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Sunday, March 31, 2019

Listening to Macca #3: Band on the Run and Venus and Mars

I obviously haven't finished my song-by-song march through everything McCartney did with Wings, but I will be very surprised if these two albums don't turn out to be the best work ever done by that band--or, more specifically, done by the trio of Sir Paul, Linda, and Denny Laine, whomever else may or may not have joined them in the studio. Band on the Run is the best-selling and most critically acclaimed post-Beatles album that McCartney ever played on or wrote a song for, with or without anyone else, and I judge those accolades very much deserved. And Venus and Mars has some great songs on it as well--and, more importantly, with the (brief) addition of the fantastic guitarist Jimmy McCulloch to complement Laine's lead and McCartney's bass, and Joe English on drums as well, you had the makings of a genuine, functioning, mutually interactive and developing band. Too bad it didn't last.

Ban on the Run was released in December 1973, barely six months after the still comparatively aimless Red Rose Speedway, and man, what a difference a half a year can make. The Paul-Linda-Denny trio ended up with nine tight songs, three of which--"Jet," "Let Me Roll With It," and "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five"--are, I think, rock and roll songs of the first order, making use of driving horns, crunching bass lines, synthesized organ tones, and boogie-woogie piano. The title song is, of course, a fun pop medley, one that actually holds together in a way that the half-done stitching jobs Sir Paul had given a pass to on his previous albums usually did not. "Bluebird" and "No Words" may not be your cup of tea, but they're both fine examples of how Macca can sometimes turn his fondness for sappy love songs in subtle or surprising directions. "Mamunia," which you expect to be a lazy folk-pop tune, turns out to be a sweet, hummable, clever number. Even "Mrs. Vanderbilt" and "Picasso's Last Words (Drink To Me)," both of which have McCartney's stereotypical thrown-together feel to them, nonetheless sustain some real musical integrity, and remain entertaining to the end. So really, this whole album is excellent, very much worth listening to all the way through again and again. I give it an A.

Venus and Mars was recorded a year and a half later, mostly in New Orleans. It has a couple of duds: "You Gave Me The Answer" is just McCartney letting his old music hall side out again, and it's hard to know what "Spirits of Ancient Egypt" (a Laine composition) is supposed to be. But many of cuts on the album are supported by tight horns and funky grooves that takes Macca's lyrics in new directions--"Letting Go," "Call Me Back Again," even the pretentious "Rock Show" (which is paired with the almost unbearably twee "Venus and Mars") are all fine, driving rock and roll songs, worthy of a listen or three. "Listen to What the Man Said" was the album's huge pop hit, but "Magneto and Titanium Man" is just as good, maybe better (I think it's terrifically witty, but maybe that's just because I catch all the comic book references). My favorite cut on the whole album, however, is the one which wasn't a McCartney composition: "Medicine Jar," written and sung by Jimmy McCulloch, is a swampy, bluesy, barn-burner; I adore it, and I can't believe no one tried to release it as a single. So give this album a solid B. If McCartney hadn't done what he so often did in the 1970s, and release his best songs--in this case, the blistering and wicked smart "Junior's Farm"--as singles rather than sticking them on the album made from the sessions where they were recorded, it would probably be higher, maybe even at Band on the Run's level.

Friday, March 29, 2019

What Urban Liberals Might Learn From Rural Rebels

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Loka Ashwood, a rural sociologist at Auburn University, visited The Land Institute in Salina, KS, last September, and gave a presentation on her then just-published book, For-Profit Democracy: Why the Government Is Losing the Trust of Rural America. The book is wonderful, if sometimes a little frustrating--I'd love everyone to read it, but especially the liberal editors of Washington Monthly, the liberal contributors to Boston Review, and all the progressive liberals surrounding Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign. Why them, in particular? Well, that takes some explaining.

I pick on the Monthly and the Review in particular because they both recently published extensive packages of articles addressing--in thoughtful and (mostly) non-condescending ways--the fate of liberal politics and left causes in general in rural parts of America, and insisting that a new engagement by those on the left with rural America is a necessity. Paul Glastris, the editor of the Monthly, announced the issue's focus by calling upon its mostly wonky, mostly DC-living readership to "check your coastal urban privilege," and the articles which followed thoughtfully examined how agricultural consolidation is more a problem for rural communities today than tariffs, and how airline deregulation and the weakening of antitrust laws have created huge difficulties for small and mid-size cities in rural parts of the country trying to hold onto the resources upon which rural, regional economies depend. Elizabeth Catte, editing a special issue titled "Left Elsewhere" for the Review, invoked the left-wing, populist history of miners unions and other 19th-century and early 20th-century fights in Appalachia, noted the parallels between those movements and the West Virginia teachers strike, and insisted that liberal reformers today need to rediscover a "continuity" with rural activists from the past. And as for Warren, just on Wednesday her campaign dropped a long list of policy proposals she is promising to pursue if elected president, any one of which--supporting farmers in their pleas for much needed right-to-repair laws, shifting anti-trust policy to focus as least much on the Monsanto-manipulated agricultural producer as on the cheap-food-price-paying consumer--would be valuable additions in the fight to preserve rural economies and keep agricultural communities intact.

Talk is cheap, of course. Still, these and many other responses--some hopeful, some less so--from the liberal/progressive/socialist/left side of the political aisle in American life would seem to suggest, if nothing else, that in the wake of consistent major losses in the middle of the country over the past couple of decades, at least some smart Democratic activists, think-tankers, and politicians want to be more serious about incorporating the social and economic concerns of rural America into their thinking. More power to them!

But, also, they should read Ashwood's book. Because her analysis of the way the federal, state, and county governments of Burke County, Georgia, plus the massive and entwined corporations of Southern Company and Alabama Power, and the nuclear Vogtle Electric Generating Plant which they all together managed to build on land that, at one time, was owned by and provided both cultural and natural support to the people who lived upon it, teaches sobering lessons to those who hope that policies alone, absent a deeper restructuring of how we think about rural communities, will suffice.

It should emphasize that I have no doubt that Ashwood herself would be sympathetic to all of those above mentioned policies, and probably many more. Her contempt for the crony capitalism and the regulatory state which uses eminent domain to serve the interests of for-profit bodies which perpetuate such capitalist concentrations of power is made exceptionally clear throughout the book and her other writings, so clear that I'm certain she would consider any program, no matter how minimal, which might even just slightly limit the ability of corporations (and the governments which enable them) to control whether or not farmers can fix their own equipment, or make use of their seeds, or hunt on what was, sometimes for generations, their own land, absolutely worth pursuing. Years of research in rural communities have convinced her--and she makes a convincing case--that the greatest enemy of rural America is what she calls "for-profit democracy." It's a term which she defines multiple times, often somewhat differently (readers of her book should be forewarned that she repeatedly introduces concepts, even if quite similar to a previously introduced one, with a "this is what I'm calling" declaration--it's a slightly distracting habit, but not a terrible one). It describes a phenomenon which should be familiar to anyone with a rural background, in which public utilities--which are nearly always for-profit corporations--work through the power of governments to capture resources (land, waterways, roads, and more) so as to expand their productive footprint (and, thus, their "public service," though of course also their profit margins). It's a phenomenon which ties together concerns over majoritarianism (urban areas with large populations rarely think about the rural consequences of voting in support of constructing electrical grids, power lines, water treatment plants, or waste repositories, and therefore for the invasive industrial expansions necessary to do so), monopolization (economies of scale, when dealing with the demand for equal access to comprehensive goods, invariably benefits those large economic actors which can provide said goods, and thus empowers their demands for special privileges from the state), and limited liability (the creation of corporate forms which can offload costs creates a corrupt condition of mutual dependency, as well as mutual enrichment, between government and private actors). To try to capture the complexity of her idea, consider this explanation:

[F]or-profit democracy is enacted through the collective legal form of the corporation. In no universe would corporations exist without a legal system committed to economic development. Corporations enjoy liability protections not afforded to humans that go by their own name. When the Smith family can't pay their mortgage, they lose their house. But if a nuclear power plant defaults on a loan payment or experiences a core meltdown, layers of subsidiary corporations, limited liability, and special legislation protect shareholders from paying their debts. Further, private utilities have an absolute monopoly because the state (in addition to making them legally possible) allows them to buy up one another while also demanding that citizens fund them....

If corporate expansion over public purposes and private profit stopped there, profit-seeking corporations might not be such a substantial affront to the moral economy of democracy. Perhaps the legal creation of what I see as "for-profit democracy"...could stay in a sphere of corporate trade and not over-power the right to own property for other reasons. Perhaps limited liability could apply only when corporations squared up against other corporations, without dispossessing humans, who still bore liability for their own actions. But corporate owners have not stopped there. On top of awarding them public and profit rights, the judiciary recognizes corporations as people....Economic development and making money are so confused with the ultimate ends of society that fictitious legal creations are treated as everyday people....Deft lawyers cleverly press the extension of human rights to the corporate form through narrow legal jurisprudence, making profit's rule ever more pervasive in ever more corners of democratic and everyday life. Meanwhile, the scales of justice that favor corporations bring democracy ever closer to the breaking point--a breaking point for the moral economy familiar to Sydney, Sara, Dave, Dean, Beau, and Patty [all of whom are various individuals that Ashwood profiles at length, all residents of Burke County who have found so many options for the traditional use of the resources and land once available to them circumscribed by the actions of power companies and the county government that are tempted to do as many others--just take the money and leave], who find themselves unable to compromise on their most deeply held principles for the sake of a profit-seeking legal apparatus (pp. 25, 71, 73).

There are many more arguments which Ashwood develops from her years-long, sometimes difficult engagement with and study of both the facts on the ground and the people who live upon it, there in Burke County. (In a nice moment, Ashwood relates how some doors were opened to her that might have remained closed as the word spread through this rural area that her husband was Irish, making her more sympathetic; apparently, stories of the sufferings of the Irish are still known among the distant descendants of the Scots-Irish in the Georgia backwoods still today.) Not all these arguments--about positive and negative freedom, about Thomas Hobbes, about the nature of private property itself--are equally well-informed. But the way she charts how the contracting of resources worsened racial divides, how the rhetoric of both Christian preaching and gun ownership was locally shaped by corporate-driven instability, and more was all superb. True, what she is studying may not be all that different from what happens in urban environments, when business interests get government support (and sometimes even subsidies!) to buy up and "improve" properties that were, in however limited a fashion, "commons" that contributed to urban life. But the fact that her context for examining the way these tensions play out is a rural one matters.

The problem, to put it simply, is rural conservatism. The people she spoke to--the white ones, anyway--nearly always voted Republican (when they bothered to vote, that is). How seriously, you might wonder, are we to take the observations and conclusions of someone who spent years tramping around the forests of eastern Georgia, and develops from that study a condemnation of corporate power and the rule of capital, a condemnation that, at least insofar as electoral results go, is apparently shared by essentially none of the white people she spoke to? Isn't it more likely that her fine-grained sociological study of the people of Burke County only reflects class and race-specific patterns of belief which we're all already familiar with, patterns that the well-intentioned proposals from Washington Monthly or Boston Review or Senator Warren fit into nicely? I would argue no: instead, Ashwood has revealed something important and not-often noticed. But unfortunately, you have to go beyond her fine book to see what that is.

Last year, Ashwood published--along with her book--a fascinating, somewhat rambling piece of sociological theory, one which attempts to categorize the type of anarchism that she had experienced so much of during her years in Georgia. It's difficult to reduce the multiple prongs of her argument in that essay to a single thesis, but this one might work: according to Ashwood, many rural people hold to an ideal of statelessness, of entirely independent self-governance. As this is an ideal with no practical vehicle of ideological expression in American politics today, it is instead often articulated in association with various parties, movements, and positions that, while not truly anarchic, nonetheless capture elements of the stateless ideal through rhetorically attacking the state--an "anti-state" position that comes in both "retract" (libertarian) and "reform" (progressive) versions. In her view, reformers "temporarily advocate a pro-statist view as a just means to a stateless end," while retractors "seek to reduce the power of the state without attention to intermediate issues of justice." Here is how she breaks it down:





Assuming we accept this typology (and I'm not sure I do, at least not entirely; I would like to have a long conversation with her as to why she assumes that radicalism is invariably tied to state power) what does it tell us about rural conservatism? Mainly, in Ashwood's view, that what many of the people she interviewed--people who struggled with the reality that tremendous (though definitely not equally shared) economic and technological benefits to their communities came entwined with alienating, land-grabbing, disempowering public-private partnerships--felt was an anarchic desire, one which came out sounding like conservatism, because there was no other available political language which came close to attaching to it. Their actions and reactions, in her view, clearly exhibited a conviction of and in something which their political context gave them no partisan formulation of.

On my reading, the real heart of For-Profit Democracy comes in her long chapter on "The Rural Rebel," which in her presentation is embodied by one William Gresham. William is a character, admired but not always appreciated by the other rural folk that Ashwood got to know, a former worker at the Savannah River Site--a 300-square mile "nuclear reservation" run by the Department of Energy which decades ago was a primary site for refining nuclear material, which stands directly across the Savannah river from the Vogtle nuclear plant--and now a general handyman and something of local legend, spoken of with admiration and sometimes disbelief. It takes a long time for Ashwood to gain his trust, but in time she spends many days with him as he runs errands, assists neighbors, fixes equipment, relates local history, and--eventually--takes her boating on the Savannah, crossing into areas which government signs declare off-limits, and to his hunting lodge, where he goes after squirrels and wild turkeys on property where being caught would mean time in jail. His knowledge of place in the Wendell Berry sense, particularly Sugar Creek, a tributary of the Savannah, is immense, and his awareness of the ecological devastation--in terms of erosion, water radiation, and more--of the land that he loves is highly detailed. He is contemptuous of local farmers who make use of the Conservation Reserve Program to supplement their incomes, and holds as an article of faith that everyone who takes a government job is physically lazy. Drawing on the work of Eric Hobsbawm, Ashwood describes what Gresham represented as thus:

William took issue with the power given to authorities, who then turned their authority into power over the people, rather than power for. He said that he didn't care about voting. That served to reinforce the state that had sucked so many of his neighbors dry. What does William stand against? For-profit politics. He stands against conjoined corporate and state corruption that violates his ideal of hard, honest work, embedded in everyday, manual, resource-intensive labor....

In the modern world, William finds the defenseless to be not only human, but also those voiceless life-forms in need of defense. The woods, open fields, lakes and streams, and inhabitants--quail, snakes, waters, trees--conjoin with disenfranchised humans to constitute what William sees as the defenseless rural poor....The term "environmentalist," signifying someone explicitly engaged in green politics as part of formal governance, doesn't fit. William clarified to me that he "ain't no tree hugger." The rural rebel defends what I sense to be "environmental honor," a poignant protection of what is seen as a defenseless community of ecology....

The bending of William's back in his self-chosen toil serves as as essential piece of his resistance against corporate and government control. He is not part of a roaming group of outlaws. Nor is he a member of a mob. He is in fact rare, and has the admiration of a following the stubbornly stands against the money interests that he sees destroying his homeland....Part of being a rebel can be staying at home--that in itself is an act of defiance against the state, which demands urban migration (pp. 126, 132, 134-135). 

There is clearly at least a touch of hero-worship in Ashwood's description of Gresham, but something powerfully authentic as well. Elements of social welfare can be found in his language, and traditional Christian morality as well, but no fondness, at least in Ashwood's telling, for either profit or progress, both of which, in Gresham's telling, invariably involve one in the machinations of both Big Business and Big Government. Gresham is hardly a role model for the more egalitarian and pluralistic world which sets the terms by which our economic and legal structures operate; Gresham's life operates in accordance with rules that are very particular to his gender (Greshman's friends are astonished that he brought a woman on one of his secret trips up the Savannah, and the aggressive flirtation Ashwood put up with while getting to know him bordered on the abusive) and his race (Ashwood's interviews make it clear that poor African-Americans that live near Gresham would never trespass property while hunting the way he does casually, or at least would never admit to doing so to an outsider like herself--the threat of law enforcement was real to them in the way it wasn't for Gresham). But for all that, is there anything "conservative," in the rural anarchic sense which Ashwood observed, that all the progressives, liberals, socialists, and others who are concerned about crony capitalism, alienation, monopolization, state oppression, and all the rest, can learn from? Well, maybe.

I have an acquaintance here in Wichita, KS, named Zack. (This is him posing next to Carrie Nation in downtown Wichita. He's the one on the left.) He's a good guy, a marathon-runner and a supporter of public radio. We go the rounds every once in a while, because his attitude towards politics is almost perfectly calibrated to make someone like myself, who teaches it for a living, kind of furious. But nonetheless I appreciate the way he, and other radicals (though by Ashwood's typology they're better described as "rebels") I have known, have pushed me to understand the many ways in which working through the institutional forms of society to achieve more moral, or more just, or more fair outcomes, cannot help but tie those outcomes to the power of the social institutions themselves. And democracy--at least representative democracy, the voting for candidates and the deliverance of sovereign authority on the basis of the results of those votes--provides no protection against this. Nor, arguably, is protest, at least not of the petition-gathering variety. In rethinking anarchism in the rural context which Ashwood provides, I see the possibility that the rhetoric of majoritarian democracy can co-opt protest, making it into something aligned with the goal of obtaining control over the state, as opposed to the goal of assuring spaces for collective action. And if the state is itself co-opted by (or at least entwined with) corporate entities hunting for profit--whether that be through contracting out to corporations the running of a nuclear power plant, or through making deals with developers to remake a city park in line with their physical preferences--then the whole logic of protest (to say nothing of voting) is changed, since it cannot present itself as doing anything other that replacing the management of the relationships with capital within the state. Perhaps some kind of socialist revolution could do the trick--but given that the historical record suggests pretty clearly the harms of that approach, what does that leave us with? Maybe just...individual acts of rebellion. As Ashwood concludes:

Taking the for-profit democratic state at face value prompts an understanding of rebels as something other than apolitical, pre-political, misguided malcontents. If the state is seem as complicit in the creation and persistence of the coal industry, the nuclear industry, or any other corporate industry that could not exist without the government, rebellion becomes less an unfortunate barrier to successful political action. It rather takes on its own legitimate basis of political reason by working entirely outside a state that sanctions exploitation (p. 125).

In the end, I'm not certain I take the "for-profit state" entirely at face value. I'm not certain that I agree that  private-public partnerships, absent a wholesale reconstruction of how markets function, are necessarily always disempowering and exploitive, especially if the public goods being secured (as, in theory, is the case with public utilities) are truly comprehensive. And therefore, relatedly, I'm not convinced that there's something wrong with Democrats who, in thinking about rural communities, focus on judicial decisions, state-enforced laws, and more. But even there isn't anything wrong, there well may be something missing. What's missing, perhaps, is a clearer understanding of the "why" any policies such of those would be valuable, assuming they can pull of their reforming work. It's not, at least insofar as Ashwood's work suggests, because farmers will be grateful for the security the state is providing. It's because, maybe, just maybe, it will help them be less in need of such outside security, and more able to live their arguably "rebellious" lives in their places. Which is exactly why all of them haven't decided to accept discipline, get with the program, and move to the city yet, right?

Friday, March 22, 2019

American Conservatism, and the Socialist Specter Which Haunts It Still

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Back in February, Rod Dreher shared with his readers an idea for a new book: to introduce conservative Christians in America to "the warnings that people who grew up under socialism are sounding now to Americans about where our country is going....[this] is not primarily about economics, but rather about how the overall mentality of our culture, especially in our leading institutions, is preparing the way for socialism." This, predictably, led to a lot of argument in his comments section. What exactly, some of us asked Rod (and each other), was the "socialism" that existed under the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which he was presumably referring to, and how is that related to what he sees happening in the Democratic party and corporate America and large educational institutions today--especially given that his concern, as he said, wasn't with economics? In subsequent posts Rod brought up multiple different possible interpretations of what "social conservatism" or "social justice" mean, and how they are or are not compatible with "socialism"--with none of it, on my reading, being especially coherent. Ultimately he recognized that using the word "socialism," when what he really wanted to get at was what conservative religious believers needed to know when confronted with an ideologically secular conformity--a conformity that many who experienced the tyranny of various communist parties in Russia and eastern Europe have analyzed thoughtfully and well--"obscures more than it illuminates." Rod didn't cite Alan Jacobs when he came to this conclusion, but he should have--because Alan, I think, had it right: Rod wasn't concerned about socialism; he was concerned about the individualistic, ideological premises of liberal capitalism itself being even further entrenched in our society. As Alan put it:

What [traditional Christians] are battling against isn't a form of socialism, cultural or otherwise. I would argue rather that it’s the ultimate extension of the free market--a kind of metaphysical capitalism. The gospel of the present moment is, as I have frequently commented, “I am my own.” I am a commodity owned solely by myself; I may do with this property whatever I want and call it whatever I want; any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny. That some kind of redistribution of access/prestige/attention and even economic resources might be needed to bring this gospel to those who have not previously been able to enjoy its benefits should not obscure for us what the core proclamation really is.

The fact that Rod saw the things he fears about ideological conformity as tied up with "socialism" is, unfortunately, a common mistake in America. Socialism is the bogeyman that conservatives of all stripes find easy to associate with all that distorts or corrupts those thinks they, in theory at least, hold most dear--namely, civil society, and the goods which social interactions in and through one's community, church, and family make possible. Given the rise of actually electable, self-identifying, democratic socialist politicians to national prominence in the Democratic party, it becomes doubly easy for Republican-voters of all stripes (including many conservatives, however defined) to simply associate "socialism" which whatever cultural concerns they have with the Democratic party's platform, or the statements they hear from various Democrats or presumably Democratic-sympathizing interest groups and movements. Sometimes those associations are accurate--but usually they are not. It would be unfortunate if some of the genuinely interesting struggles taking place among conservative writers today, whether it be Daniel McCarthy's "new conservative agenda" or Rod's own call to eschew any revival of "zombie Reaganism," continued to fail to take socialism--meaning, very fundamentally, putting social equality and collective empowerment before individual interests and private property--seriously. To do so is to leave the right side of the rhetorical battlefield empty, and thus available for our idiot president to fill.

Timothy Carney's mostly excellent new book, Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse is a good example here. Carney is a talented writer, and he is clearly trying to set a higher bar for himself than the sort of conservative hackery was he was content with in his earlier books. This book has a real thesis, and in exploring that thesis--the question of the "localized erosion of civil society in our country," which he forthrightly admits in the acknowledgments isn't at all new, but rather hews closely to the ground which important sociologists and thinkers like Robert Putnam, William Julius Wilson, and many others have already plowed (p. 301)--Carney brings out many solid and thoughtful arguments. Starting with the data which shows it wasn't necessarily the most economically distressed white voters who decisively supported Donald Trump in 2016, but rather was the white voters who lived in the towns and cities where the social dysfunction which regularly attends the lives of the economically distressed (pp. 58, 62), Carney wants to explore why some places in America, and not simply certain groups of people, suffer. By comparing data sets specific to particular places, supplemented with some on the ground reporting, Carney smartly connects the collapse of certain sorts of economic opportunities--"low-skilled but reliable jobs....[which were] one of the many training grounds for life"--with the emergence of large numbers of people (mostly white men) who, failing to make America's supposed meritocracy work for them, find themselves flailing:

For college-educated men, high-skilled jobs still exist in today's economy, and those jobs often demand and cultivate the same virtues. For the man who was or would have been a factory worker, though, there aren't the salaried jobs of the elites or the reliable factory jobs of the past. There is instead irregular and even unreliable work--contractor jobs, occasional gigs. These are the sorts of jobs that don't reward or cultivate reliability or commitment, in a large part because they don't offer reliability of commitment in return. they reflect more an on-again, off-again relationship of convenience...and perhaps the cultivate other habits: detachment, the default stance of constantly looking for a better deal, and survival instinct that elevates self-preservation over loyalty (p. 82-83).

Leftist that I am, it is hard for me to understand how someone can notice the common denominator present in these places--the collapse of community, leaving in its wake far fewer examples of responsible citizenship and decent families and self-denying individuals; as Carney puts it explicitly, "the factory closing in Monessen destroyed Monessen as a community....[wiping] out the institutions of civil society"(p. 86)--and not come to the logical conclusion that the bulk of the problem is with what Jacobs rightly called "metaphysical capitalism": the acceptance of the supposedly overriding imperative to let individuals and corporations specialize and sort and relocate and maximize and to all the other things which homo economicus does so well. Carney poignantly describes how this cult of meritocracy and profit hollows out the human relationships that used to attend many once-stable communities (pp. 40-41), how it breaks apart those institutions--the church congregation, the local diner--which provided the places and contexts where mutual support and the goods of civil society could be experienced (pp. 102-103), how it deprives work of dignity and turns us all into interchangeable cogs in the Gig Economy (pp. 182-183). Yet when he visited Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011, or activists working on the Sanders campaign in 2016, and saw the degree to which their actions in opposition to all of the above involved "building a mini-society" or "participating in community" or "making grass-roots connections"--in other words, when he himself acknowledged that the egalitarian aims of their work involved the strengthening of civil bonds, exactly the sort of thing that all good conservatives presumably cared about--he still couldn't help but basically discount them. "As progressives and socialists...[they] believed the solution to this real problem was centralizing power" (pp. 209-213). Is that really all that conservatives can see?

There are a couple of points in the book where Carney digs deep, and comes up with something perceptive about his own understanding of the world; maybe that understanding connects with why the socialism right in front of his face--at one point his own analysis leads him to praise the union-run unemployment insurance system of countries like Sweden and Denmark, and says the U.S. ought to do the same, putting labor unions in charge of distributing roughly $100 billion in welfare dollars every year! (p. 286)--can't be accepted in its own terms. In talking about Arlie Hochschild's Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the America Right, he quotes her statement that "the right can't understand the deep pride liberals take in their creatively designed, hard-won public sphere as a powerful integrative force in American life." He responds:

Hochschild...and others on the left perhaps can't understand that the folks of Trinity Baptist, Salt Lake City, and Oostburg see the church schools and the church slide as part of the public sphere and an integrative force. There's no admission charged on Sundays. The slides and coffee shops and concerts and sports teams at these churches tend to be open to all comers, and not merely believers. Even those who are exclusive when it comes to worship (see the Mormon temples) are inclusive when it comes to other events. The "gentiles" I met around Salt Lake City spoke fondly of bringing their kids to the monthly potlucks the local Latter-day Saints church would throw. The recovery aid programs that Hochschild described and that most churches have are open to all needy people. Homeless atheists or Catholics aren't turned away from Trinity Baptist. A mind-set that won't count these institutions as "public" is a mind-set that diminishes community and civil society (pp. 153-154).

Now as it happens, as a Mormon who lived in Utah for five years, I and friends of mine could relate numerous situations which would suggest that Carney's cheery portrait of Salt Lake City is hardly the whole story. No doubt similar stories could be told about any exclusive community attempting to balance its desire to maintain its identity while simultaneously being a good, civil society-contributing neighbor. This is one way in which Carney's writing and analysis, fine as it is, fails to grapple with the real difficulties of community-maintenance in the way which, say, Alan Ehrenhalt's The Lost City did--or, for that matter, Rod Dreher's own The Benedict Option. In both these works, as different as they are, the authors understand that the binding power which church institutions can contribute to civil society is unavoidably also an exclusionary one: that some doctrine, or standard, or authority, is going to have to be acknowledged, in one way or another, however "public" the church coffee shops or baseball leagues or recovery programs may appear to be.

Now, to the extent that such pluralism--that is, the various bodies, some of them being more open than others, all contributing in their own distinct ways to a healthy civil society--is experienced as a problem, it is arguably one which just takes us back to "metaphysical capitalism" again: the idea that "any suggestion that my rights over myself are limited in any way I regard as an intolerable tyranny." Of course, the liberal foundation of rights in this country, whatever its abuses, can't be cavalierly dismissed. But it is equally important to recognize where that doctrine leads, and to recognize that socialist principles can, and do, provide an alternative to it. Socialism (or democratic egalitarianism if you must) ought to be fruitfully pluralistic--and it usually is, as anyone who has spent any time in societies that embraced egalitarian principles, and made use of socialist policies to adhere to those principles, can probably tell you. But it is admittedly true that many types of socialism--particularly, but not only, the state socialist and communist parties which dominated much of the world for much of the 20th century--were unfriendly, to say the least, to any component of that pluralism which excluded, as of course churches often do, despite (or perhaps one could say "in connection with") their manifest role in providing for the development and the strengthening of social goods.

This isn't an argument that such civil bodies, once socially empowered, would or should never be changed by being more thoroughly economically integrated with the rest of society. Of course such bodies, churches included, can't do what they do alone; even Carney recognizes that without an economic foundation which protects good work--that is, without strong limits on the marketplace--communities will fail, and families and individuals will follow, with churches and other particularist, voluntary organizations usually being mostly powerless to slow that decline. (As John Médaille wonderfully put it, while conservatives insist that politics in downstream from culture, culture itself is "downstream from breakfast.") But perhaps if those who hope for the overthrow (or at least the significant modification) of capitalism wouldn't so often fail to understand the place of what could be, and historically often was, one of their key allies in preserving anti-capitalist, genuinely social and familial and egalitarian values in a community, conservatives--or at least those conservatives who are able to break away from the always-trust-the-market-first mentality of Cold War fusion conservatism--might realize that what they're looking for is something we socialists (or some of us, anyway) have been talking about all along.

Back in January, Erik Olin Wright, a brilliant and profoundly original socialist thinker, writer, and organizer passed away. His book Envisioning Real Utopias had an enormous impact upon me; when I first read it, I found myself explaining and re-explaining its ideas to myself and everyone I met for months. The most important thing it--and so many other of Wright's writings--did, I think, was explain how the Marxist shadow over socialist, anarchist, egalitarian, and all other utopian thinking has too often blinded thinkers on the left from recognizing something pretty obvious: that what we are looking to do is empower civil society, to make the mutual support communities provide stronger, to make our social and economic worlds more democratic. Hence we leftists need to be guided, first and foremost, by a "socialist compass," and we need to recognize everything that falls within that compass, including what he called "interstitial" entities and strategies--or in other words, what a non-sociologist might call the dozens, hundreds, thousands of initiatives and organizations (neighborhood co-ops, women's shelters, intentional communities, environmental groups, and many more) which provide spaces wherein civil society, and not capital, rules. He acknowledged that the more doctrinaire Marxist thinkers would see these as a distraction from the longed-for revolution, but insisted that their emancipatory potential is real (Envisioning Real Utopias, pp. 322-327). And as for those civil associations which strengthen community and provide shelter from the hyper-individualism of liberal capitalism through particularist, sometimes exclusionary, even religious means? Should they be crushed by the secularizing Red Guards of some new socialist movement? Well...no. As Wright explained:

A vibrant civil society is precisely one with a multitude of heterogeneous associations, networks, and communities, built around different goals, with different kinds of members based on different sorts of solidarities....It is tempting to deal with this...by somehow defining civil society as only consisting of benign associations that are consistent with socialist ideals of democratic egalitarianism....I think this is an undesirable response....There is no guarantee that a society within which real power rooted in civil society predominates would be one that always upholds democratic egalitarian ideals. This, however, is not some unique problem for socialism; it is a characteristic of democratic institutions in general. As conservatives often point out, inherent in democracy is the potential for the tyranny of the majority, and yet in practice liberal democracies have been fairly successful at creating institutions that protect both individual rights and the interests of minorities. A socialist democracy rooted in social empowerment through associations in civil society would face similar challenges...My assumption here is not that a socialism of social empowerment will inevitably successfully meet this challenge, but that moving along the pathways of social empowerment will provide a more favorable terrain on which to struggle for these ideals than does either capitalism or statism (pp. 145-148).

I can easily imagine many conservatives--and socialists too--seeing the forgoing as a lot of murky meanderings, neither promising of real social empowerment nor conserving genuine community stability. My guess is that Carney wouldn't touch it, despite it, on my reading, allowing for exactly the kind of economic support and community respect that his own analysis seems to point directly towards. For my part, I find it beautiful; it reads as a perhaps unintended, but nonetheless carefully thought out and genuinely expressed, olive leaf to everyone who wants civil bonds to flourish, equal respect to increase, and communities to be stabilized--in other words, to promote economic and cultural goods that most people need to lead fulfilling lives. Here's the truth, conservatives: socialists (at least those who haven't unintentionally absorbed a metaphysics which is more capitalist and individualistic than anything else) want those things too. So as the threat of Trump leads some American conservatives to rethink what they believe and where they're going on, here's hoping that they'll realize that the socialism (or the "left conservatism") which keeps on haunting their own arguments is more a helpful ghost, than a specter to flee.

Monday, March 18, 2019

Some Thoughts about Wichita and Baseball

For those who care, some thoughts about the controversy over the proposed baseball stadium (with its attached riverfront development package) here in Wichita. I can't make it to the special city council meeting being held on Tuesday evening to discuss the stadium and related matters, but perhaps some of these thoughts may be of interest to those who are able to attend. For whatever its worth...

1) I really want to see the new baseball stadium built at the corner of Maple and McLean Boulevard.
    1a) Of course, one of the primary reasons I really want to see the new baseball stadium built there is that Lawrence-Dumont Stadium is gone, and we presently have a big empty space at the corner of Maple and McLean, where a baseball stadium had previously stood for over 80 years.
    1b) And yes, like no doubt many others, I do find it very hard to believe that Mayor Jeff Longwell and other major city players, being anything but stupid, didn't count on the facts on the ground--despite Vice Mayor Jeff Blubaugh protest that it wasn't the case that "this is something that [we] just rushed through"--to help propel their plan for the new stadium forward. Build it (or rather, knock it down) and they will come, indeed.

2) I don't have any particular complaints with how the city plans on paying for the new baseball stadium.
    2a) Note that I said "particular complaints," not "fundamental complaints." Fundamentally speaking, it is, in my judgment, rather bizarre to run a major city construction project by way of (as the excellent reporting of Chance Swain in The Wichita Eagle has laid out for us):
        --the state issuing STAR and the city issuing general obligation bonds...
        --whose purchase by banks, investors, or other financial bodies is based on the expectation of repayment...
        --such repayment being dependent upon increased sales and property tax receipts...
        --those increased receipts being in theory encouraged by the imposition of Tax Increment Financing and Community Improvement Districts (known as TIFs and CIDs) in the as-yet undetermined area around the future stadium, which legally enable the collection of higher sales and property taxes by the city...
        --those higher tax rates themselves being dependent upon new property development and commercial traffic within those districts associated with the construction project in question...
        --meaning that subsidies need to be provided to encourage developers to put up the money for building those venues which will generate the aforementioned traffic...
        --all of which--how convenient!--turns out to be very appealing to a certain AAA baseball team owner that was looking to get more involved in real estate and commercial development, and wouldn't come to Wichita without such a promise.
    2b) Having laid out all that, note that there are very good reasons--economic, legal, and political reasons--why American cities (particularly slow-(or-no-)growth mid-sized American cities like Wichita) find this kind of debt-driven, development-dependent, subsidy-focused, "growth machine" financing pretty much unavoidable. Exploring alternative responses to those fundamental economic, legal, and political conditions is, I think, necessary, and consequently something of an obsession of mine. But unlike some critics, I don't think that, simply because one might reject the legitimacy of any or all of the above particulars, the appropriate response needs to be a fundamental rejection of all development. I don't think austerity-mindedness is any kind of solution here; the consequences for the financing of all the other multifaceted programs and processes at work in a complex city, programs and processes which many individuals, families, and businesses are dependent upon, would be too great. And, it must be emphasized, it is to the credit of city leaders that they have very carefully worked out revenue-sharing and other agreements with the team (assuming it does, in fact, come) to provide some guaranteed coverage for the costs.
    2c) So in other words, my attitude is: yes, criticize the overall process, imagine ways to move our city--and America's urban economies generally--towards something more sustainable and less bizarre, but in the meantime, work within the system as best you can.

3) All that said, leaving aside a deep-dive into the systematic particulars of the financing place for the new baseball stadium doesn't mean there aren't larger questions worth asking about the whole arrangement. Let me suggest a few here:
    3a) In a lengthy and exceptionally well-research article in the Eagle, Carrie Rengers quotes multiple sources making clear something that academics who study these issues have known for years: that the indirect public financing of the construction of expensive athletic venues is almost never justified in terms of subsequent economic development. Given the long and not-always-successful history of baseball in Wichita, I would be interested to know in detail not just why Mayor Longwell and others thinks their plan is financially solid, but more importantly, what convinced him that attracting a AAA baseball was project to take this risk upon, as opposed to something else.
    3b) Moreover, it is worth noting that of the three examples that Mayor Longwell has pointed to in support of his vision of providing an economic and cultural shot in the arm to the city through building what was necessary to bring a AAA team here, only one of them, according to Rengers's reporting, reflected a similarly convoluted set of financial incentives and land swaps--and that was Charlotte, NC, a city with a half-million more residents in its urban core and a million more people in its overall metropolitan area. So not, perhaps, an entirely good analogy to Wichita's situation. Of the other two examples Rengers reported on in detail, one, Durham, NC, did involve some significant city investment, but was actually mostly the result of multiple corporate owners committing their own capital, which obviously isn't the case here. The other example, Oklahoma City, involved the something impressively straightforward: the city directly payed for the stadium with specific, voter-approved tax increases. Which leads me to asking...
    3c) Councilman Bryan Frye, in a Facebook post, defended the importance of this project by pointing out that the "west bank of the Arkansas River between Douglas and Maple has languished for decades with little to no development interest, revenue creation, and/or investment in public amenities." Leaving aside exactly why it is a problem to have a one-third mile stretch of grass along the Arkansas River opposite the Hyatt hotel and Waterwalk Place fail in its (required? obligatory?) "revenue creation," I would ask why he followed up this defense by asserting that this project "had to be done without adding [to the] citywide taxpayer burden." Why? Besides the fact that, since property-tax-dependent general obligation bonds will almost certainly be involved, that isn't entirely true, was it really a complete given that the city couldn't have simply paid for a new stadium, as a public amenity, outright? Maybe--especially given how the last sales tax proposal turned out here in Wichita--it's reasonable to assume this; maybe the political culture of Wichita is just more negative and suspicious than OKC's, and so simply financing the stadium directly (the way Intrust Bank Arena was) wasn't an option.
    3d) But if that's the case, why not say so? Might it be that saying so--that if Mayor Longwell and others had, back in 2016, put it to the people of Wichita that attracting a AAA baseball to the city was worth paying for, up front--would have resulted rather in the discovery of a consensus in favor of simply maintaining the level of baseball we currently had, thus suggesting that city leaders and major players focus on developing political support for funding other priorities (like, oh, Century II?) Given that those other needs haven't gone away, it's a possible trade-off at least worth contemplating.

4) One last thought, related to "the level of baseball we currently had" which I just mentioned. It may well be the case that the confidence Mayor Longwell and others have in AAA baseball will be justified. (After all, Wichita, however slowly changing and growing it may be, is obviously a different place than it was in 1984, when the Wichita Aeros, the last AAA team to play here, departed for Buffalo, NY.) But until and unless we see those results, there remains the fact that the baseball which has had a long history of strong support here is the National Baseball Congress. The city has apparently already reneged on a promise to the owners of NBC to give them office space at the new stadium, and now the likelihood is that the NBC World Series--you know, that delightfully wacky and fun two-week series of baseball all through the day and night every August--will be forced out as well. If there is any way that existing baseball fans in Wichita--not the new ones that the city is counting on creating, but the ones that already existed last year and continue to exist this year as well--can push to shape this (as even city leaders admit) less-than-transparent process into something more reflective of public wishes, it would be in making certain that the World Series, which has had a home in Wichita since 1935, continues to be guaranteed a place.

Okay, I can't think of anything else. Enjoy the meeting, everyone and anyone who can make it. I hope that the result will involve both a showing of respect and some mutual learning by and for everyone involved, and the creation of greater confidence in bringing this project to a positive end.

Sunday, March 17, 2019

A Tale of Two Congressmen (with a 10-Point Constitutional Excursus)

[The Wichita Eagle ran this morning an editorial of mine praising Senator Jerry Moran, one of my senators here in Kansas, for breaking with his party and voting in support of the resolution to deny President Trump the authority to use his emergency powers to claim non-appropriated funds to build his beloved wall along the Mexican border. Since my argument in that piece touches on matters of constitutionalism and presidential power that I've written about before, I decided to expand on my piece below.]

President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency back in February, which--in his view and that of his lawyers, anyway--gave him the authority to spend taxpayer money to build a wall along our southern border (despite Congress not having constitutionally appropriated funds for him to do so), has been, to say the least, divisive. That divide, or at least one aspect of it, played itself out interestingly in my own back yard--specifically, in the responses of two men men who represent me in Congress: Senator Jerry Moran (left) of Kansas and Representative Ron Estes of the 4th Congressional District of Kansas (right). (And yes, I know, as a resident of Kansas I am technically represented by two senators, but everyone who knows him--including most of those who genuinely like and have voted for him--knows that Senator Pat Roberts checked out of the whole "citizen representation" thing years ago, so I'll just leave him aside.)

Moran and Estes are both conservative Republicans, which is unsurprising--this is Kansas, after all, and despite some interesting developments and potentialities here in Wichita, south-central Kansas remains a pretty conservative place. Moran and Estes reflect that; their voting records show consistent support for identifiably conservative causes and the agenda of President Trump. (In Estes's case, his career congressional vote total is 95% in line with Trump; for Moran, it's a slightly smaller 89%.)  But in this particular case, those two interests--call them "conservatism," however defined, on the one hand, and the Republican party and its leader as a vehicle for expressing conservative goals, on the other--parted ways. You can chart the parting by looking at the comments Estes and Moran issued when Congress held a vote to remove the president’s claimed emergency powers in this case, as allowed under the 1976 law which presidents have invoked whenever they've used their emergency power over the past 40 years. When the House voted on the resolution in late February--and passed it--Estes voted against it. When the Senate voted on the resolution last Thursday--and also passed it, thus requiring President Trump to veto this legislation if he wants his emergency powers claim to move forward--Moran supported it. Why?

On my reading, Estes thought this issue was pretty straightforward. In a four-sentence statement, Estes mentioned President Trump by name three times. He spoke of Trump “rightfully exercising” his presidential powers, and of “supporting the president’s actions to address this crisis.” He was, in other words, voicing what probably seemed to him a straightforward political matter. The President of the United States was doing something which he, as a Republican, agreed with, and so as a good member of the president’s own party, he was going to support him. In this case Estes, as I think his statement clearly reveals, understood himself to be spokesperson for the Trump-supporting Republicans of his district; whatever else Estes may or may not think about any of the larger issues involved, to not support Trump’s agenda--particularly an agenda item that Trump emphasized all through his campaign and ever since--would be a political betrayal of those who voted for him. This is the "delegate" model of representation, and it is perfectly defensible.

For Moran though, the issue was anything but straightforward. His statement also mentioned President Trump by name three times. But that was in the course of a 26-sentence long outline of arguments, which wound around some of the fundamentals of our constitutional system (such as: it is “a violation of the U.S. Constitution” if the executive branch spends money that goes beyond “appropriations approved by Congress”), around fears for the future (such as: “this continues our country down the path of an all-powerful executive, something those who wrote the Constitution were fearful of”), and around basic ethics (such as: “the ends don’t justify the means”). To be sure, he made it clear that he basically agreed with his party’s (overwrought) concern about conditions at the southern border. But in this case, Moran’s conservative, Constitution-protecting values trumped (pun most certainly intended) the president’s aggressive claims to do what he thinks he must about those conditions. In this case, Moran was acting in accordance with the "trustee" model of representation: being entrusted by voters to use all one’s resources and experience to make, on their behalf, difficult decisions–which this one clearly was.

What do I, personally, think about that decision? Well, I think it was a good one--building a wall along our southern border is, in my view, a pointless waste of money, a needlessly and stupidly provocative approach to the problem of illegal immigration, a symbolic move representative of a genuinely inhumane way of relating to our hemispheric neighbors and the rest of the world, and contemptuous downgrading of hundreds of miles of precious environmental space. It ought not be built, and so if Congress can slow Trump's moves in that regard, they ought to. But given that, as a conservative Republican, Moran almost certainly disagrees with all of those points (except possibly the first; I suspect he really does have substantive fiscal complaints about the proposed wall), what about the substance of what actually brought Moran to his decision? That is, what do I think of his constitutional reasoning about the need to curtail the expansion of executive power through emergency declarations and the like?

More than 4 1/2 years ago, President Obama's move to essentially legalize millions of technically illegal residents of the United States created a firestorm of "Unconstitutional!" accusations, and I waded in. This resulted in a series of lengthy arguments between my friends Damon Linker, David Watkins, and myself. Rather than rehearsing all the theoretical claims and counter-claims those blog posts laid out, let me just briefly lay out, in the context of Moran's constitutional case for opposing President Trump's claim, how I think about the whole matter now:

1) Moran writes that, in his view, "if the enduring value of the Constitution disappears...Americans will be less free." I don't entirely disagree with that, but I wouldn't make that claim myself.

2) I wouldn't make it because it suggests to my mind a fetishization of the U.S. Constitution, and the particular sort of freedom it supposedly guarantees.

3) But I think if you look at our Constitution, or the very idea of constitutionalism, both historically and theoretically, you can see that it has primary served as a means of invoking (and thus defining, and thus also limiting) a particular sense of "peoplehood" as connected to a particular polity. In the modern, post-Westphalian world of sovereign capitalist states, that means it turns the demos into a creature under contract, plugged into and committed to (and perhaps empowered by, but perhaps also restricted by) a set of procedures by which "popular sovereignty" is expressed.

4) I'm not calling this a bad thing; on the contrary, liberal constitutionalism has been an important way by which a limited form of democracy could be realized beyond self-governing communities and on a mass scale, which has had many good results. Still, it simply isn't the sine qua non of freedom, and no particular constitution, most certainly including our own property-defending one, shouldn't be treated as such.

5) Does that mean I don't think it's a big deal when someone violates the constitution? No, I think it is a big deal--but I may disagree with many in what kind of big deal I consider it to be.

6) One thing that is essential to understand is that constitutions--again, speaking theoretically as well as historically--have been, and remain, performative in a way bodies of law in general mostly are not. Since constitutions generally do not define, and thereby do not either allow or proscribe certain actions, but rather define and thereby either include or exclude certain persons, or particular certain ways said persons may or may not qualify as citizens, or the particular roles those citizens may or may not execute in diverse ways, there is a qualitative element to questions of constitutionalism that is simply besides the point in most other areas of law.

7) This means it is perfectly reasonable, I think, to declare an action both legal and unconstitutional. Someone--say, a President of the United States--could take an action that is arguably within the realm of legal statutes, but has taken that action in such a way, or justified it with such arguments, or made the choice to take that action in such a context, as to reject the norms, traditions, assumptions, or provisos that have developed in conjunction with the performance of the constitution in question. (This, for everyone who didn't bother to click on the links above, is what I said about Obama's immigration order--legal, but not constitutional.)

8) Now, as those norms themselves perpetuate the way in which the constitution in question is interpreted, and as those interpretation and their continued performance necessarily impact the way in which we as citizens understand ourselves to be governed, it is perfectly logical to understand unconstitutional acts to be a threat to the "peoplehood" under which we our governed.

9) So consequently, when President Trump claims he has the inherent emergency-declaring authority to spend money that Congress, which according to the language of the U.S. Constitution is the only branch of our national government which can authorize the spending of money, has denied him, then he is performing the role of President of the United States badly.

10) The law may or may not make room for the legitimacy of his performance. But in acting in this way, he is challenging the one the primary procedures by which, for better or worse, Americans have historically articulated their democratic sovereignty--and while that may not be an immediate threat to our "freedom," it absolutely challenges (yes, in the same way Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, and most other presidents also challenged) the premises on which this particular democratic polity was, and still is, imagined to work. So, yes--it is a big deal, and worth trying to stop, for whatever reason.

To go back to Moran--however much our reasoning may diverge, note what is the same about it. Moran is thinking about the U.S. Constitution, about how it functions and what it means. We don't think about it the same way, but his thinking about it, however much I might dispute elements of it, is serious. And it is always impressive to see someone in Congress think seriously about not just the political popularity, or the partisan necessity, of a given issue, but rather about, for example, the danger of establishing a “precedent for future presidents” (as Moran did). Estes’ statement invoked President Trump, and for many voters around here that was enough; but Moran, on the other hand, invoked his “understanding of history,” his “intellect,” and his “gut.” That is a hard decision, and I think it is one deserving of praise.

Not that my praise necessarily matters a great deal. After all, I’m neither a Republican (though I do vote for some on occasion) nor a conservative (though I hold to some conservative views); as such, the core supporters of both men can dismiss these thoughts of mine out of hand. But aside from that, I am also an American citizen and a resident of Wichita, Kansas, and as such, these two men represent me in Washington, D.C. So as someone you represent: thank you, Senator Moran.Though I may often disagree with you politically, this week you’ve earned my appreciation, and my trust.