What Happens When Parties Can No Longer Be Managed Moderately?

[This is a somewhat expanded version of a piece that appeared in the Wichita Eagle over the weekend; I received an e-mail on Sunday which causes me to think more about what I mean by "moderation," and this is the result.] 

A few weeks after the dust settled from the 2020 elections here in Kansas, I was giving an online presentation on the election results to the local chapter of the League of Women Voters. Many of the virtual participants had good questions, but the most common one was some variation on a question that has been a constant here in Kansas, and elsewhere, for decades now: “Whatever happened to moderate Republicans?” It's a good question, thought obviously not a new one.

That the parties--both following and, not frequently, shaping the voters which support them--have become more polarized over the past generation is well-supported. I think the only people who can honestly say today, as I think could be at least plausibly claimed in the 1990s, that there is "no real difference between the two major parties," are people deeply committed to revolutionary or reactionary causes--everyone else clearly understands that, in both marginal and major ways, elections have consequences. And it follows, therefore, that when you see party positions become less variable and flexible, and more tightly wound around ideological poles distant from each other, that's going to have consequences for governance. It is those consequences--and specifically, in Republican-heavy Kansas, the consequences of the state Republican party having become inhospitable for the moderates and liberals who once found shelter within it--which had my good-government-concerned interlocutors most worried.

Kansas's strongly Republican (and, yes, "conservative," but actually, for reasons of history, it's even more a matter of party than ideology) majority has been in place for many decades. But for a good number of those decades the state Republican party was a fairly crude instrument, one that contained diverse factions, but those factions could be played off one another, allowing for a degree of elite management. I use "management" there purposefully, because that is--for many observers of elections and the processes by which parties serve as the machines which transform, through representative elections, voter preferences into actual legislative and executive action, anyway--exactly what is presumably demanded: managers who, through the judicious orchestration of the mechanics by which voters and candidates produce majorities which can pass bills and enforce laws, do their best to make certain that those majorities are in respectable, balanced, or above all "moderate" ways.

More often than not, those who found themselves in the role of managers were various moderate and liberal Republicans, politicians and donors and strategists who worked hard to connect with--and, by so doing, cultivate--a particular kind of Republican voter. This isn't anything unique; this type of Republican--mostly suburban, mostly college-educated, and mostly committed to the success of their local public schools and other civic organizations--was the backbone of state Republican parties for decades all across the country. These voters (and in Kansas, you found them overwhelmingly in the suburban and exurban communities which surrounded Kansas's cities, and hence the largest numbers of them were found in northwestern Kansas, in and around Kansas city) faithfully supported the GOP, but they also often protected and rewarded those who dissented from any strictly conservative or libertarian ideological line. The result was a consistent majority party that nonetheless remained somewhat flexible, with many elected representatives who tended to move left or right as the times warranted.

Ed Flentje was a long-time Wichita State University professor, a scholar and a gentleman whose place as a regular column writer for Kansas newspapers I had the honor to take over. One of his great themes over the years was to trumpet this historical happenstance in the history of Kansas's political parties as one of the primary virtues of politics in the Sunflower State. We are a state with a decided (more than 2-to-1) Republican majority among voters, thus providing stability and predictability. At the same time, this Republican majority was divided enough between moderates and conservatives that a crucial number of its elected representatives could, from one issue to the next, ally with the minority Democrats or with the more conservative part of the Republican majority in the legislature, thus allowing the party to adapt, innovate, and pursue good government policies, even progressive ones on occasion. This is, Flentje strongly implies, the best of both wolds: consistent Republican party leadership, but a Republican party that regularly had moderates like Dick Bond and Bill Graves and Jean Schodorf leading the way. So thorough was the managing power of this party faction over the decades that the representatives elected by strongly conservative voters--whom, in the wake of the Summer of Mercy and the movement of Wichita, Kansas's largest city, to the right, probably constituted the majority of Kansas Republicans--were themselves seen as the small, trouble-making faction: "Republican rebels" who messed with the state party's commitment to be "the party of government," as Burdett Loomis, another long-time observer of Kansas politics, once put it.

In the introduction to a recent collection of his newspaper writings, Flentje remains confident that the patterns he often defended still hold. The collection includes ten years of columns which follow the path of Sam Brownback as he thoroughly remade the Kansas Republican party, driving out moderates in political primaries throughout his first term as government, and embarking on a fiscal revolution that had terrible consequences for our state. Though the “Brownback Revolution” took the Kansas Republican party, and thus the state government, in what he recognizes as an immoderately right-ward direction for a time, he sees that as a historical aberration, and believes the moderate Republican faction--who were essential to Governor Laura Kelly’s election in 2018--will continue to provide balance. He says this, while noting at the same time that he writes as one who is almost certainly a "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) in the eyes of many of his fellow Kansas Republicans, and also noting that moderates need to do their job as managers of the center of the party better ("grassroots politics will require tending" is his observation). Nonetheless, his commitment to the value of elite party management, of working to promote and fund campaigns and narratives which will put moderate Republicans in a deal-making, compromise-finding position, remains firm.

I don't dispute the value of Flentje's determination, given the convoluted ways that we have historically gotten our nation-wide, representative, two-party system we have. The United States was filled with various informal state-based party arrangements which functioned in mostly moderate ways--even though that regularly involved the exclusion of small segments of the local electorate--throughout the 20th century. But those arrangements may no longer hold. The 2020 election delivered a Republican majority to the Kansas House almost exactly the same as the one which existed when Sam Brownback was first elected governor a decade ago, and that similarly defiant, un-moderate, Trump-centric campaigns led to Republican wins in Congress and state legislatures across the nation, perhaps it is the rather election of Kelly two-years ago, an election made possible by Republican crossing over to vote a Democrat, that will someday be seen as an aberration here in Kansas from the new, 21st-century style of party politics.

What is that style? It is, most of all, a nationalized one. Regional variations that once characterized American politics are dying out. Flentje and others long presumed that state parties were capable of local adaptation, and continued to believe so--as recently as 2014, despite the changes which the Tea Party had by then spent carrying out (some would say "hollowing out") with the national Republican party, Flentje still suggested that Kansas Democrats take a page from the playbook of Democratic Kansas Governor Bob Docking and explicitly rebuke the national party, signing off on the winning strategy of tying his re-election in 1972 to Richard Nixon's. This year, Kansas Democratic senate candidate Barbara Bollier's similar strategy, which included explicitly highlighting voters who intended to vote for her and President Trump, obviously didn't work nearly so well.

The nationalization of American politics has many sources. There is growing congressional dysfunction, the result of campaign finance rules and the way in which ideologically committed interest groups have captured political primaries, which has allowed (or even encouraged) presidents, our only nationally elected figure, to claim, as a matter of necessity, more and more executive power. There is the growing homogeneity and finance-centered character of the America's service economy, with powerful corporations, increasingly distanced from the variable work of actual production (since natural resources from which things can be produced naturally vary around the globe), imposing a kind of accidental uniformity of interests which makes ideology much more appealing way of eliciting voters' attention than traditional political log-rolling. But today, in particular, I think of my old friend Damon Linker's recent--and excellent--two-part essay on how media technologies are turning the tools by which party elites once kept populist extremes at bay against those same managers. His conclusion to the first part is striking:

[This is] what social media does: It allows for the constructing of identities and the cultivation of resentments in a virtual space among likeminded people separated by vast distances in the physical world. Instead of [James] Madison's highly differentiated republic of discrete communities with their own regional, factional interests--or the kind of slow-motion grassroots organizing we saw in the real world during the mid-20th century--we have new forms of rapid-fire, technologically facilitated solidarity among tens of millions of Americans separated by hundreds or thousands of miles but united by a sense of shared grievance and a commitment to lashing out against its sources, real and imagined.

In short, in a centralizing world of instantaneous communication, ideological slights and crusades, whether real or perceived, can amass a movement overnight--and apparently many voters, fearful of being represented by their ideological opponents (or so their news feeds depict them), follow along. Party leaders and donors are, predictably, sensitive to this, start operating on the basis of it, and perhaps are even happy to do so. Why would that be? Obviously, people whose political preferences cannot be easily packaged in a particular ideological construct are frustrated: their swing-vote tendencies are making them less and less important, particularly in states like Kansas, where one-party dominance is mostly unquestioned. But it's not unreasonable to suppose that a good many people in those areas of local dominance have long chafed at the management they've experienced, and wanted real contestation to take its place. The fact that the breaking of this state-specific Republican status quo was primarily due to national, to say nothing to global, movements and technologies is a frustrating irony for believers in participatory and local democracy like myself. Still, unlike some, I can't pretend that I see the eclipse of the cult of anti-populist moderation as entirely bad thing. Bad for Kansas state policies, its taxes and programs and civil society? Absolutely! But bad for Kansas's democratic health? There, I think I mostly agree with Ezra Klein, who draws upon research showing the degree of ideological and historical randomness out of which the label "moderate" emerges, and concludes that frequently the moderate label is "little more than a tool the establishment uses to set limits on the range of acceptable debate." In this jerry-rigged national political system we call our constitutional order, the conviction that there is something fundamentally wrong or illegitimate with ideologically unified and disciplined parties--if that is, in fact, the direction we're going--seems a step too far, to me.

Of course, 2020 was just one election. Who knows how the Republican party will evolve once Trump, whose constant Twitter declarations overwhelmed potential intra-party factions, is out of the White House? There's no good reason to believe that we'll see a complete return to some idealized 20th-century American "normal," but it may that at least a couple surviving moderate Republicans up in the northwest corner of Kansas may find themselves not quite so pressured to either abandon or conform to their party. Still, that's a slim possibility at best. More likely, we here in Kansas may need to start assuming that nationalized, polarized, and deeply divided parties are all we have for turning voter preferences into successful public policies.

That isn’t necessarily impossible; parliamentary democracies, with their “loyal opposition” and “shadow governments,” do it all the time. But that, obviously, involves a great deal of structural adaptation, the sort of thing that would have to emerge over time as parties confront more directly their paralyzed reality, and slowly shake off the deeply ingrained belief that "one more election" could make the difference in squelching their intra-party opponents. How to create such governing forms in Republican-heavy Kansas, however, where deal-making moderates were so central to the whole idea of good government for so long, is far from clear. So I guess I'd just conclude with this, speaking hypothetically here to those who asked me where the moderate Republicans had gone. Let's say times have changed, technology has changed, funding has changed, and that for all those reasons the times wherein moderate voters would regularly send a sufficient number of dissenters and adapters to Topeka under the Republican party, such as would necessitate compromise, are at an end. Figuring out how to enable our state government to work as it once did without that party crutch has to be job number one.

Messages of Gratitude from the Desert (and for it, Sort Of)

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

For years, our family has had a "Thanksgiving Tree" tradition. We write on cut-out leaves something we are thankful for, then hang them on a "tree" of dead branches, and on Thanksgiving Day, we share them all. Since we've saved these leaves over the years, I can look back at mine, and there are several constants. Among other things, it seems that at this time of year I regularly feel gratitude for changing seasons, for frost on the grass, for fall foliage, for the smell of the earth after a November rain. It wouldn't be wrong to sum up one of the main themes of these leaves simply as: I am thankful I don't live in a desert.

Despite the faith community I am a lifelong member of having achieved its first full development on the edge of America's Great Basin Desert, that attitude is, I think, probably somewhat woven into modern Mormonism as well. I lived in Utah for five years, as an undergraduate and graduate student at Brigham Young University, and was happy to leave it for many reasons, not the least being the six months out of every year where the dominant natural color everywhere I looked was a dull brown. While its proximity to the Wasatch Range and its canyons, alpine meadows, and ski slopes may make it easy for the Mormon faithful gathered in the heavily urbanized corridor from Ogden to Provo to forget that they live in a desert, the order of ordinary life there also serves to push that awareness ever further away from everyday awareness. Maybe that just means that living in Salt Lake City is similar to living in Last Vegas or Phoenix or any other urban agglomeration located in an arid place--but I suspect there's more to it than that. 

Rather, I think the lived experience of American Mormonism itself has become thoroughly suburban, or even urban, perhaps as profoundly shaped in its assumptions about spiritual life by post-WWII suburban developments as American evangelical Protestantism has been. This shift towards stereotypical "urban" spiritual characteristics--pragmatism, individualism, flexibility, diversity--has arguably threatened something essential about the Christian faith, but such an argument is rarely heard among American Mormons, who, for the most part, see the practices and opportunities of urban modernity as simply a new challenge to integrate into their faith life. The idea that my church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, needs to maintain the old tradition of separate farming communities--much less flee to the desert in order to preserve its collective relationship with God--is an idea that has long since been forgotten in pursuit of creating perversely well-watered suburban gardens and golf courses in Utah. That is, assuming it was ever believed by more than just a handful of cranks in the first place.

Still, those cranks may have a point, and they put my thankfulness for having avoided what I see as the harshness and empty openness of the desert (so different, to my mind at least, from the openness of the Kansas horizon, which is always distant but never empty) into question. That the desert speaks to some people--or, perhaps more accurately, opens some people up to a still and small voice they perhaps need to hear--is not news to me. A thoroughly urban and cosmopolitan friend of mine has written about the starkness of the Utah desert, and how he experiences something "profoundly stirring and deeply right" when he stands "awed by beauty and unspeakable vastness," "feeling impossibly small," during his visits there. I can't say I've ever had such an experience--but among my faith tradition more than a few others have. Gene England saw the desert as a place of covenant, calling the Mormon faithful to live up to the hard standard of peace. Nathan Nielson reminded us that the enchantment of the stark desert escapes our every attempt to package it, whether for visiting tourists or just ourselves. Perhaps most famously, Terry Tempest Williams saw the whole 20th-century history of Utah Mormonism as a tale of violation and rebirth in the desert wilderness, and in so doing gave voice to a Mormon environmentalism which was only ever implicit in decades past.

As wise as some of those writings are, though, none of them reproach me in my perhaps misbegotten anti-desert gratitude as do the Desert Mothers and Fathers. For these ancient mystics and hermits--whom I've been reading a fair amount of lately, as part of an effort to become more familiar with the early Christian church--the idea of the desert as a hard, demanding gift, a necessary and subjecting and purifying gift, is absolutely central. That language alone--a language of subjection and purification--isn't at all typical to the very modern rhetoric of the LDS Church, so it's not surprising that these early Christians saw things very differently from the way desert-dwelling Utah Mormons do. (And, to be clear, it is radically different from the faith language of the overwhelming majority of practicing Christians of all stripes in America today as well.) But that different perspective has been haunting me over the past months, and among other things, making me rethink the whole project of gratitude I see among my fellow Mormons.

Primarily, there is the fact that our language of counting one's blessings is almost always an enumeration of the positive: I am blessed with this or that or this other good thing, and for them I am duly grateful. That is definitely not the approach reflected in all that has been recorded of these desert monks long ago. Instead, their approach is that of the tax collector in Luke 18:13; for them, gratitude was primarily a negative expression of abasement and unworthiness. In the words of Abba Or, "In my own opinion, I put myself below all men"; in the words of of Abba Matoes, "Now that I am old, I see that there is nothing good about me"; in the words of Abba Anoub, when asked "What is integrity?" answered "To always accuse oneself." Consistently, across hundreds of sayings, these mystics suggested that they had pursued a life of solitude and suffering in the desert because they understood the best route to recognizing the love of--and their dependence upon--God to be that which separated themselves from the temptations posed by material accumulation, accomplishment, and security. To truly not judge others as Jesus commanded, to be one of the "pure in heart," meant to remove from one's life any basis for judging oneself or anyone else as deserving of any reward, whether it be good health, a remunerative occupation, supportive family and friends, or even sufficient goods, to say nothing of luxuries. The praising of God's goodness through the listing of blessings is replaced by the pleading for God's mercy in the context of sinful deprivation, which the humbling reality of desert existence hammered home daily. Abba John the Dwarf summed it up well: "Do not pay attention to the faults of others, and do not try to compare yourself with others, knowing that you are less than every created thing."

It is easy for modern-day Christians, particular those of a restorationist tradition like Mormonism, to dismiss all these folks as kooks at best, apostates who have gotten Christianity entirely wrong at worst. And I happily agree that there are ways in which I see their extreme asceticism becoming an idol in itself, particular in the way their insistence upon solitude--Abba Poeman: "Have the mentality of an exile in the place where you live"--runs against the very community-building hope which Jesus said His grace would always attend to. But some of these desert truths seem powerfully true to me, all the same. In particular, my own intellectual gifts and educational blessings come in for probably much needed disparagement, with these monks reminding me that a humble person is always willing to confess ignorance before the ways of God (Abba Anthony: "Abba Joseph has found the way, for when asked to explain the Scriptures he has said: 'I do not know'"). And some of the stories of genuine pastoral consideration and care which these sayings include are both beautiful and, I think, perhaps more reflective of the ways of the human heart than is often the case in stories whose context is a suburban cul-de-sac or citified congregation. But sure, just as the desert is a place of extremes, so are most of these sayings.

Perhaps it isn't surprising that the few signs of moderation found among these determined souls generally come from the women monks, the Desert Mothers. Amma Theodora warned that "neither asceticism, nor vigils, nor any kind of suffering are able to save," since demons, which neither eat nor drink, are not impressed by fasting, nor by separation from the world, since they live in the desert too. Amma Sarah observed that one should not condemn those who give alms for the praise of others, like the Pharisee mentioned in the same scripture above, because even if such acts are "only done to please men, through them one can begin to seek to please God." Perhaps the most well-known Desert Mother, Amma Syncletica, strikes this tone often. Not that she was at all ambivalent about her choice to pursue a life of solitude and suffering; she was actually rather contemptuous of the "many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and thus are wasting their time," and noted that being "a solitary in one's mind" was a matter of personal discipline, not circumstance. But she did not deny that people in urban circumstances, far away from the desert and "living in a crowd"--whom she called "seculars"--could also achieve the sort of balanced commitment which recluses like herself sought. She thought it was unlikely, since "immoderation cohabits with...the freedom of the city," but it wasn't impossible. Ultimately, one just has to be sensitive to just what kind of vocation God is calling one to; as she is recorded as saying:

Not all courses are suitable for all people. Each person should have confidence in their own disposition, because for many it is profitable to live in a community, and for others it is helpful to withdraw on their own. For just as some plants become more flourishing when they are in humid locations, while others are more stable in drier conditions, so also among humans: some flourish in the high places, while others achieve salvation in the lower places.

As someone who, as our collected Thanksgiving leaves from years past testify, has pretty much always, ever since escaping Utah, been appreciative of a course that hasn't involved living in high and dry places, and has been grateful to witness the changing of seasons from fertile and flat places all through the rest of my adult life instead, I need to keep this reminder of the variety of God's creation, and the variety of humankind's relationship to God's creation, in mind. It's not the most important lesson I take from the Desert Fathers and Mothers, but it's a valuable one all the same. Particularly during a time of thanksgiving, it's probably a good idea to think less about whatever bounty we think God may given any of us, and more about how God's love is always there, calling out to us, demanding a response from us--even, or perhaps especially, in the stark, sometimes psychologically immense and emotionally gaping absence of any particular bounty whatsoever, which too many face, every single day. 

Personally, I'm not sure I've ever heard that call, nor do I think I've ever felt any desire to listen for such a call, across the desolate, demanding, desert spaces which my church fled to and made blossom like a rose (partly and at some environmental cost). But I'm thankful to those, both anciently and today, who have turned away from living in the crowd (sometimes only briefly, sometimes for a lifetime), gone into the mountains and deserts, and shared with me what they heard. It's not a warm and light message of gratitude that I've learned from them; more often a harsh and intimidatingly direct one. But among the great fecundity of God's creation and the diversity of those who hear and respond to and seek to live in accordance with His word, it's a word of thanks, I think, all the same. As Job supposedly said, whether the Lord gives (like in the wide, rolling fields of Kansas I've come to love) or the Lord takes away (like in the haunting, sterile vistas of the Utah desert which some weirdly adore), "blessed be the name of the Lord."

The Anti-Federalists Were Right About Trump (and Many Other Things as Well)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Gillian Brockell, a talented writer and researcher for The Washington Post's history blog Retropolis, interviewed four esteemed historians and scholars of the Constitution, about what, if anything, the Founders had to say about the possibility of a President of the United States who refuses to concede an election, contests the results to the bitter end, and then, when the results are clearly and finally against them, simply rejects the results and insists upon staying in office. Their answer? As the historian Sean Wilentz of Yale University sums it up: “No, the Framers did not envisage a president refusing to step down or discuss what should be done in such a situation. There’s obviously nothing in the Constitution about it.” Jeffrey A. Engel of Southern Methodist University expands on that a little:

"[The Founders] couldn’t fathom two things: a person who had become president who was so utterly lacking in classical virtue that they would deign or dare to put their own interests above the unity of the country. And the second thing is, I think they couldn’t fathom how any president who would so vividly display disdain for the unity of the country, and mock and undermine the legitimacy of American democracy, why that person [wouldn’t have] already been impeached and removed from office.”

Fortunately Brockell did sufficient research so as to be able to add in her article, at length, comments from one of the Anti-Federalists who opposed the Founders' constitutional creation, the anonymous Pennsylvanian known as "An Old Whig." This concerned citizen presciently wrote:

To be tumbled headlong from the pinnacle of greatness and be reduced to a shadow of departed royalty, is a shock almost too great for human nature to endure. It will cost a man many struggles to resign such eminent powers, and ere long, we shall find some one who will be very unwilling to part with them. Let us suppose this man to be a favorite with his army, and that they are unwilling to part with their beloved commander in chief....[A]nd we have only to suppose one thing more, that this man is without the virtue, the moderation and love of liberty which possessed the mind of our General [Washington]-- and this country will be involved at once in war and tyranny....

We may also suppose, without trespassing upon the bounds of probability, that this man may not have the means of supporting, in private life, the dignity of his former station; that like Caesar, he may be at once ambitious and poor, and deeply involved in debt. Such a man would die a thousand deaths rather than sink from the heights of splendor and power, into obscurity and wretchedness....

I would therefore advise my countrymen seriously to ask themselves this question: Whether they are prepared to receive a king? If they are, to say so at once, and make the kingly office hereditary; to frame a constitution that should set bounds to his power, and, as far as possible, secure the liberty of the subject. If we are not prepared to receive a king, let us call another convention to revise the proposed constitution, and form it anew on the principles of a confederacy of free republics; but by no means, under pretense of our public, to lay the foundation for a military government, which is the worst of all tyrannies.

Ah well, hindsight is always 20-20, right?

On Partisanship and Punishing Politicians

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

It would be wrong to say I know James Clendenin. I've met him a few times at different city events. Once I asked him to come to Friends University (where I work) for a candidate forum, during which he interacted with and answered questions from the students--about parking enforcement, marijuana decriminalization, and more--in a smart and open-minded way, and that impressed me. Another time I had nice things to say about his genuinely admirable--and ultimately successful--work to save the Starlite Drive-In in south Wichita. That's not enough to say I'm friends with the man, but perhaps it gives me a little cover when I say: the fact he still hasn't resigned from the Wichita City Council in shame disappoints me--but perhaps that disappointed is at least as much rooted in the structure of our city council as much as in anything relevant to the character of Clendenin himself.

That I think he needs to resign isn't news; I signed on to an editorial which unambiguously insisted on that point two weeks ago. That there is cause for him to resign also isn't news; his involvement in both the false smear campaign against then mayoral candidate Brandon Whipple in 2019, and the subsequent effort to set up Sedgwick County Republican Party chair Dalton Glasscock when that smear was exposed, is well-documented, with supporting audio recordings, so much so that all sorts of local power players--including the political arm of the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Representative Ron Estes--have called for everyone involved to resign.

Of the three men facing those calls--Clendenin, Michael O'Donnell, and Michael Capps--Clendenin has done the most hunkering down. Capps, a state representative, lost his position in a Republican primary in August; while he ought to formally resign his office before it officially ends in January, he is already persona non grata with most of the local Republican establishment (and the state Republican establishment too; during the primary election, even former governor Jeff Colyer took the time to let his low opinion of Capps be known). O'Donnell initially wanted to tough it out, rebuffing his colleagues on the Sedgwick County Commission when they asked for his resignation. But when Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett announced that he would open ouster proceedings against O'Donnell, he quickly quit, even before it was confirmed that he's lost his re-election bid and that Democrat Sarah Lopez would occupy his seat anyway. Through all this though, despite condemnations from his colleagues on the city council and the members of his own District Advisory Board, Clendenin has remained essentially silent (save for one short statement that only told us what we already basically know).

It is notable that for Clendenin these condemnations of his behavior have been restricted to exactly that: condemnations, not calls for his resignation. Which is curious. Outside of the aforementioned ouster proceedings (which, according to state law, can be brought against any holder of "either state, district, county, township or city office" should they "willfully engage in misconduct while in office") being considered by the district attorney, no one is talking about invoking any kind of official power of expulsion here, so the comments of Councilmembers Claycomb and Tuttle regarding how the city council has "no authority to remove Clendenin from office" and that "the voters are the only ones who are able to change" Clendenin's position as the District 3 representative are off-point. The county commission agreed to formally request that O'Donnell resign in the face of his obviously unethical and possibly criminal actions; why wasn't our city council willing to do the same for Clendenin? (It's not like they don't have grounds, after all; the city of Wichita does have a code which requires councilmembers to "set an example of good ethical conduct," and the state of Kansas does have a statute which emphasizes that city councils can oblige their councilmembers to adhere to such codes.)

There are lots of possible reasons, of course. Clendenin's fellow councilmembers and DAB members, unlike me, actually personally know the man, and can bring actual personal knowledge to the problem. Maybe they see him as an unfortunate patsy, a good guy who was drawn into a scam by the more Machiavellian O'Donnell and Capps, and thus deserves less shame than the others. Maybe they see him as a councilmember who, whatever his irresponsible actions, has done his legislative work well, and thus shouldn't be pushed to step down if the voters in his district aren't trying to recall him. Maybe they see him as an essential part of maintaining whatever fraught coalitions or divides currently exist on the city council, as Mayor Whipple attempt to push Wichita into more aggressive action in terms of controlling the pandemic we all face (a dilemma certain to continue given the state mask mandate ordered Wednesday night), and they don't want to take the risk of replacing him. Or maybe they just want to wait until DA Bennett decides whether or not to pursue ouster proceedings against Clendenin--even though the county commission didn't wait in O'Donnell's case, and the county and state Republican parties didn't wait in Capps's.

Which suggests to me one additional possible reason, one that I do know something about. Maybe it's because the Wichita city council, unlike the county commission or the state legislature, is formally a non-partisan body, and that leaves less internally empowered to make demands on a fellow councilmember's behavior.

The council isn't really nonpartisan, of course; everyone knows the party affiliation of every person on the council, and it's not hard to see the basic party-aligned beliefs and associations held by the different councilmembers reflected in more than a few actions which the city council takes (particularly, in reference to the above, past votes which imposed a mask mandate in Wichita and then later allowed it to expire, though to be fair the latest such vote, on Thursday morning, one made in support of the county's presumed commitment to enforce for Governor Kelly's latest mask order, actually included a slight 5-2 break against party lines, though Clendenin wasn't one of the switchers). But since the official rule of municipal elections and service in Wichita's city government is nonpartisanship, the fiction is maintained--I think with often undemocratic results. I'm a broken record on this point--I really do believe that partisanship is a necessary part of the formula for making our city government both more responsive and more accountable. But let me suggest a different side to this old argument of mine: the different ways which the different elected bodies which Clendenin, Capps, and O'Donnell are (or, in that last case, were) part of responded to their involvement in this scandal reveals the way that partisanship imposes discipline. 

Parties, for all their limitations and problems, are effective institutional tools or organizing the interests of voters around electable candidates. But that statement focuses on the voter side, not the candidate side. On that side of the equation, parties are, or at least can be, an effective way for talented, ambitious people to connect themselves to the shifting preferences of voters...and for other, equally talented and ambitious people, to hold one another in line, thereby helping to impose accountability to those same voters. Sometime this is expressed through various organizational procedures available within the party: the withdrawing of privileges or funding or support, or even outright expulsion. But more often it is expressed through providing the sort of internally generated peer pressure that enables people to do the personally difficult thing of calling out a colleague, and demanding they face the music. It is easy, for me at least, to imagine that in the partisan environments of the state legislature and the county commission, that enabling force was contributing factor, while in our non-partisan (and, not coincidentally, given our council-manager system, structurally weak) city council, it may not have been felt much at all.

I have no evidence that my imagination is correct, of course; this is, again, just a suggestion. But is it really such an implausible one? Look again at the Sedgwick County Commission, and be absolutely clear on the relevant partisan stakes. In 2020, the year when Republicans outperformed the polls all across the country, all across Kansas, and all across Wichita, another Democrat was elected to the county commission, by a grand total of 264 votes out over 32,000 cast in District 2, bringing the Republican majority on the council down to 3-2. Sure, solid Republicans like Pete Meitzner and David Dennis and Jim Howell might not be particularly worried about that shift--but is it really likely that none of them are cognizant of the strong likelihood that if the scandal-plagued O'Donnell had resigned after the story of the false smear had first broke in 2019, or even at any reasonable point in 2020, and almost any other Republican was subsequently appointed in his place, that this November their Republican majority on the commission would still be 4-1? And now that all is said and done, that their recognition of this sad result contributes to their being just be a little tired of the man who tarnished their brand?

Implausible or not, the fact remains that, as of this writing, Mayor Whipple and the rest of the Wichita City Council are going forward conducting business alongside a man who helped raise money for a false smear and then, when that smear was exposed, was fully on board, according to his own recorded words, with framing an innocent person for the deed. Perhaps condemning him for his unrepentant attitude is sufficient, or perhaps waiting to see if the DA will present him with a stark choice is also. But O'Donnell's resignation, and Capp's retreat from the limelight, surely happened at least in part because their colleagues--and in both of their cases, their Republican colleagues--let them know that the party no longer had their back. In an environment where parties are artificially hidden, one of the great benefits of parties--the motivation of members to make costs tangible in the choices made by their fellow elected representatives--is muted. Whether that is actually a part of why O'Donnell and Capps no longer wield any political authority on the part of Wichita voters, but Clendenin still does, is something I don't know, any more than I know all that much about Clendenin himself. But as our city continues to move forward through these difficult times, it's something to think about, all the same.

Three Quick Addenda on Civic Friendship on Election Day

Apropos my sermon from a few days ago on the difficulties of civic friendship, three quick thoughts, this Election Day morning.

1) I voted early this year for the very first time this year, as a way to support an advance voting site that was set up on my campus two weeks ago. Thus, this Election Day morning is the first in my whole adult life that I wasn't at my local polling station early in the morning. I felt a need to go down the street anyway, and thank some of the volunteers. They were appreciative of the thanks, but not, it seemed to me, surprised. Election workers, poll observers, really everyone involved in the mechanics of making representative systems work: they may not see themselves as avatars of civic friendship in their commitment to this very ordinary, in many ways very boring work, but nonetheless I think they exactly the low-level, even humble hope which my post ended with. Maybe they're personally religious, or maybe they're not, but one way of speaking of the civic conviction which brings them (and perhaps many readers of this as well) out to volunteer is a kind of civil religion. They really must have--as most of us, most of the time, I am confident, similarly have-- some kind of faith that people can govern themselves, and that people like you and me and all of them can be trusted, whatever the legitimate and even necessary extremities of our different views, to go through the electoral rituals of American democracy, not just overturn all the tables without cause. 

2) I am a profoundly privileged person; I recognize that, though I also recognize that my articulation of that privilege--which mostly has to do with matters of sin and grace--likely does not operate the same as that which most of those who have engaged with intersectionality might assume. The point is, though, I know that I'm blessed and lucky, and that those blessings and that luck are significantly a function of my position in the various communities I am a member of. So having emphasized that, please take what I say here with all appropriate qualification: my experiences with civic friendship, limited as they may be, have convinced me it's an accomplishable goal. Unlike many others, I do not think I have lost any friends over the past four years. Maybe I have; it honestly wouldn't surprise me to learn that my privilege has blinded me to evils that have been done through my friendliness to people of radically different political views than me, my wishy-washy willingness to simultaneous call someone desperately, even wickedly, wrong but also to continue to consider them a fellow community member. If that is true, then I need to repent--but of course, I need to repent all the time of basically everything anyway (as, I think, does everyone else). In the meantime, I continue to have hope that, beyond all my unseen failures, those community connections, even if only performative, will have some real civic meaning, and thus amount to a real, however small, civic accomplishment. Which, honestly, is just another way of expressing a civic faith, a hope for something unseen, which is nonetheless real.

3) As always, "Northern Exposure" got it mostly right. So find the time today to watch this deeply romanticized, mostly inapplicable to most of our civic lives, but nonetheless, I suspect, deeply true story. And let Chris's final words be, if not a guide, then at least a hopeful reminder to us all.

Matthew Workman Never Wastes a Drive

Matthew Workman is many things. He's a husband and a father, a story-teller and a writer, a journalist and a podcaster. He is almost certainly one of the foremost native English-speaking authorities on the Faroe Islands in the world. He knew Phillip Seymour Hoffman when they were kids (kind of). Most importantly, at least insofar as this blog post is concerned, he is a long-time Uber and Lyft driver in Portland, and he's written a book chronicling some of his adventures, Driver Diaries: Five Years of Driving Strangers Around Portland. You should order a copy.

I'm not doing this (well, not solely) to shill for an old friend, partly because it seems presumptuous to call Matthew that. "Old acquaintance" is more like it, though I'd like to think we like each other as much as any other set of old acquaintances ever like each other on Facebook, and that we would be friendly if we ever met in person again. (I did date the woman who later became his wife for part of a summer, but I don't know if that would contribute to the friendliness or get in the way of it.) We first got to know each other very nearly 30 years ago, when we were both students at Brigham Young University and, more importantly, involved in putting out a very, very unofficial off-campus newspaper named Student Review. I wrote about it here (and quoted Matt!) when it was going through a revival (its second or third, I think) close to ten years ago; the only evidence I can find of it today is a Twitter feed that hasn't really been active since 2016, but hey, who knows what the future may hold.

The point, however, is simply this: Matthew and I were both young college students, figuring out what kind of grown-ups we were going to be, and a lot of our growing happened through Student Review. The perspectives I brought to the paper, and the associations I built through it, were of one type, involving one cohort of people: for the most part, we were a ponderous and serious and determinedly outrageous bunch. Matthew's type was different. He wrote a regular column for the paper--"Matthew Workman's Wasted Characters"--and the persona he projected through his writings was thoughtful, but never heavy, sharp-witted, but never sarcastic. Mainly he was a light-hearted observer of the foibles of the our campus and our world (which, weirdly, was very nearly BYU's motto); his weekly columns become required reading among a surprisingly large cohort of BYU students. Frankly, I was kind of jealous of the guy. With the perspective of youth, in which a 1 or 2 or, maybe at most, 3-year-difference can appear like a massive cultural gap, I saw him and his gang as so much more easy-going, so much more comfortable with themselves than perennially fraught me and my particular gang of malcontents. On more than one occasion when I crashed at the crazy house where he and his pals threw their parties and cranked out their papers, I found myself sticking Matthew and his crew into episodes of "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" in my head. (I hope that comes out as complimentary, Matt.)

Well, anyway, life happens to us all, and decades go by without much, if any, contact between us. But slowly, social media puts us back into each others orbit, slightly. I was delighted to discover that he'd preserved the old name of his Student Review column for his blog. And then I heard about his plans for a book. Always late for things like this, I never contributed to the Kickstarter campaign, and missed the first batch of books. Luckily, a mutual friend had some additional copies, and shared one with me. I'm grateful he did. Is it the Great American Novel? Of course not; it's a self-published 100-page collection of anecdotes, so scale your expectations back accordingly. But when properly scaled, I think you can see that this book is a gem.

I'm not an Uber person myself, for reasons of both inclination and ideology, but Matthew's prose makes me kind of wish I was otherwise. In the more than 10,000 drives he estimates that he's made over his years as a drive, he's encountered a huge range of situations, less than 20 of which he includes in the book, but all of them are described with a charming mix of sympathy, bemusement, kindness, and wit. In the nearly three decades since I first started to read his work, Matthew has perhaps grown even more deadpan (when a woman his helping shares a sorrowful story of drunken sex, he can't think of anything else to say than "It's a bit early for that, isn't it?"; after being sexually propositioned by a handsome, apparently desperate man, he let's him off at his destination with a hapless "Enjoy the rest of your night!"). Not that he can't be serious; his trips have included a woman who had just escaped a sexual assault, a man delivering himself to prison; and, in the longest entry in the book, an affecting story of his attempt to deal with a woman likely suffering from dementia who couldn't tell him where she needed to go or who to reach out to for help. But, despite the occasional darkness of the book, there is a lot of ridiculousness and delight and some outright joy too--the ride that ended with him being able to drive his minivan onto the tarmac of the Portland International Airport, or the evening in which he had "two rides in a row where I could talk about penises without repercussion."

Was it a book that changed my life for the better? No. But was it a read that put a smile on my face, that taught me things that I'd never knew before, and that make me think about the quotidian randomness and grace that ordinary life brings? Absolutely. Dave Eggers (not that Dave Eggers, another Dave Eggers whom Matthew knows) calls it in a blurb "the defining work of gig-employment era," and no, it's not that at all. Matthew doesn't have the sociological chops to reflect in that way on his work, and neither does he want to be that boring. What this slight book is, in the end, is pretty simple: it's a collection of stories about people taking an Uber in the Portland area, usually late at night, with thoughts both generous and sincere about those stories attached. Every single one of those stories is worth reading, and not one was wasted. Matthew, don't ever change; you gave me a good day this Saturday, and I appreciate it very much.

Thoughts on the Difficulty of Friendship at the Present Time

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

[A slightly expanded version of a presentation on civility I gave at Friends University on October 26.]

I have seen a lot of anger among my family and friends during this election season; I presume I am not alone in that. After I was asked to give this presentation I thought about that anger, and talked with my wife about it at length. To her, Jesus's cleansing of the temple is the emblematic scripture story of our moment, and I think she may be right. But what kind of guidance does it provide, if any, when we're thinking about a Savior who called all who aspire to be servants of Him to love one another, without reservation?  A Savior whose most loving words, to those who served Him best, was to call them friends?

My old friend Michael Austin once wrote a whole book about friendship in the midst of political disagreement. He began his argument in that book by considering Aristotle’s philia politike, or "civic friendship." Drawing on the work of some other scholars, he defined it as the fellow-feeling that any self-governing community depends upon as a very particular kind of friendship, one characterized by a sense of both the mutual self-interest which exists within a shared community, as well as a degree of goodwill. He quoted the philosopher Sybil Schwarzenbach, who once wrote: "Aristotle is not saying that in the just polis all members know each other, are emotionally close, or personally like each other….Political friendship is evidenced, rather...in the legal and social norms regarding the treatment of persons in that society, as well as in the willingness of fellow citizens to uphold them.”

Schwarzenbach's point about norms in Aristotle's account of how citizens are to be friends strikes me as important. Norms are social and historical constructs, assumptions about and expectations for the community systems within which we live; they are essential components of any social organization which exists over time. It is reasonable, therefore, to see the violation of a norm as a form of betrayal, or an act of injustice: that is, of sometone taking advantage of the civic friendship--or, rather, of the historical assumptions we all have regarding what we may expect from others and that which they may expect from us--upon which all of ordinary life in a community requires.

We can all think of examples of politicians violating what many would rightly consider to be crucial constitutional norms. But those social assumptions and expectations function in our lives beyond the level of party politics. For some, there are norms involving the trustworthiness of the police; for others, there are norms which assume the stability of gender. The fact that there are always subgroups within our community for whom these and other norms were not only not recognized but would have been considered the height of naiveté to take seriously is, I have come to think, part of the point: a feeling of betrayal doesn't only come from violations of norms, but from the discomfort which a shifting understanding of norms entails as well.

This is my armchair hypothesis: that one source of the anger is that we have had, all year long, constantly forced before us--thanks to a callous president regularly inventing and condemning enemies, thanks to lock-downs that exacerbated economic difficulties and shut down spaces of social escape, thanks to an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story--the fact that norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different subcommunities of this country (norms about respectful political compromise, about the equal treatment of the races, about the integrity of law enforcement, about the predictability of gender identity, about the functioning of the economy, or even about the place of God in our lives during a time of pandemic) are being challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed. And so the anger at--and, sometimes, the hysterical insistence upon defending--the systemic assumptions we thought we knew flows ever stronger.

Obviously, a social media civil war isn't remotely the same as a real one. Michael, in his book, made use of Abraham Lincoln as well as Aristotle. Focusing on the great call of his First Inaugural Address--"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies”--Michael looked closely at how Lincoln's choices as a political figure reflected his understand of civic friendship, something which he called for even in the midst of a level of anger that far exceeds anything we've seen yet this election season. Interestingly, he pointed out what Lincoln, to use the terms I sketched out above, pretty explicitly did not think embracing a sense of mutual self-interest and goodwill towards those whom you may fundamentally feel betrayed by requires. He did not think it requires us to deny or hide our deeply held beliefs, even extreme ones. Also, he did not think it requires us to believe that all sides are equally at fault (if there even is a "fault") in the violation or upending or simply the changing of norms, and that the best compromise therefore will always be found in the mushy middle, as we are so often condescendingly told.

What did Lincoln think civic friendship in the face of the systemic collapse--or at least the feeling of norms collapsing all around you--requires? On Michael's reading, it requires one to operate on the assumption that everyone can change their mind; that no one's position in the midst of the fraught debates all around us is absolute. It also requires us to prioritize fairness--not the abandonment of one's beliefs, but a fairness in the expressing of them, always allowing others to express the same. Most of all, it requires us to be willing to play the long game, to patiently accept the legitimacy of small steps. Patience, incidentally, is one of the key themes of Compassion & Conviction, a book some colleagues and I have been reading together with a group of students this semester. At one point the authors--all of whom are long-time activists and pastors in African-American communities--observe that:

Patience is often in shorter supply for the zealous convert to a cause than the long-suffering laborer for justice. It is not usually the most vulnerable who are the most vitriolic, nor is it usually they who have persevered for what they believed who are most bitter. Instead, often the people for whom these issues are primarily emotional are trying to prove their commitment rather than just being committed. Those who have advocated for an issue for a long time, on the other hand, are able to track progress, are respectfully aware of the various points of disagreement, and understand the terrain (pp. 120-121).

That impassioned call to patience, and Michael's reading of Lincoln, are both powerful, I think. But I can also think of reasons to dissent from them. What if the very idea of “fairness” is part of the norm that appears to have been systematically broken or never consistently applied in the first place? What if cognitive research and social science and long hours of arguing with people on Facebook have proven to you that, actually, people never really do change their minds? Most of all, what if the patient long game which Michael embraces has already been intolerably too long? (Keep in mind here that Martin Luther King, Jr., himself wrote a whole book, titled Why We Can't Wait, about those annoying calls for civil rights protesters and demonstrators to be "patient.")

I can come up with no easy solution for how one is to deal in a friendly with one's fellow community members when dismay or confusion or consternation or anger over the breakdown of systems and assumptions dominates. So instead I come back to Jesus cleansing the temple--not just overturning tables, but taking a whip and driving those who were collecting and changing money at those tables out into the streets. I have no idea what kind of mental state we are supposed to understand our Savior to have had in this story. Was He sorrowful? Or was He, actually, angry? Angry, perhaps, at the realization that the system of sacrifice under the temple priests and Levites had become so exploitative, that the norms by which poor Jews were given access to temple rites had become so warped, that there was nothing left to do but take direct confrontational action, and literally upend them all? I don't know, and I doubt any believer can know. But believers can and should, at least, recognize that, even while the call to love and friendship--to say nothing of the minimal civic application of such--remains, it remains, at least if we include this scriptural story into our understanding of Jesus, in conjunction with both a recognition of the legitimacy of feeling betrayed, and a recognition that our responses to perceived violations of or confusions over norms and expectations will not always be eternally passive.

At one point in his wise book (wise in terms of political ethics, certainly; whether it is wise in terms of addressing failed political systems and norms is something that remains to be seen), Michael frames civic friendship as a hope. That, I think, is the only true point I can conclude with. The civic friendship which can exist in a community is fundamentally always going to be an act of faith, a holding onto a "conviction of things not seen."  We don't know--we can't know, until it actually happens--if the norms and assumptions and expectations whose seeming collapse angers us are final; we don't even know if some of them might not be opening up a window for systemic change that might appropriately be described as providential. In the meantime, so long as this community that we know is still here when we wake up in the morning, the call of Jesus can, I think, be at the very least expressed as a continued hope to be able to treat our fellow community members as friends. “We exercise civic friendship, or fail to exercise it, when we decide what kind of society we want to be. We vote on this question every day–occasionally in a formal election but more often through the purchases we make, the people and institutions we choose to associate with, and the things that we give our attention to. No law can force us, and no syllogism can persuade us, to care about other people; only friendship can do that. But when animated by a genuine concern for the well-being of others, we can find ways"--and I would add here, “to restore failing norms” or “to rebuild or replace flawed or discriminatory systems” or perhaps merely, as Michael wrote--"to make our society more just” (pp. 38-39).

Three Thoughts (with Supporting Subpoints) about Trump, Biden, and the 2020 Election

It's a week before the election. I cast my vote early, and very likely a large percentage of anyone who happens to read this has also. So this isn't about changing anyone's mind or convincing anyone of anything. This is just pure testimony--me stating, for myself and anyone else who cares, where I stand. Also, it's long and very navel-gazingly. So, you've been warned.

1) Donald Trump is not the worst president in American history. But he is personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, stupidly (and often gleefully) divisive, and politically destructive (and not in any remotely productive way), plus he has promoted all sorts of policies which I profoundly disagree with. Of course I was never going to vote to re-elect him, and neither should have (or should, if any of the 14 people reading this are undecided) anyone else.

1.a) I sincerely mean that first sentence. Not only do I not believe Trump to be the worst president in American history (how to compare this whiny, ignorant, self-aggrandizing grifter and sexist jerk to the outright murderous Andrew Jackson, or the outright racist Woodrow Wilson, or the outright criminal Warren Harding?), I do not even think he's the worst president in my lifetime as an adult capable of voting in presidential elections.

1.a.1) In our present era, while presidents can be--as Trump has fully shown--personally corrupt, administratively irresponsible, socially divisive, and politically destructive, the administrative state has, thankfully (and, to be sure, only thus far--those bureaucratic guardrails and behavioral norms can't survive forever when they're disregarded as they frequently have been by our current president), for the most part effectively prevented the people who wield the executive power of the American state from fully pursuing whatever murderous, racist criminality may be on their minds. So what do I think is the worst thing that a president can, in this day and age, manage to do? How about invading another country on the basis of misleading, flimsy, or outright false information fed to you by an economic and ideological cabal whom you stupidly and self-interestedly gave complete trust to, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, the wounding and traumatizing of millions, the expenditure of trillions, and ruination of whatever limited diplomatic or moral authority the American state could have wielded over roughly one fifth of the planet, prior to 2003?

1.a.2) So yes, Donald Trump is not as bad a president as George W. Bush was. Take a bow, Mr. President; you have, so far, managed not to trip over that impossibly low bar. Congratulations.

1.b) As for the rest, well, if you don't agree with me now, why would I be able to convince you? So suffice to say I think Trump is personally corrupt (see here), administratively incompetent (see here), socially divisive (see here), and politically destructive (see here). Admittedly that last one is specific to our present dysfunctional liberal constitutional order, but if you believe that his destruction is or could be a politically constructive long game which is paving the way for a better alternative in the future, I disagree there too (see here). And then there's all the ways his populist talk seems to me to have been mostly a complete sham (see here), and all the ways he's presided, when he has actually presided at all, over what seems to me mostly the same pro-business, conservative Republican agenda that I happen to fundamentally disagree with (see here), and all the ways his mixture of crudely stylized patriotism and vindictive cruelty led him to expand our already inhumane border patrol policies into what seems to me to be an immoral horror (see here). Also, I'm unconvinced that the record number of judges he's appointed will serve America well (see here), I don't see much worker-empowering upside in the trade wars he's picked with China and other countries (see here), I consider his supposed triumphs in moving the America's embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to have been disruptive distractions from his general foreign policy incompetence (see here), and I'm appalled, as I think everyone should be, by his irresponsibility when it comes to fighting the covid-19 pandemic (see here). So yeah: he didn't get my vote. If he got the vote of anyone reading this, well, I'm sorry to hear it (though not surprised, I guess).

2) Like I would estimate better than 90% of however many Democrats, liberals, socialists, and other left-leaning people who ever read this, Biden was not my preferred candidate in the Democratic party's presidential nomination race. But I didn't think twice about voting for him, and I hope lots of you did too.

2.a) I'm genuinely not sure how much of a change saying that is for me. My personal history of votes for presidential candidates ever since I became eligible to vote is, at present, evenly divided between Democrats and independent or third-party left-wing challengers and symbolic candidates: Clinton (1992), Nader (1996), Nader (2000--write-in), Kerry (2004), Obama (2008), Stein (2012), Sanders (2016--write-in), Biden (2020). My argument for those votes--which I made many, many, many times over the years--was always, for all its varying details, fundamentally about contextuality. That is, every vote takes place in a specific electoral context, and that context--constructed out of, at the minimum, the candidates available to vote for, the parties which nominated them, the electorates voting for them, the calculations at work as the candidates and parties appeal to certain members of the electorate in their particular districts and states, and much more--should be respected for what it is, as opposed to pushing it aside in favor of a demanding narrative of absolute, a-contextual choice, which is so often the default conclusion of many under our two-party system. In the actual absence of such a narrative (which is as I think it should be), it seems reasonable to me to allow some legitimate place for expressive concerns of an aesthetic and moral and ideological nature as a part of one's voting decision, rather than insisting that an overriding utilitarian calculation about the democratic accumulation of power is the only thing that matters (especially when that hypothetical accumulation of power somehow has to happen in the context of a democratically-disempowering structure like the Electoral College). Anyway, sometimes all those concerns, in their varying contexts, left me feeling good about supporting the Democratic party's candidate for president with my vote; other times they didn't, and I expressed myself otherwise. So maybe this year isn't any different.

2.b) Except it is--because this year, I actually do think that the "demanding narrative of absolute, a-contextual choice" is real, so much so that, even though I know it is basically impossible to imagine my state of Kansas will delivering its Electoral College votes to anyone besides Donald Trump, I nonetheless think it's important for me to vote for a candidate that I have significant aesthetic and moral and ideological reservations about.

2.b.1) What are those reservations? Well, aside from a not-particularly-credible-but-still-nonetheless-plausible sexual assault allegation against the man--an allegation which contributed to the Democratic Socialists of America, an organization I'm a member of, deciding to issue an explicit Biden-non-endorsement--the plain fact is that Biden, unlike both other Democratic candidates whom I donated money to and wrote in support of over this campaign season, is a bone-deep institutionalist and moderate, a politician who by all accounts deeply believes that the norms of our national government, our political parties, and our liberal capitalist order, can and should be made to work as they are, rather than recognizing their essential dysfunction and supporting something new. So for the hijacked (and democratically indefensible) judiciary he advocates forming a bipartisan commission to study the problem. So for climate change he goes back and forth on fracking, unwilling to commit to either the science or politics. So for health care, and the philosophically incoherent but still sometimes life-saving mess which is the Affordable Care Act, he rejects the obviously cleaner and more coherent Medicare for All, and instead insists upon Obamacare 2.0--"Bidencare," which may set up the goal of a true public option for those desperate for health insurance coverage, but still sticks the American health care system with the same insurance-company-managed superstructure. All of which, to be sure, may involve significant improvements over the status quo--but none of which suggest any intention of aiming the executive branch in the direction of the sorts of revolutionary changes which our dysfunctional government and sclerotic socio-economic body politic truly needs. Was there any real chance that electing Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren to the presidency would have resulted in anything different, all talk of revolutionary longings aside? Yes, practically speaking I actually think there was. But that chance is lost now; Biden is who will be on the ballot, and then leaves me far from excited.

2.b.2) Unless, that is, maybe Biden is actually, as has been suggested, a Konrad Adenauer figure, an old and  re-assuring and unexciting political leader who comes to power in the wake of (or, in our case, in the midst of) a devastating crisis, and exactly because he threatened no one who was invested in preserving their respective institutions, was therefore politically capable of pulling off massive institutional changes nonetheless? That's a hopeful argument! It's the flip-side of the paranoid argument advanced by those convinced that the genial, resolutely liberal Biden is smuggling into the executive branch, in the person of Kamala Harris, a Black Lives Matter socialist radical (though how anyone who read the news at all over the past year and saw all the criticism during the primaries of Harris's time as California's top cop could believe this truly confuses me). As someone sympathetic to both socialist radicalism and massive institutional change, I'd love it if either of these arguments turn out to be true. Probably neither of them will--but regardless, that's not why I said I didn't have to think twice about casting an, in Kansas, almost certainly entirely symbolic vote for Biden.

2.c) No, the reason I said what I said is that I've been convinced that my vote for Biden is, as I wrote above, only almost entirely symbolic. I do not have any confidence that my vote for Biden for president here in the state of Kansas will provide any electoral help to replacing Donald Trump as president--but I am unable to shake the possibility that my one vote, along with millions of other votes, just might provide actual popular help in making that replacement stick.

2.c.1) I actually don't believe Trump is a fascist; "incipient fascist figurehead" is the term an old friend of mine used, and I think that fits better. The fact that Trump's own narcissism and stupidity have contributed to undermining his own authoritarian tendencies is, as some have noted, no reason not to take seriously the potential threat which all his divisiveness, vindictiveness, and irresponsibility presents our political community with. This is a man who--perhaps humorously, perhaps trollingly, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps even he doesn't even know the difference--would not even unambiguously admit to respecting the peaceful transfer of power. His paranoia and resentment (particularly where President Obama is concerned) instead makes it necessary for his every engagement with that question to turn into a whining disquisition on FBI abuses, voter fraud, and other false and/or irrelevant claims which he uses to give himself cover for refusing to commit to an answer. And for all the systemic harms and flaws built into our system, to have it be ripped apart by a leader who might, just might, use mobs or the military to keep himself in office--no doubt preceded by reams of lawsuits over ballots and state election rules, all of which would quickly end up before a Supreme Court which would issue decisions on these matters in a manner that we'd have every reason to fundamentally doubt--would not result in anything that could be easily built upon in the future. Hence, everything, no matter how small, that every voter can do to affirm the Biden side of the "absolute, a-contextual choice" before us is, in this election at least, imperative in a way that I simply don't think has ever been so clear before.

2.c.2) Is this an inconsistency in my thinking? Knowing everything I do about Duverger's Law, about political socialization, about party polarization, I still do not apologize for, and still think there is a place for, thinking about presidential elections in a manner that makes space for expressing those aforementioned aesthetic, moral, and ideological concerns, and thus sometimes voting outside of the two-party system, rather than simply insisting upon making the usual utilitarian calculation between the Republican and Democratic candidates. But if I believe that, then doesn't that mean I'm in principle kind of unconcerned with the possible influence which not engaging with the existing system may somehow have on down-ballot races and other electoral contests, while in this one case I think that question of influence just happens to be absolutely central? I admit that may be an inconsistency. In my defense, though, I argue that my vote for president will, in fact, be counted and added to a total, a total that in our present context just might have some role to play in representing an actually popular repudiation of the man abusing our system, whereas in every previous context I can reconstruct in my memory, I can come up with no plausible popular connection between, say, voting for Al Gore in Virginia (where we lived in 2000) and thus making it that much less less likely that the Supreme Court would stop the recounts in Florida, or voting for Hillary Clinton here in Kansas four years ago, and thus somehow influencing one or more of 70,000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to change their minds. Also, please note: while I have occasionally been tempted, I've nonetheless never once allowed my aesthetic, moral, or ideological reservations with a candidate to get me to express myself through voting outside the two-party system in local or state contests. Why? A lot of different reasons, many having to do with my ability to actually, democratically interact with local and state candidates and their relevant electorates in a way that I never could on a national scale--but mostly because democratic movement-building through the existing parties isn't short-circuited on the local or state level by the Electoral College in the states I've lived in, thank goodness.

2.c.3) So, anyway, in case anyone is confused: I reject the idea that every vote in ever election should be imagined as subject to an overriding utilitarian calculation about the democratic accumulation of power, but I do believe, in the light of the context of 2020 and President Trump's bad record and his probably unlikely but nonetheless still actually possible even worse potential, that in this election I, and everyone, ought to jump on that overriding utilitarian calculation and take it all the way to voting for Biden at the ballot box. Or in other words, do exactly what Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints tells you to do.

3) All of the foregoing has involved a piling up of arguments about our electoral system, so let me finish with this: I think everyone who can legally vote should always vote, I think as many adult citizens as possible should be legally able to vote, and I think everyone adult citizen should always vote in every electoral contest they can.

3.a) Are there too many elections in the United States, such that my above-stated belief can lead to voter exhaustion and representative cowardice? Yes. Between the ever-evolving and ever-increasing demands of campaign finance, our never-ending and increasingly unpredictable social media and 24-hour news cycles, and the transformation of political parties into something closer to polarized personality cults than machines of democratic representation, elections have frequently become warped and stressful and extreme events, providing little of the breathing room necessary for responsiveness and little of follow-up necessary for accountability.

3.a.1) Overturning Buckley v. Valeo and removing the constitutional block which that interpretation of the First Amendment placed on serious democratic arguments about the appropriate way to regulate the way money warps candidate and interest groups agendas and behaviors would be very helpful here.

3.a.2) The complete public financing of elections would be better, of course, but so would replacing our entire liberal capitalist and constitutional and electoral orders with a confederal system of environmentally sustainable, mostly autarkic egalitarian communes and ward republics which operate on the basis of a combination of direct democracy and proportional representation. But as this isn't a post about my more utopian fantasies, let's just leave that here and move on.

3.b) More particular to the whole point of this post, why do I believe that everyone should cast a ballot, even in presidential contests when the Electoral College renders millions of votes every year (though maybe not this year; see 2.c.1) essentially meaningless, at least insofar as the aforementioned utilitarian calculus regarding the democratic accumulation of power is concerned? Because, fundamentally, voting is one of the basic practices of citizenship, and being a citizen means being a member of a liberal democratic civil society, a particular kind of civil society that will not endure--which would mean the loss of all the small-r republican virtues (respectful pluralism, civil discourse, attendance to the common good) that a genuinely functioning civil society allows--without its members going through the practices. This is straight out of Tocqueville, folks. Yes, I do know, and have a fair amount of fondness for, those who reject the claims (and, true, the invariably bourgeois pretensions) of civil society in favor of forms of membership that are more radically participatory and democratic, more economically socialistic and mutualist, more truly--as opposed to merely "respectfully"--pluralistic and decentralist. I wouldn't have listed my utopian fantasy replacement of the U.S. Constitution above if I wasn't willing to admit to feeling some real affection for that more deeply communitarian alternative. But I also have a lot of affection for the ordinary bourgeois goods which our liberal democratic state has been able to provide--not always, and not to everyone, but consistently enough--to me and my loved ones and hundreds of millions of others. Therefore, if there is a way to participate in the republican practices which our civil order appears to require if it is to flourish, and there is no clear reason to believe that going through the motions of those republican practices are actually making harder the expression of mutualist, decentralist, communitarian alternatives, then I just don't see any good ethical reason not to so participate, from the most local level all the way up to the highest national one, especially when the aesthetic, moral, and ideological caveats I mentioned in 2.a) are in place.

3.b.1) One final point: is voting the only such practice? Of course not; it's not even the most important one--organizing, demonstrating, volunteering, speaking out, donating, protesting, running for office yourself: all of those are equally or more important than the vote. But if the vote is legally there for you (and it ought to be), one ought to make use of it. Doing so more fully expresses oneself as a citizen, and the republican expression of citizenship in liberal constitutional state, for all its capitalist corruption and democratic dysfunction, is no small thing--especially if it contributes, if only as a popular safeguard, to the removal of a bad man from the presidency, as I hope will happen one week (or one week-plus-however-many-weeks-of-lawsuits/demonstrations/riots/enormous-whining-from-the-con-man-in-the-White House) from today.

Vote well, everyone. 2020 has been enormously horrible; let's not add to it, shall we?