in the number of Americans who sympathize with socialist goals, and an increase in the number of arenas—both local and national, both strictly economic and broadly cultural—within which this sympathy has been expressed. The growth of the Democratic Socialists of America—a “multi-tendency organization” with significant differences between its hundreds of chapters, an organization which has prominently benefited from Sanders’s campaigns, despite his never having joined it—is perhaps the most emblematic example, but it isn’t the only one. (As a long-time member of the DSA, my opinions here are obviously less than neutral!)

Those who insist upon a definition of socialism which preserves the historical materialism of Karl Marx—that is, that socialism must involve a collectivization of the economy, one achieved through the actions of the working class (making use of captured state power, at least under most construals of Marxism)—the lack of ideological rigor in these various calls for “equity” or “fairness” or “justice” may be annoying, to say the least. As part of a long, thoughtful essay, full of genuine (if often back-handed) praise of the Democratic Socialists of America, author Frederik deBoer expressed doubt that “the average DSA member could give you a coherent definition of what ‘democratic socialism’ even is,” but also reflected that while the those who identity with socialist causes today haven’t accomplished much on their own terms, “neither has Black Lives Matter, or MeToo, or any group (or individual) which has participated in this confused and substance-free ‘social revolution’ we are supposedly living in.” This is, to be sure, a rather cynical take on political developments of the past half-decade—yet it also touches on something vital, which makes deBoer's insight relevant. Specifically, it points us toward the question of how seriously we should take the likely connection between Sanders’s radical insistence (given the realities of American politics) upon the validity of “democratic socialism,” whatever its ideological inconsistencies, and the broad emergence of groups and causes which, in their own sometimes anarchic ways, similarly embraced a democratizing aim. (Yes, it's easy to point, as counter-evidence, to conflicts between Sanders and Black Lives Matter protesters on the campaign trail, or the serious limits in African-American support for his candidacy, or the declarations of right-wing pundits that Sanders's radicalism had nothing to do with--or at least has "lost control of"--the anti-establishment energy of 2020. But all that is marginal, I think, when compared to the indisputable connection which BLM and other radical leaders and thinkers and activist organizations posited between what Sanders represented and was trying to do, and what they want to see happen.)

The scientific socialism of Marx presented the alienating effects of concentrated socio-economic power as something that could only be smashed through revolutionary action. Later thinkers saw that this revolutionary logic did not reflect the actual socio-economic developments of the industrial world, and argued that socialism could be build electorally in the midst of the marketplace—which is what gave us “democratic socialism” (and later “social democracy,” such as is well represented by countries like Norway, and by the Sanders—and arguably the current Biden!—platform).

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright, however, suggested that socialists should see the obstacles to the democratization of wealth as something that can be “eroded” as well as smashed or tamed. How? By building and advocating for alternatives “interstitially.” Wright acknowledged that focusing on the many different ways in which social goods can be produced and distributed besides the capitalist marketplace—including “within the intimate relations of families; through community-based networks and organizations; by cooperatives owned and governed democratically by their members; though nonprofit market-oriented organizations; through peer-to-peer networks engaged in collaborative production processes,” etc.—would not be sufficient to accomplish the aims of socialism; instead “we need a way of linking the bottom-up, society-centered strategic vision of anarchism with the top-down, state-centered strategic logic of social democracy.” Nonetheless, the relationship between the two are vital; writing in an article in Jacobin published before his death, he argued that it is through such open-ended and organic associational efforts that we can “get on with the business of building a new world—not from the ashes of the old, but within the interstices of the old.”

The democratic socialist banner which Sanders has long inspired people with is obviously far more on the social democratic side than the anarchic one. And yet, it would also be simply perverse to claim that Sanders’s constant emphasis on income inequality and worker disempowerment had no relevance whatsoever to the explosion of interest of late in diverse radical movements for recognition and justice, or—especially during the pandemic—cooperative efforts to provide mutual aid. Whether obvious or not, that relevance, it seems to me, always eventually emerges. Michael Harrington, the founder of Democratic Socialists of America, towards the end of a decades-long engagement with socialist debates, concluded in his final book that socialism had to move towards a “decentralized conception of its goal”—going so far as to ask if a “socialist republicanism” was possible (Socialism: Past and Future, p. 277). (And if an organizer like Harrington doesn't persuade you, maybe the late in life discovery of decentralization by the Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen can.) Perhaps looking back historically over the Sanders’s ideological impact on the 2010s will similarly oblige us to recognize that his greatest accomplishment wasn’t in serving as the fulcrum by which the mainstream of the Democratic party was made comfortable with certain (re-named!) democratic socialist ideas, but as having helped bring into the mainstream a fruitful, disparate mess of radicalisms, all of which are busy promoting their own alternative democratizing visions.

In his essay “Bernie Sanders’s Five-Year War,” a detailed but also touching retrospective on what Sanders meant for many of those of us on the left, Matt Karp observed: “If Bernie Sanders was not fated to be the Abraham Lincoln of the twenty-first-century left, winning a political revolution under his own banner, he may well be something like our John Quincy Adams—the ‘Old Man Eloquent’ whose passionate broadsides against the Slave Power in the 1830s and 1840s inspired the radicals who toppled it a generation later.” This is, I think, is correct. I firmly supported Sanders, but probably more because I could see in his campaigns an ideological richness, a genuine multiplicity of possibilities--both  egalitarian and localist as well as even conservative or Christian--that extended far beyond the neoliberal homo economicus which remains too often our default today, than because I wanted him to win. That is, I wanted his ideas to win, and that means for his ideological construct to expand and multiply and flourish. To see ideological constructs such as that which Sanders long employed (and still does!) as static and linear is to perhaps misunderstand the organic character of ideological constructs in general. Yes, Bernie Sanders failed to win the presidency--but still, he didn’t fail to fertilize, with his words and actions, long moribund ideas in America. The diverse, disparate ideological growths in his wake will likely be with us for a while yet. Or so I hope, anyway.

Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

For ten years now, I've been teaching one version or another of a class on personal simplicity and economic and environmental sustainability here at Friends University, a formerly Quaker, non-denominational Christian, small liberal arts college in Wichita, KS. Though I teach at a religious university, I don't teach religion myself--and for that reason, I at first doubted that Jennifer Ayres's Inhabitance: Ecological Religious Education would much that would be pedagogically relevant to me, despite my strong sympathy with her subject matter. In this, I was partly wrong. While Ayres's book includes many intriguing (and a few borderline outrageous) educational suggestions, its greatest value to me as a teacher is the way it inspires me to take stock of what I've tried to do with with my sustainability class, and to perhaps rethink what my primary goals in that course should be.

My original aim in the design of this class--about which I've probably shared my thoughts about too many times already--was always primarily getting students out of the classroom and into the growing, producing, fecund Kansas ecosystems all around us, showing them that there are patterns of life that can keep people fed and housed and happy without committing oneself to the rat race. It shouldn't have been a shock to me, after I'd lived in Kansas for a few years, to realize how many of my students really had no connection with farming or food systems--but it was, nonetheless. Sometimes broad popular stereotypes about "living in the heartland" would be confirmed as I talked with the students taking the class, and some of them would end up taking the lead in teaching me about cattle ranching or winter wheat or regenerative agriculture. But more often than not, my own agricultural background, limited as it is, nonetheless greatly eclipsed theirs. And so I figured that, whatever else I might be able to communicate to my students about Wendell Berry or John Woolman, I should at the very least get them out of the city and take them to some farms--as well as urban farmers markets and community gardens and other kinds of local sustainable business operations, perhaps going so far as to work on one of our own.

In doing all of that, I'd like to think I've been fairly successful, at least insofar as the "getting them out of Wichita" part is concerned. Even in the midst of the worst of the pandemic last summer and fall, different butchers and ranchers and food producers were willing to sacrifice some of their busy days to let students--majors in Conservation Science, Health Science, History & Politics, and more--come and tour their land, their independent meatpacking processing operations, their homemade tomato and lettuce greenhouses, their cheese-making and milk processing facilities, and so much more. These kinds of experiences don't, I'll be the first to admit, necessarily provide the students with the sort of detailed know-how necessary for them to develop more sustainable practices in their own lives. But as Ayres herself insists, knowledge about one's ecological surroundings are only the tip of the iceberg; as she writes, "Cultivating [the] capacity for inhabitance"--which she defines as "seeking to know and love and particular place in some detail and honoring its [ecological] rhythms, limits, and possibilities"--"requires personal and social transformation at a level far deeper than that of figuring out ‘greener solutions'" (pp. 3, 17). Thus the aim of those who aspire to "educate for inhabitance"--which I realized, in reading this book, clearly describes me--has to involve figuring out ways to engage the affections of others, their bodies and appetites and emotions and creative imaginations. If that seems intuitively true, it may be simply because philosophers from Aristotle to Polanyi have consistently argued that nothing can so engage people as real tactile experience, and real practical work. So far as that goes...as I said, I think I've done fairly well on the first, though not so much on the second.

To be clear: any success I've had with the first has to be attributed, first and foremost, to having an exemplar to draw upon, and becoming friends with Leroy Hershberger--a mechanic, handy-man, cook, juggler, bicyclist, and born story-teller, all with a degree from Yale--a decade ago has made all the difference in my life and the life of so many of my students. Some of them from years before have told me that dinners at the Hershbergers were one of the highlights of their entire college education. They remember well Leroy's glorious beard (that he shaved it off during the pandemic came as profound shock of several of them!), the kind words of his mother Mary, the inquisitive questions of his father William (who passed away at the age of 80 during the pandemic; Leroy's tribute to his father was touching, kind, and wise), and most of all the joy the whole Hershberg family take in being able to introduce young people a life more focused on the land, on real material productivity, and in that way a whole ecosystem--both ecological and economic, to say nothing of also spiritual--that exists and enlivens the worldview of many outside the hustle and bustle of our urban college campus.

I've sometimes been challenged--or, indeed, given the vicissitudes of trying to do my part to not just educate students but also keep my tuition-driven college campus alive and functioning, sometimes I have challenged myself--as to the real "outcomes" of this class and these excursions. Am I trying to turn my students into farmers, into rural proprietors and local producers? If so, why, and am I at all successful at it anyway? Every educator in today's late capitalist world confronts those questions of metrics and assessments at one point or another, and it's hard for me to conceive of anyone serious about the teaching profession who doesn't recognize the harmful framing they introduce into the very idea of paideia--that is, of the formation of the human person which a proper education should involve.

That may not mean that such questions can--much less should--be simply dismissed as irrelevant; our students live in this late capitalist world too, and are looking to find ways to discover livelihoods, relationships, and most of all places of productive inhabitance within it. If we as teachers provide no bridge from the formation we hope to introduce to their affections to the challenges facing them upon the conclusion of their education, then we haven't served them well at all. Ayres reminds me of all this, with wise comments on matters of both paideia (which she presents as an acknowledgement of the communities within which we are formed, and the responsibility of constructive critique which community membership must entail--p. 62) and place (which she defines as any location which, through human inhabitation, "is imbued with meaning, with histories, and [most crucially] with contestations"--p. 88). Creating, through my classes, opportunities for my students to come face-to-face, and hand-to-hand, with people like the Hershbergers and dozens of others who have exemplified simpler and more sustainable forms of life hopefully also gives them 1) a model of the love of place, and 2) the incentive to recognize, come to know, and thereby carefully--but unsparingly--critique their own places. 

Do I imagine that such incentives and models will automatically transform my students into ecologically, environmentally, agriculturally informed inhabitants of wherever they live? Obviously not, especially since my own inhabitation still falls short in so many ways. But life is long, and beginning students along a path scattered with seeds for reflection, fits in, again, with the kind of trust in the slow pace of creation which Ayers speaks of eloquently:

[S]low knowledge is the kind of knowledge necessary for an ecologically conscious person or community. It is cultivated together and shared, is deeply related to the context in which it is nurtured, and acknowledges--indeed, embraces--human limitations....[M]ost importantly, it demands human patience and attentiveness. It will not be rushed. In the not rushing, in the attentiveness, wisdom is cultivated and inoculates human consciousness against the seductions of technological progress and the quick fix....

In formal education settings, the push toward more content coverage and measurable success makes the proposal of slowing down, reading less, and reflecting more somewhat of a pedagogical and institutional risk. In religious communities, "slow learning" meets other institutional pressures: in a season of anxiety about declining religious affiliations and lackluster participation in education programs, religious and educational leaders might be seduced by slick curriculum packets that promise effortless preparation and meaning engagement with learners. The principle of slow knowledge, however would suggest that efficiency and meaning are sometimes at cross-purposes. Meaning takes time (pp. 72-73).

The relevance of ecological language to the slow formation of ideas, in the lives of students or parishioners or anyone else, contrary to what Ayres calls--learning heavily on Berry, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Wes Jackon, David Orr, and many others--the "uncritical embrace of the efficiencies and networking capacities of technology" (p. 4) should be obvious. Equally obvious is how committing to the enacting of that slow formation--such as by growing a garden--can only strengthen that relevance. But that, of course, is where things get exponentially harder. It is one thing, in the midst of whirlwind of experiences that make up a college education, to get students to pause for an hour, or a day, or maybe even longer, and enable them to put their hands on the soil and the food and the people who can provide them with real models of belonging and critique. It is an entirely different thing to commit students to fill up that pause with the daily, weekly, monthly work of growing things in a garden, and to be able to see and, eventually, taste the results of their own re-orientation.

For close to a decade, many of us here at Friends have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to commit our students--and ourselves!--to projects requiring some genuine husbandry in a garden space on our campus. Sometimes there have been real successes, and sometimes the space has lain almost entirely forgotten for an academic year (or more). The space in general has much improved since the early conversations about it, and the first rush of enthusiasm to transform what was a vacant lot beside a student housing complex. But an entirely sustainable component of Wichita's local food system--much less even just Friend University's!--the garden is absolutely not. It remains, month in and month out, dependent upon the vision and determination of a few of us, and the occasional student or two or five who find ways to make the time spent working in the garden satisfy either their own personal commitments or their academic responsibilities or both. But even in those happy situations, we'll likely only have a season or two from the students in question: they are, after all, young people, seeking to gain the learning (and the certification of having received such) that will enable them to find their own place, and make their own commitments, on their own schedule, not necessarily Mother Nature's. So we make the most of the seasons we have, and continue to try our best to get the carrots and arugula and potatoes to grow, in the same way I try my best to make my classes spark agrarian and ecological ideas that might never have occurred to the students before. Sometimes, it all works. And when it doesn't, we trust in God's grace and the fecundity of both the Kansas soil and the college student's mind, and try again.

That kind of attitude is always going to be dispiriting to some. They might look at Ayres's book and note that she hardly ever addresses the complex structural forces which likely make it difficult for an education in inhabitance to translate into the creation care she considers imperative. The same criticism could made of the three-credit hour college class I teach once a year at a not-especially-notable Christian college in the middle of Kansas, of course: how is that really addressing the obstacles to inhabitance. But as utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" it may seem, that doesn't mean we still can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind. Or at least I do--and I thank Ayres for reminding me of that ideal. She is a teacher speaking to other teachers, like me. She is urging, through her book, those of us who have grasped the imperative of seeking to cultivate a greater concern for ecological and economic and spiritual sustainability to “envision...a way of inhabitance that may not yet be entirely possible,” holding on to the faith that the communities we might be building through our teaching “can imagine and do and become that which one person cannot on their own” (p. 129). Perhaps "envisioning for inhabitation" isn't a bad goal for my class, as I take it into its next decade.

Eight Inter-Connected Observations about Complexity, Liberty, and the City of Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

1) Cities are complex systems—that is, they are places where different groups of people organize, worship, trade, celebrate, work, and simply live in close proximity to each other, all in different ways and with different goals in mind. In other words, cities are pluralistic, with different sectors and levels all interacting in complex ways. Obviously not all cities are equally pluralistic and complex—the size of the city matters, its economic and racial and religious and regional history matters, and the way it is governed matters. Still, the one common feature of every modern city--meaning every built community that isn’t a rural village and exists in the wake of the democratic and industrial revolutions of the 18^th and 19^th centuries--no matter what its relative size or history or location or politics, is simply this: its day-to-day operation is a complex, and by no means necessarily automatic, matter.

2) That doesn’t mean a large portion of what happens in any given city on any given street on any given day isn’t significantly automatic, because in a healthy city an awful lot of it will be. This was the crucial insight of Jane Jacobs, probably the most famous observer of cities in the 20^th century: that in the midst of the “seeming disorder” of the city, you actually have “an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”  But Jacobs also insisted that the natural emergence of this “orderly whole” depended on putting in place (or removing out of place) the basic tools (or the basic obstacles) which cities require (or inevitably, unfortunately, produce). Call it a matter of putting in place, or enabling city residents themselves to put in place, good “infrastructure,” broadly defined, and get rid of the bad.

3) However, a lot of Americans, including a lot of Kansans, and perhaps especially a lot of Wichitans, have an ideological resistance to complex operations. They tend to believe that dealing with complexity, with the problems of good and bad infrastructure (the construction and renovation of roads, the maintenance and evaluation of schools, the expansion and restriction of police departments, etc.), is always going to result in someone, somewhere, capturing some resource that will enable them to limit someone else’s choices. This isn’t entirely incorrect: while the economic and social opportunities of city life have long been empowering and thus freedom-expanding to many, it’s also true that people under complex systems are often subject to--in the words of Louis Wirth, an early 20^th-century urban sociologist--“manipulation by symbols and stereotypes managed by individuals working from afar or operating invisibly behind the scenes.” In other words, when things get complex, it’s easy not to know who is really making decisions, or to think that you’re in control of your choices when actually you’re not. So any society that takes individual dignity seriously has to recognize this, and work to make certain that the liberties provided by cities don’t crowd out those of the other type.

4) In our city, however, this structural dynamic is often flipped on its head, with those urban forces that push for the expansion of economic and social opportunities—including those involving environmental sustainability, civic health, democratic accountability, and more—having to prove themselves again and again against a less-complex, more libertarian default. Since Wichita is, in fact, a genuine metropolitan (if mid-sized) area, and simply isn’t—despite the convictions of many of its residents—a small town where (as my city councilmember, Bryan Frye, optimistically but, I think, incorrectly put it) everyone is only “one degree of separation” separated from everyone else, the reality of pluralism, and the need to deal with its complexities (whether through parties or procedures or some combination thereof) cannot be denied. Still, such denial is common, and thanks to the influence of major city players like the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Policy Institute, and most of all Koch Industries, it is likely to continue to form a conceptual stream that those who engage city issues will have to struggle with.

5) That struggle has taken and will take many forms; I don’t mean to suggest that this is the secret history of every and any city controversy. (To believe that—that is, to believe, for example, that Charles Koch alone is solely responsible for Wichita’s profoundly underfunded street repair and public transit systems, despite evidence which might support that conclusion—would in itself constitute another form of denial of Wichita’s ideological complexity.) Depending on the issue and context, the disposition of so many in Wichita against urban complexity and in favor of a simplistic historical or market liberty may be more obvious or less so. On the more obvious side, you have the anti-government responses whenever city leaders suggest encouraging transportation alternatives or citizen groups advocate against the overuse of non-recyclable plastic bags. Or you have the fact that, when confronted with declining tax revenues or questionable management, the privatization of city resources—golf courses, the ice rink, or Century II itself—always seems to be preferred, as opposed to re-organizing or cutting back on the sort of services typically more valued by those with a property-centric libertarian perspective.

6) A less obvious manifestation of this perspective might be the way in which concerns about democratic accountability (that is, the ideal that anything the government does will reflect something that at least some portion of citizens actually want to have done), whether expressed in the context of political parties or city regulations or national polls, seems like a needless complication, an additional demand that gets in the way of simple, individual liberty. This is probably a stretch on my part, but when I look at a recent attack upon a fairly anodyne column of mine, it’s what first comes to mind.

7) To focus on that attack just for a moment (click through and read it if you’d like; I’ll wait), consider: why would implying, as I did, that challenging the use of the term “democracy” when thinking about the legitimacy of governmental actions was a distraction itself constitute “a disgraceful attempt to get people to accept [my] version of reality”? The version of reality which the author insists I am foisting upon my unsuspecting students and the reading public is that version wherein a constitutional republic like ours, one with elections, representative legislatures, and the bedrock principle that it is “We, the people” (the demos) who ultimately govern, is a “democracy” in the same way that a Starbucks Caffè Misto is a “coffee” and a walking, talking American citizen is a “human being.” In other words, unless the author is operating under a serious terminological misunderstanding, one which leads him to confuse fundamental categories with their particular types (I wonder if he believes that, because the United Kingdom has a monarchy, no one is ever actually elected to Parliament?), I suspect that he wants to push back against the case I made for acknowledging concerns over “democratic legitimacy” simply because, frankly, it is frustrating to have to admit that the people, pesky creatures that they are, might have mutually contradictory views about what they want those whom they have elected to do. Invoking the majesty of the U.S. Constitution has its place, surely, but doing so in a way which suggests that the pluralistic interests of the many different sectors and levels of America’s democracy can be cleanly resolved through a few lawsuits is, I think, once again, engaging a simplistic kind of denial.

8) My point in all these observations comes down to this: here in Wichita there is a strong tendency by many to deny the almost inevitable liberal fundamentals which, sooner or later, quickly or slowly, emerge in cities. This denial isn’t universal, but it is common; it scales all the way down to neighborhood arguments and all the way up to presidential elections. Don’t read too much into that “almost inevitable” bit; Wichita is far more divided than it is blue, and likely to remain that way for a good while yet. Still it’s simply impossible, I think, to be both honest about our city and simultaneously insist that its pluralistic reality can and should be reduced to a simple set of libertarian lessons, wherein urban needs and disagreements resolve themselves naturally in the marketplace. For better or worse, we’re bigger and more complex than that. Doubling down on that reduction only makes the already difficult task of managing Wichita’s infrastructure even harder, and leaning too hard on the “small town” ideal only ends up excluding some of those who came here looking to enjoy freedom and opportunity as well. Let’s not do that, shall we?

20 and 15 Years, and More

20 years ago today--May 12, 2001--I was awarded my Doctor of Philosophy in Politics from Catholic University of American in Washington, DC; I became a Ph.D. And yesterday, with the submission of my final grades, I completed 15 years of teaching here at Friends University in Wichita, KS, the school that I have come to identify with so strongly that I hope to work here for another 15 years (or 20 years) more. Which means that, if God and family and my health is willing, my life as a Ph.D. will end up as having been, for all intents and purposes, basically synonymous with teaching our mostly south-central Kansas students here at Friends about political ideologies, American history, constitutional law, and theories of government and sustainability and economy, as well as playing the professor of political science in the local media and on civic boards when it comes to elections and court decisions and whatnot. As Robert Bolt's version of Thomas More once said, "not a bad public that."

Looking back over the past 15 and 20 years, I can see I've written a lot about how I think about it all: figuring out my place within academia as a small liberal arts college professor in Kansas, figuring out what kind of politics I can or should be teaching to these kind of students in this kind of mid-sized place, figuring out what I really took from my graduate education and experience (which was in some ways very cosmopolitan, and in other ways very parochial), and how much what I became as a professor can be traced back to those years in Washington DC, as opposed to something which came along later from hours in the classroom, from interactions with colleagues, and from the ever-changing vicissitudes as well as the constant recurrences of academic life. Looking back on some of those posts, I'm a little embarrassed--but only a little. My vision for developing a "political science" that would fit what I had offer and what Friends University could support from back in 2009 seem kind of immature to me now (but hey--I was only an associate professor back then). Looking back 5 years ago, I think 10 years of teaching and professing, in the classroom and around the city, had given me a little more perspective on what in my understanding of my own vocation had changed, and how much the place in which I was practicing that vocation was responsible for those changes. By now, stuff that was just developing at that time has born some genuine fruit: my major is now "History & Politics" (hopefully the last name change for a good long while!), my teaching and research is strongly focused around matters of urban democracy and sustainability, and my approach is sufficiently divorced from our increasingly statistics-driven Social & Behavioral Science division that I've moved my program (because at a SLAC, the faculty can decide such things) over to Theology & Humanities, where I also hope it'll stay. In short: it's taken a while, but I can see that I've built something over the last 15 years--not what I originally expected to build, to be sure, but something I'm committed to nonetheless. And I definitely want to be able to plan on another 15, or perhaps 20, years of teaching to build it further.

As for my Ph.D. experience, now 20 years gone, I now find it returning to me in a way I never anticipated before. Our oldest daughter (a mostly proud KU graduate!) is following the Ph.D. route, pursing a doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in their e-mails and phone calls home I'm occasionally thrown back into that maddening world of "read another book!" whenever confronted with questions structural or theoretical or historical or critical. And yet, as hopeless as I know their prospects likely are--just as I know how hopeless the prospects of every other student I've ever taught who has ever expressed any sort of admiration or envy or desire in regards the possibility of being lucky enough to become a college professor like myself--I cannot get myself to pretend that my graduate education (for all its ups and downs, for all its costs and consequences, for all the ways it both opened up and empowered my mental world as well as failed to prepare my mind for the future or actually prepared me for the wrong things) wasn't pretty great. I loved it, and yes, I love being able to see my daughter--hopefully with their eyes fully open to the costs and consequences which are shaping them!--going through the same experience, and sometimes being able to get tastes of it through them. Their Ph.D. experience isn't mine, but still, the memories--at least of the good times--are strong.

I'm not sure what else to say. 15 years, or even 20, is just a drop in the bucket in the long run, and what seemed obvious to me when I was 40 isn't exactly the same as what seemed vital to say when I turned 50, even if the continuity between them is obvious, and will always remain so, even if I was inclined to attempt to separate myself from it all, which I'm not. Friends might go bankrupt tomorrow, or Kansas could turn overnight into a tyrannical fascist state, or some other personal or family catastrophe might happen, and everything that came before--my Ph.D., my teaching career, the roots I've put down in this place and before these students and these neighbors and fellow citizens--could go up in smoke. I sure hope not, though. I want my 20-year-old and 15-year-old histories to continue into the future, to throw out ever more branches and build ever stronger continuities and connections, through our children and our friends and more. This year, a Friends University teaching award that I cannot deny I'd envied for 15 years was awarded to me; far from feeling like a summation, it feels to me like a landmark, a signpost of a continuing vocational, academic, and personal journey...one that I'm a good long ways into, for certain, but one that I will, hopefully, still have a while to work on and improve and grow larger and deeper yet. I'm a lucky man, and for all the rough passages along the roads I've biked over so far, I have to call myself blessed. For anyone who has read this far: thanks for being part of the ride.

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

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

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

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

Biden and (Some) Better Times for (Some of) Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

When President Joe Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan (ARP) a little more than a week ago, I commented to some friends that this may arguably turn to be one of the best things that has happened to Wichita in a very long time. Let me explain that argument here—starting with a rephrase of my original comment: the ARP will likely turn out to be one of the best things that has happened for many Wichitans in a very long time.

Why the change? In part because there are a thousand ways to think about a city, depending on the perspective of the person doing the thinking, and for every metric I or someone else might propose, someone else can surely come up with a different, countering one. While I don’t think that makes it impossible or inappropriate to talk in generalities about the common good (actually, I think it is both possible and necessary to do so), it does mean that I have to respect the perspective of tens of thousands of Wichitans, or more, who, for any number of reasons, hate (or at least have been told to hate, or hold to a political orientation which presumes—wrongly, I think—that they are supposed to hate) this latest stimulus.

Note however, that there are fewer such people than you might believe. While there were nearly 30,000 more people who voted for Donald Trump than for President Biden throughout Sedgwick County last November, leading the former president to win the county with 52% of the vote, that doesn’t hold for the city of Wichita itself, as this precinct-based graphic makes clear:

 

The city of Wichita isn’t entirely blue—not yet, anyway, and maybe not ever. But from Oaklawn to Bel Aire, the zoo to Eastborough, the default Republican preference of Kansans was challenged in our city, with a majority of voters throughout Wichita’s precincts going for Biden. Which means, if nothing else, that the passage of the American Rescue Plan is, for those voters, a huge confirmation of their political choice--a win, in other words. And not just a political win, obviously; nearly 100,000 households across Wichita are going to receive the $1400 per person stimulus checks (it would have been nearly 120,000 households, or easily 75% of the total population of the city, if moderate Democratic and Republican senators, including Wichita’s own two, hadn’t balked).

The Republicans of our city could push back at this point: the CARES Act which Trump pushed for did that too! True, but not to the same extent, and not as effectively. The ARP is actually giving more money to more people than did the CARES Act, which spent nearly three times as much money on businesses than on individuals and households. And while that money, mostly administered through the Paycheck Protection Program, was a lifesaver for some businesses, it was poorly administered, with comparatively little going to the employers that needed it most, thus having much less of an impact as it might have had, not to mention generating a lot of frustration and abuse along the way, as Wichita knows from plenty of local examples.

This can be debated, of course, as anything that involves hundreds of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars can be. Those who see the ARP as the second coming of the New Deal--whether hopefully or fearfully--should be prepared for disappointment; fundamentally, it’s really just another emergency stimulus package, first and last. It’s even possible that the CARES payment, when one really gets into the weeds, did more for working people than the ARP will. Now, if it works out that the additional child tax credits and increased unemployment and pension assistance which the ARP provides are made permanent—and the language of President Biden himself surely indicates that such is his intention—then that would retroactively turn the ARP into a genuinely transformative accomplishment, as much as Social Security or Medicare were. So if Wichita’s Republicans want to insist Biden didn’t do anything Trump didn’t already do, insofar as actual cash investments in the lives of struggling parents, workers, and retirees are concerned, the fairest answer may be: maybe; let’s wait and see.

But fortunately, there is an additional element to the ARP which we won’t have to wait a long time for, which demonstrates the true value of the act to Wichita’s development, and which involves something that the CARES Act barely touched upon: namely, direct aid to cities. Not just states (though they’ll getting plenty of support for all the programs they’re obliged to carry out too), but the municipal governments of "metropolitan cities," to use the actual language of the law. Wichita’s budget is facing estimated shortfalls of nearly $30 million over 2020-2021 thanks to the pandemic, with more likely to come in the future; the fact that the ARP will likely deliver close to $73 million to the city (according to the latest estimates) will make a massive difference in the costs which that revenue loss will mean to the quality of life in our city. 

(As an important aside, note that by setting up a program which bypasses states and counties, Wichita, and cities like it, may be able to avoid what looks likely to become a sticky constitutional and political fight, as some state leaders--including our own Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt--have argued that they ought to be able to use the ARP funds which will be given to states to cover new tax cuts, leaving the issue of making up for budget cuts to state programs aside. And that doesn't even touch the proposal by some Kansas legislators to grab up to $100 million of federal relief funds, presumably out of that which would be directed to Kansas counties, and use it to compensate businesses for their losses as punishment for the counties having imposed shut-down mandates as the governor directed. Wherever these destructive arguments go, they should touch that money directed to Wichita itself.)

I wrote “quality of life” up above purposefully. Thanks to the covid budget priorities the city council established last August, in which the Wichita Police Department enjoyed (in the midst of much protest and counter-protest) a large increase, the cuts which were introduced were overwhelming in the area of public arts, city libraries, capital improvements, parks and trees and sidewalks and bike paths and like. While clearly ARP funds will need to be used to first and foremost to support and supplement various localized covid-relief and anti-poverty measures (though honestly, given the distribution of responsibility between the city and the county, those should mostly come out of the $100 million or so which the Sedgwick County Commission will receive), if the spirit of this aid is adhered to by our city council at all (perhaps as encouraged by concerned citizens like you and me?) then we’ll see this important source of relief used to help begin to rejuvenate, and perhaps even re-direct, a city whose cultural offerings and music scene and patterns of growth (or lack thereof) have been taking major hits not just throughout the past year, but for quite a few years previously.

What is the “spirit of this aid” I mention? Simply the fact that the Biden administration, as it shaped and pushed for this relief package, had a set of priorities very different, and far more urban, than those of the Trump administration. The latter was happy to contribute to already deepening divisions in American society by tweeting at great length about “Democrat-run cities” with their “anarchist jurisdictions,” which is the sort of thing which leads Republican politicians like Kansas First District Representative Jake LaTurner to dismiss the whole thing as a scam to “bail out liberal states.” Those who are actually involved in administering cities, whether in red states or blue ones, know that is absolutely not true, and have said so at length. But the real story is buried within many and various ideas, plans, and people which Biden has brought with him to Washington.

While Trump’s re-election built itself in part upon distracting claims about how Biden’s crazed socialist ideas were going to destroy the (white) American suburban ideal, Biden’s campaign instead recognized that America’s suburban homeowner form houses a lot of racial and ethnic minorities, whose social and economic challenges required a response quite different from Trump’s culture war attacks. Biden’s push for more racial equity and low-income options among America’s suburban development goes hand-in-hand with lessening exclusive zoning requirements, encouraging greater density in development, and looking to expand transportations choices beyond just the well-subsidized suburban access roads and freeway on-ramps which have defined metropolitan sprawl for far too long, which in turn makes his nomination of Pete Buttigieg--a favorite of the Strong Towns movement!--as Secretary of Transportation potentially so important.

To be sure, you can legitimately criticize all of these supports as something that will actually undermine, rather than democratically empower, localities; I take all these criticisms seriously (even, to my surprise, the ones about zoning reform), and so should anyone else with genuinely localist and small-d democratic concerns about urban spaces in general. And yet, to see all of this happening in Washington, and underwritten at least in part by the ARP, at the same time that Wichita’s leaders are finally seriously talking about these related matters via their Places for People initiative, makes me wonder if there isn’t some kind of unforeseen alignment taking place. An alignment that will allow the different Wichita that is out there to take the support being offered it, and use it to build and encourage, in the midst of what is sure to be a long and difficult economic recovery, the kind of culturally-enriching, family-rewarding, individually-satisfying, community places and practices that Wichita has too-often sacrificed in the name of its usual, easily-fallen-back-into growth-centric routines.

It won’t come easily, of course, and it may not come at all. And if it does come, it won’t be a change that pleases the large number of Wichitans who look upon any push for greater urban sustainability, density, and equality in this city as antithetical to the small-town conservatism which they want to continue to imagine is appropriate for an urban area of a half-million people. That’s fair, I suppose. But I also suspect that, as a great many Wichitans emerge from what was probably, for the majority of us, one of the worst years of our lives, at least a few of us can see the possibility of some better—and even, maybe, differently better—times ahead. And even if not—well, 2021 can’t get any worse than last year, can it?

Grace Olmstead's Uprooted Idaho, and My Own

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Last summer my family and I drove right by Emmett, Idaho, the ancestral home of Grace Olmstead, author of the wonderful, if imperfect, Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We've Left Behind. Idaho's Gem County (Emmett is the county seat) is beautiful country, which it was good to reminded of. We were traveling from Spokane, Washington (where I was born and raised, and where my widowed mother--whom my children hadn't seen in years, and needed to visit--continues to live in a cabin atop what we call Fox Hill just over the Idaho border) to Gooding, Idaho (for a big family gathering which, out of pandemic-related concerns for our mother's health, we held someplace other than the old homestead). If we'd taken the interstate, we would have traveled faster, but missed the scenery, so instead we took state highways through the wheat fields of the Palouse, down into Hells Canyon, up again into the forested mountains around Payette Lake (we swam for a bit, but Sharlie, the legendary monster of Payette, made no appearance), and then down again towards Boise, before getting on the interstate and heading east across southern Idaho's Snake River Plain to our destination. If I'd known that reading Olmstead's book was in my future, I would have made sure we stopped for dinner in Emmett instead of later on.

I take the time to talk about the landscape around these places because it is the land of southwestern Idaho, and the people who built small farming towns like Emmett on that land, that Olmstead approaches in her book with great--though sometimes uneven--passion and grace. Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family (though mostly just her great-grandparents), partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless. She calls her book "an exercise in discernment" (pg. xiii, 206), and it was that element of the book which broke through my partial resistance to it. In presenting to the public her ongoing attempt to work through her own feelings about the decades-long decline of a town and the agrarian vocation which it served as a particular home for, all of which she has belated realized she loves, and moreover in doing so with such regional specificity, Olmstead forced a degree of reflection upon me--a person with his own family stories of Idaho and farms, stories which I, also, mostly now know only at a great distance, both physical and temporal.

For Olmstead, the heart of the story she wants to tell about Emmett, and about her own Howard family in that place, is her great-grandfather, Walter Allen Howard--or as Olmstead always refers to him, "Grandpa Dad," the marvelously inventive and hard-working (and, as the story unfolds, contrary and independent to a fault) patriarch of her clan. Born in 1911, and still driving a tractor and tending to his prized (and apparently somewhat secretly maintained) irrigation ditches until he passed away in 2008, Olmstead grounds her many ruminations about farming life and community attachment in near-constant references to Grandpa Dad's example. He was a man who embodied a certain kind of rootedness, to the land ("Grandpa Dad dug many of the ditches that still feed water to crops in north Emmett--all of them with a spade and his two hands"--pg. 5), to the community of Emmett ("He would often come in dirty from a long work day on the farm and head straight for the shower to clean up so he could attend a local meeting"--pg. 179), to his church ("To Grandpa Dad, some things mattered more than the price tag--and supporting his neighbor and Christian brother [who ran the only grocery store he was willing patronize] was one of those things"--pg. 141), and most of all to his family. Her portrait of this impressive man is a deeply loving one, and no wonder: to a great-granddaughter, shucking corn beside him, listening to him tell stories of his long-dead wife and recite poetry and spin tales of a land utterly transformed ("He was the first storyteller and historian I knew...overflowing with knowledge and narrative"--pgs. 5-6), he must have seemed an entirely lovable human being.

But Olmstead also thoughtfully makes use of such authors as Robert Nisbet, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edmund Burke, Robert Wuthnow, and Wendell Berry to elaborate upon the beauty, social utility, and moral worthiness of that particular rural rootedness which she most centrally associates with the memory of that human being and of his farm in Emmett. In particular, she makes use of the distinction employed by Wallace Stegner (and frequented emphasized by Berry as well) between "boomers"--those who "come to extract value from a place and then leave"--and "stickers"--"those who settle down and invest." She trenchantly observes that "Since the mid-nineteenth century, there have been more boomers than stickers in Idaho history" (pg. 21), and provides the background to make her point clear. Grandpa Dad, in contrast, was a sticker, and that haunts her.

Haunts her, because she, and her whole extended family, didn't actually stick, at least not entirely. Though the Howards were all deeply shaped by the connections which Grandpa Dad's work and care for the land and the community had built all around him, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren nonetheless never committed to that community or that work. They became bankers and pharmacists and engineers and, in Olmstead's case, a journalist in Washington DC. And here is where my internal reflection begins, because I could say something similar in regards to myself, and my own extended family. Our family's own Idaho farm, and the milk cows and alfalfa fields and vegetable gardens and calf pens and homemade fences and barns I grew up around and worked early mornings and late nights in, all through the 1970s and 1980s, have faded into an enduring set of Idaho-centric reminiscences, not something I--a college professor in Kansas, with siblings working in real estate and communications and investment and education--can really claim any rootedness in, especially not over the past fifteen years or so, as we have settled in Wichita and as our children have grown up.

There are differences, to be sure: my own great-grandfather, and grandfather (that's a photo of him there, standing in the crop fields along the Kootenai river north of Bonner's Ferry, Idaho, sometime in the early 1950s), and my father too, all mostly approached agriculture as a business endeavor--something lovely in its own right, to be sure, and something they studied well and worked hard at and thought important enough (or at least money-making enough) to impress upon us children. They weren't dilettantes when it came to growing wheat, driving combines, bailing hay, leveling ground, raising calves, breaking horses, and all the rest. But to them it was also, in the end, something to expand and outsource (a four generations of Amoths, a Mennonite family, have really done most of the daily work on that Idaho land) and trade upon and sell off (the Amoths now own the farm) as the situation warranted. This is very different from Olmstead's Grandpa Dad, who wouldn't take government subsidies and, as the decades went by, continually "refused to get big and refused to get out" (p. 64). Not that his impressive example at all affected the economic, cultural, and governmental realities which depressed his own community (and which my own ancestors recognized and, when they could, both profited and escaped from). Emment's agrarian community has suffered the same catastrophic decline in numbers of farms, in wealth, in population, and in environmental health that you see in rural areas all across the country. But either way, whether our family histories reach back through an engagement with farming as something to get into and get out of while the getting was good, or an engagement that was grounded in a true sense of vocation and community...it was something that didn't last.

Olmstead is very good at making the case that it might not have been this way; the viability of sticking with the farm and with the rural communities which long centered the lives of large numbers of Americans--include her family and mine--might have been preserved. If the centralizing logic of finance capitalism had been prevented from cheering on agribusinesses like Monsanto as they effectively robbed farmers of control of their own seed; if the global marketplace had been pushed away from prioritizing commodity crops which served international trade and put the burden on farmers to expand and homogenize and go into debt in order to do so; if government supports and subsidies had been directed at maintaining local networks of producers instead of ever larger and ever more costly farms that could maximize on production for the expansionist purposes of the Cold War-era American state; if, if, if...well, then maybe things would be different. As it is, though, they aren't. Olmstead details the lives of many contemporary farmers in the Emmett area who are sticking it out despite the obstacles all around them--people like Susan and Peter Dill of Saint John's Organic Farm, the Williams family at Waterwheel Gardens, or Terry and Ashley Walton who (thanks to a Farm Service Agency loan) purchased Grandpa Dad's farm after he passed away and no one in the family had any interest in preserving it. But her deep engagement with these topics--with America's broken food system, its exploitative farm labor practices, its consumer-mad economy, and its poisonous addiction to treating the land almost always as either a brute calorie resource or a recreational site for visiting elites, and almost never as respectful localities where people can build lives for themselves--all makes her doubtful that even a great many farmers like her great-grandfather could ever make enough of a difference:

Grandpa Dad emerged from the difficulties of poverty in this landscape by not moving--by staying in one spot for his entire life. But wealth is no longer build through allegiance to a community or a town; it is increasingly achieved in isolation by individuals and grown through rootlessness, not through loyalty....Without systemic change--without a revaluing of the soil, or all the land that depends on it, of the farmers to cultivate and steward it--I fear sticking might not even be enough. Too much has changed. Too much has been lost (pgs. 126, 175).

What kind of systemic change? In a word, an abandonment of the cranky individualism which is so central to the myth of the family farm in America. Olmstead documents how as early as 150 years ago perceptive writers and government leaders were already pointing out the economic and environmental necessity of farmers forming "cooperative communities" rather than "privately owned patchworks" (pg. 56); this vision of individual (rather than collective) and libertarian (rather than local) self-sufficiency has long endured, with arguably ruinous results--the real story behind of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books provides one example, and the separation of the extended Howard family from what Grandpa Dad had laboriously built provides another ("Grandpa Dad's fierce independence was likely part of the reason our family no longer belonged to Emmett, or to the farm....The farm was always his: something others helped with but were never integrated into"--pgs. 182-183). In place of such ferocious denials of the collective, Olmstead, repenting of her youthful attachment to "free-market capitalism and limited government," applauds federal programs designed to "get a younger, more diverse, and more sustainable population on the land," to use "public funds and efforts to undergird civil associations: not just investing in individuals, but also the groups and networks that support them," and to basically just use government policies to push back against the "reductive thinking that breaks down the farm's purpose to fit solely profit-focused ends," and to instead "strengthen local economic sovereignty" (pgs. 186-190). The change she'd want to see, in other words, is a populist one. Not the faux-populism of the Trump era, of course, but the kind of populism--that is, the kind of collective, inclusive, democratic action which economically empowers local places--which farmers like Wendell Berry have both striven to build and constantly emphasized for decades.

But would such systemic changes actually bring about a return to the land? That's a harder question, and one likely not much influenced by changes in politics. For her part, Olmstead sees her own political evolution ("I'm neither Republican nor libertarian these days....but...someone who cares deeply about...the issues of racial injustice, economic exploitation, and ecological abuse"--pgs. 202-203) as actually creating additional obstacles to her return to the red-state land she loves--though she suspects it will happen eventually, as her parents grow older and become more in need of her care. More important than any political disagreement or policy recommendation, though, is the difficulty of simply accepting the sacrifice that a return to the rural will involve for people who have organized their whole conception of the self, whether they realize it or not, in opposition to the kind of communal beauties which belonging to a small, land-based, productive community may (it's always a maybe; never a surety) involve. Our acceptance of community transience, consumer disposibility, and capitalist booming will not easily or quickly turn around--though trying to do so is a must. As Olmstead note's in her conclusion:

To choose rootedness, we must acknowledge the fact that, as Simone Weil points out, a desire for profit, unless tempered by other goods and goals, tends to destroy human roots. We have to seek out larger goals than financial fulfillment, than reaching the next rung on the social or economic ladder. We have to consider whether the perfect career or paycheck will offer us the fulfillment or happiness we lack--or whether the cost of transience is, in fact, too high a cost. It is true that providing for ourselves and our families and having solid employment are fundamental considerations. But we must also remember that they are not the only questions or goals worth considering (pg. 217).

I should note that Olmstead's book, in my judgment anyway, is not at its absolute best when it comes to those "fundamental considerations." While the impassioned case she makes for Emmett--or at least for the sort of local food and tight communities and productive land which can be found in a place like Emmett--is well-informed and wise, it doesn't hold together as tightly as it might have if she'd approached questions of cost, as they are born by those who actually live in the region, somewhat more consistently. She has a long profile of the Little family--part of "the state's agriculture royalty"--whose climb to the top of Idaho's state government and Republican party began in Emmett, but there is strangely little analysis or critique there (are we really supposed to believe that the Little's massive leased-out ranches and the Williams's "twenty-five dense acres of fruit and vegetables" both reflect the same "decision to invest in this community"?--pgs. 160-164). Another time she profiles a self-described "Emmett original," a young woman who only wanted to escape the town ("there aren't enough jobs in this valley, she told me, and she thinks the education system is rather poor"), and while her journey out of Idaho includes some intriguing bumps (she turned down the prospect of Oregon State University because "I just didn't . . . see no one in cowboy boots"--pgs. 116-119), she did up leaving to study journalism elsewhere--very much like Olmstead herself. What's her story, and what does it tell us readers, or Olmstead herself, about how we, or she, should total up the educational or economic costs of her, or our own, staying versus leaving? Again, by mostly skimping on the structural or ideological aspects of this act of investigation, the point is not clear.

But then, no book should be expected to clearly explain--or critique, for that matter--every consequence and cost of the story they aim to tell, and certainly not a book like Uprooted, whose overriding purpose, as Olmstead insisted, is just to discern something about her own story, and the story of a family and a town and a region and a vocation she loves and remembers and is still shaped by, however great the distance. And I wonder if any criticisms I have of the book aren't rooted (yes, I see what I did there) in how it pushed me to think through and discern better my own distant agrarian connections--ones that, I cannot deny, were never as strong as Olmstead's, nor ones that I have attended to with anything like her own dedication or insight or generosity. Grace Olmstead's book may not be the final masterpiece of all possible localist argument, but it is a set of very smart reflections on localism and rural life which are specific enough, and thoughtfully expressed enough, to bring up in my mind the Fox family's own private agrarian Idaho, and to reflect upon--and also mourn, if just a little--my distance from it's own beauty as well. As I wrote above, I wish I'd read this book before my family made our visit to my old home and our drive to southern Idaho last summer. But now that I've read it, I can at least remember it a little bit differently, and a little bit better too.

Century II, Home Rule, and the Problem (and Appeal) of States Pushing Cities Around

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

On Sunday the Wichita Eagle ran two guest editorials--one by me on how state governments push cities around, and one by my friend John Todd on the effort by him and others to get the state to require cities to hold a public referendum before historic buildings like Century II could be torn down. Both essays are essentially about "home rule," though neither ever use that phrase. Let me try to expand on that idea here.

"Home rule" refers to the principle of municipal governments being allowed the ability to fully govern their own residents. Under our constitutional system, the national government and the state governments are assumed to have some degree of sovereignty; no such assumption necessarily holds counties and cities, however. While some have made the democratic argument that any self-identifying and politically recognized community should possess distinct governing authority--a claim with real historical, legal, and philosophical grounding--generally in the United States the opposite has been the case. Counties are understood as administrative arms of the state, and cities, as codified in a principle called "Dillon's Rule," as seen as entirely dependent creations, with "no inherent right of self-government which is beyond the legislative control of the state."

While the legislative record claims that Kansas, after the adoption of the Home Rule Amendment to the state constitution in 1960, has "stood Dillon's Rule on its head," in practice this has clearly not been the case, especially not in recent years. We here in Wichita, the largest stand-alone city in the whole state, know this well. In 2014, the city of Wichita fought in vain a state law overturning local gun control ordinances, thus passing along to cities like our own increased insurance costs as they could no longer legally limit concealed carry in public buildings like courthouses and libraries. The very next year, the state of Kansas sued Wichita to stop from us from following through on a minor local marijuana decriminalization referendum, obliging the city to continue to accept the costs of enforcing invasive drug laws that, on the basis of the referendum, have limited popular support. The tendency of our state government to minimize or outright dismiss local governmental concerns isn't limited to Wichita, of course. For example, the state allows the residents of 101 Kansas counties to choose their own election officials--but when it comes to counties with a significant urban population, such as you see in Kansas City, Overland Park, Topeka, and of course Wichita, the state government insists on making those appointments themselves.

In the jargon of governance, this is often known as "preemption"--the act of a state government taking away options that might be democratically determined by the people who live in and wish to govern themselves locally. It's an issue that is having a bit of moment right now. Governing magazine ran a long piece about how common state preemption of local authority has become over the course of the pandemic, and Strong Towns used it as a basis of their weekly podcast. Of course, the story of the Texas state government going bananas at the prospect of the city of Austin reforming their own police department (which, of course, the city of Austin pays for), has gotten a lot of attention, but don't count Kansas out; as of last month, the Kansas state senate debated a bill that would profoundly limit cities’ ability to explore sustainable energy alternatives to natural gas. It may not go anywhere–but considering the Kansas state government's track record (note how the state is currently considering forcing local counties, to which they gave explicit responsibility of managing and enforcing health restrictions during the pandemic, to bear the total, and devastating, cost of those mandates), I wouldn't be surprised to hear it being sent to governor's desk anyway.

So what do all of these issues pertaining to the limits on the power of local people to govern themselves through municipal or county bodies have to do with the argument over Century II? Because, in that particular case, both sides are, in essence, claiming "home rule" for themselves--though only those opposed to the proposed public referendum requirement are saying so specifically. In fact, Amanda Stanley, a lawyer working for the Kansas League of Municipalities, when arguing against the proposal during a legislative committee hearing in Topeka, called the idea of the state of Kansas requiring that the local populace be allowed to vote one way or another on the fate of historic buildings "the antithesis of home rule." 

That claim does make sense--but only if you set aside the general principle of local, democratic governance, and you think in terms of the institutions which such governance gives rise to. In the case of Wichita, what it has given rise to is a council-manager form of government, with a city manager and a professional staff in control of the details of the city's budget and general policies, and a city council, led (though only formally) by a mayor, which gives approval to and, in certain circumstances, initiates, stops, or gives correction to those policy directions. For those who spoke on behalf of the city in Topeka (including two members of the city council, Republican Bryan Frye and Democrat Brandon Johnson), "home rule" means "rule by the government of the city of Wichita."

Which, of course, we have, for all the reasons listed above, precious little of, whatever the formal proclamations of the Kansas state constitution. It seems reasonable to city leaders, whose hands are already tied in so many ways, to not have the tied any further by yet another state mandate. But this would be a state mandate connected to local democratic action, would it not? Local voters deciding on whether or not a proposal which involves the destruction of a beloved (by some, anyway) old building should go forward--that's not the same as the earlier examples of preemption, is it?

It clearly isn't, and that's part of the problem here: knowing exactly where real democratic empowerment lies. In some ways, those who spoke for the city really tipped their hand in an anti-democratic direction; when they testified in Topeka that the voters of Wichita (or wherever) lack sufficient training or experience “to make rational choices regarding the maintenance of such buildings,” the condescension is so thick you could cut it with a knife. But are they wrong? Not necessarily; part of the whole reason we have a representative systems of government is because it has become accepted as more or less obvious that, when societies (whether we're talking about cities or countries) become large and complex enough, mass democratic politics--government by plebiscite, in other words--becomes a risky project, particularly when complicated and long-term problems demand resolution. Not that direct democratic resolutions will always be wrong; the anti-populist terror most Americans are schooled in regarding the "tyranny of the majority" is too often a tool to make certain that the poor never fundamentally trouble those in power. But nonetheless, the institutions of representative government serve a valuable civic purpose, balancing distinct needs and forcing compromises over contentious issues. Those who take on the difficult, often thankless task for trying to organize, serve, and lead our city through our institutions can't be blamed for seeing public referendums like this as an additional complication of their jobs.

Maybe the problem, then, is their jobs themselves. Because, as I noted above, the institutions of our city government actually do not, for the most part, have the kind of power and responsibility which would enable them to balance distinct needs and force compromises. On the contrary, too often issues are laid out to them by the city staff in ways which foreclose any truly fundamental political arguments over priorities, with the members of the city council, including our mayor, rarely being able to enlist the kind of democratic support for any particular matter facing the city so as to challenge the broad determinations which the city manager's office has already made. What this means, in practice, is that historically in the city of Wichita, the only voices which have regularly tended to emerge so as to influence the direction of city policy are those already friendly to construction, development, the expansion of the city's built environment--the "growth machine," in other words. And after watching our city council either embrace or at least acquiesce to such growth-friendly (though hardly necessarily sustainable) calculations when it came to our baseball stadium, and fearing the same pattern being followed when it comes to the whole Wichita Riverfront, it makes sense for concern citizens of Wichita to want to make an end-run around these institutions, and appeal directly to the state in the name of their (potentially) populist and localist project.

Still, it's a risky proposition. In the aforementioned Strong Towns podcast, Charles Marohn, the founder of Strong Towns, looks at a situation in California today, where you see something comparatively rare--while usually it is Republican-dominated state legislatures preempting cities which tend more Democratic, in California is it a Democratic-dominated state government preempting the options available to cities. In California, a state-wide--but certainly not universal throughout California's cities--consensus about the problems with single-family zoning has emerged. This is an issue dear to ST's heart: privileging single-family zoning artificially imposes a suburban model upon development which is bad for the environment, bad for social and physical health, bad for housing costs, and most of all, very bad for the fiscal liabilities which cities must carry. Every city ought to severely limit single-family zoning! (To its very small but still real credit, the city of Wichita's Places for People plan may at least begin to introduce an escape from these commonly locked-in zoning requirements.)

But if every city in California ought to limit single-family zoning...should the state of California therefore mandate that the cities of California limit single-family zoning? Or since the costs of development, the liabilities of paying for streets and sewers, and, yes, the lure of construction jobs and population growth are all matters particular to cities, should decisions about zoning remain with them? Chuck Marohn admits--beginning at around 11:30 in the podcast--that as much as he's convinced that this is policy is the right one to follow, he's doubtful of the wisdom of states actually preempting local zoning decisions. In his view, the ideal of subsidiarity--of determining the most appropriate level for making decisions, and giving to that level the power and authority to make the decisions accordingly--while lacking in efficiency, is far better for real democratic legitimacy. Hence, rather than appealing to the state, even in the name of something which would enable and empower local democratic concerns, organize politically on the city level, and make the needed changes there. For all the reasons he mentions, I have to say I agree.

And so we come back to the city of Wichita, a city that--almost uniquely among all American cities of its size and situation--maintains a manager-council form of government, with a nominally (but of course not actually) non-partisan and part-time (exhaustively so, as any councilmember will admit) city council that is both too small and too under-staffed to effectively and democratically articulate and represent and fight and compromise over the divided desires of its citizens. Should the efforts of Save Century II, rather than appealing to the already much-abused preemptive proclivities of our state government, be focused on organizing around, campaigning for or against, and otherwise working with and seeking influence over the institutions of Wichita's city government? Yes, they should; that's the best local democracy that we have available. But given the deep structural problems and limitations of our city government as currently constituted (where what ought to be a straightforward discussion of ethics can get derailed by the supposedly horrendous possibility that the mayor has brought "big city politics" into the council!), do I blame them for seeing our city government as a possibly unreliable institution, perhaps incapable of holding to whatever a majority of voters may charge them to do, and instead seeking a state-level run-around? I have to admit: I don't blame them one bit.