On Substance and Signaling, in Trumpland, Topeka, and Beyond

[This is an extensively rewritten version of an essay I wrote for Kansas newspapers last Sunday.]

In a recent substack post, my old friend Damon Linker made an obvious, but still important, observation:

One thing I think I and many others got wrong during the first Trump administration was to spend far too much time allowing ourselves to be triggered by things the president was saying—in his social media feed, at rallies, and in press conferences….[T]here’s a reason why journalists…began to joke about the importance of taking Trump seriously but not literally. That’s because he frequently communicated in a very different way than presidents usually have, often speaking from anger and in an off-the-cuff and ill-informed way. In many cases, his primary goal was to trigger the libs rather than clarify what his administration would be doing in the near future. That made his comments a distraction from what his administration was actually doing or aspiring to do.

Trump is, in many ways, a unique case (though it seems likely that such won’t be the case in the future, unfortunately). Generally speaking, our democratic political culture, in terms of how the public and the mass media internalize and reflect the ways in which representatives--both those in office and those hoping to be elected to such--seek votes and articulate priorities, has organically come to recognize that some statements from politicians are “mere” signaling, whereas others are “actually” substantive.

I put those qualifiers in quotation marks because, among the many other democratic ills which Trump’s influence on our political culture over the past decade has introduced, the recognition of even basic value distinctions like those—specifically, the idea that signaling a position to one’s political allies is, well, just that: a matter of positioning, rather than a matter of substantively working towards an actual, achievable solution--is harder than ever. Still, the assumption that some statements made by politicians need to be taken literally, even if they aren’t serious ideas, remains a hard concept to many voters to accept without resistance, because it runs directly against our inherited experience, going back through the whole history of America’s struggles to make mass democracy work, regarding what responsible government even means.

This may seem like I’m dressing up a mundane reality of democratic politics into something more weighty than it deserves to be. Because all politicians lie, right? So who cares that the lies of Trump, and an unfortunately large number of those who have followed his example, seem categorically different? Elected representatives spending their time on meaningless bills or resolutions that show their support for causes promoted by major interest groups or another donors, rather than getting down to the business of building actually substantive legislation—isn’t that just to be expected?

Maybe. But still, I care in particular about these sorts of lies, because they help to make the distinctions upon which much of the public’s ability to connect to their own elected representatives depend upon even harder, necessitating both 1) changes in the way the media does its work, such as Damon describes in his above-linked post, and 2) even more work on the part of those who the substance of legislation affects more directly.

As an example, consider the ongoing arguments over medical support for individuals who identify as transgender, since these debates are particularly rife with serious concerns that are based on matters that are not, in fact, literally true. To put it another way, these are our elected leaders taking actions that some might justify as “merely” signaling serious intent, even though there is little or no literal substance “actually” behind their intentions.

Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson recently affirmed that, with the Republican legislative majority even stronger after the 2024 elections, the leadership will bring back the push to ban, among other types of gender-affirming care, transgender surgeries sought by those Kansans who are under 18 years old. The last effort to do so ended with a veto from Governor Laura Kelly and a veto-override attempt which failed by only two votes. It’s reasonable, now that they have additional votes on their side, that the Republicans would try again. Why? Because the significance of the signal doing so would send, a signal of their “seriousness” about the threat of young people being pushed into receiving surgeries when they’re too young to know whether it’s what is best for them, hasn’t changed.

Of course, the literal reality of the situation, the actual substance of the subject of the proposed legislation, hasn’t changed either. (Note: I recognize that there are other gender-affirming concerns tied up with this, regarding the availability of puberty blockers and other medications to minors, but since Masterson himself led with the extreme issue of transitional surgeries, I’m comfortable treating that as a separate issue.)

I know many legislators, and I sympathize with how difficult their job can be, particularly those on the state and municipal level. On the one hand, they are closer to their constituents, and can more directly hear and respond to many diverse local appeals. But on the other hand, their funding, the parties which structure most of their ability to reach out to voters (and thus both do good work as well as protect their jobs), so profoundly entwined with America’s nationalized media environment, and with major interest groups and organizations that usually care little for specific local budget or policy matters, and instead are focused on creating signals that serve primarily to rile up or placate key donors and constituencies across the country. I can understand a politician coming to the reasonable conclusion that have to play the signaling game, if only to make sure they have the opportunity to also focus on the difficult, substantive matters that may actually affect those whom they represent most.

Now that’s not to say that there aren’t members of the Republican super-majority in Topeka who, for a variety of reasons, may well be sincerely concerned—maybe even horrified—by the prospect of someone under the age of 18 receiving gender modification surgery, and see banning such as a necessary action in the name of public health or morality. I’m sure more than a few fit that description. But most of them, I suspect, are actually well-read enough to recognize that they are crusading symbolically against an almost non-existent concern.

Here is where the literal substance of the matter gets serious. There’s no definitive evidence of any Kansas medical center ever performing complete gender transition surgery on a minor, and nationally the numbers for such surgeries, according to data reported by the American Medical Association, are incredibly low: out of all gender-affirming surgeries in the United States in recent years, perhaps 2 out of every 100,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 15 and 17, and 1 out of 1,000,000 were performed on a person between the ages of 13 and 15. Beneath that age, the number is zero. So, as I wrote, an almost non-existent concern.

(Another note, for the record: after an earlier version of this piece was published in Kansas newspapers, I was contacted by a concerned individual who insisted that my information was wrong; that gender re-assignment surgeries have in fact been performed on Kansans under the age of 18. The data which this individual relied upon had been collected by Do No Harm, an organization devoted to “protecting health care from the disastrous consequences of identity politics.” Their reported information on Kansas lists a total 22 “surgery patients”(though their breakdown of hospitals actually record a total of 25; I’m unsure why three are excluded); they obtained that information by looking at insurance records, focusing on claims that involved procedure codes which are used for “confirmed surgical gender transition procedures,” though they allow that those procedure codes could have been used for “surgeries related to intersex conditions” or “congenital conditions or other non-gender transition-related reasons.” I appreciate the additional information, but 1) since I don’t see any breakdown in the ages of the minors who supposedly received these surgeries, unlike the information from the AMA, and 2) since there is apparently no way to effectively distinguish between corrective and elective surgeries among these numbers, to say nothing of there being to no way to capture the individual complexities and differences present in any of these instances, and 3) since a total number of 22, or even 25, surgeries performed in a state with a total of nearly 706,000 people under the age of 18, is a number so much smaller than even the national number, that I can’t see how sticking with my judgment of this proposal being an act of signaling in regards to an essentially non-existent phenomenon can be faulted.)   

To return to my main point: when Senator Masterson says that the Republican super-majority are going to do something, we need to take him seriously. There’s a serious message they (the Republican leadership, certainly, and presumably at least some other members of the caucus) want to send regarding the disapproval the Republican majority feels toward “transgender ideology,” and connecting it to the issue of minors receiving gender-affirming surgery is a major part of the signal they intend to send. But is there an actual, literal, substantive basis for them spending time on sending this message? The answer there is, on my review of the data, no.

This pattern—when the data and the message don’t match--holds for many other issues as well. The number of transgender athletes seeking to play sports competitively in the category of their chosen gender is tiny, yet everyone seems to have a story about some transgender woman with an unfair advantage at their daughter’s high school. It’s the same for illegal immigrants, who are far more law-abiding than the rest of the population, yet every story about an undocumented resident who commits a crime will be shared over and over and over again.

On a certain level, one must simply accept this as a political reality, one that the type of lies and misinformation which our President-elect has specialized in, is only making more complicated. It is true that most people, lacking both the time and inclination to become experts regarding any given matter, depend upon—and make decisions upon—the conveying of key signals, whether involving law or morality or anything else. This is something that interest groups have long known and made use of—and which too many politicians have come to rely upon in preference to the unglamorous, necessary work of finding substantive compromises on actual, literal concerns. As for those who do have expert information on what is literally happening—often because they actually are one of the people being symbolically discussed (a person with sexual dysphoria, perhaps, or a Dreamer, or more)—the battle to call attention to the actual data, and introduce substantive arguments to push back against the signally, is never-ending. But also necessary, all the same, and never more so than today.

What the Constitution Says About Parents, Public Schools, and Students' Gender, and What it Doesn't (Yet)

[An expanded version of a piece which appeared in the Wichita Eagle and elsewhere on February 27, 2024.]

What does the law actually say when it comes to a young person’s right to privately decide what gender they identify with, and to their parents’ right to engage in or even direct the decisions they make? As usual, the law is a lot more ambiguous and contentious than many might wish.

Recently Dion Lefler--arguably the best-known journalist in Wichita, Kansas’s largest city-- picked a fight with Kansas’s Attorney General Kris Kobach--arguably the best-known politician in the whole state--over essentially this exact problem, and Kobach--who, despite his protestations, has never been retiring when it comes to defending his beliefs--picked back. Both of them drag multiple ancillary issues into their argument, but let’s focus on the legal heart of their dispute, and see what we can clarify.

Last December Kobach sent a letter to six Kansas school districts regarding policies which allegedly require teachers of students who identify as trans or non-binary to avoid revealing information about the students’ self-identification to their parents unless the students give consent. In his letter, Kobach cited multiple Supreme Court cases defending “parents' right to direct the care, upbringing, and education of their children,” and implied that he would treat these policies as a violation of those constitutional rights. (In response, two school districts publicly changed their policies, while four others continued to defend them.)

With the news of this letter became public, Lefler called Kobach a “bully,” and said that seeking to intimidate school districts into abandoning these policies was “endanger[ing] transgender kids without legal grounds.” His claim about the absence of any specific legal ground is correct: while a bill was proposed in the Kansas legislature last year that would have extended parental rights in this exact context, it lacked the support to make it out of committee, and as a result, these policies do not violate any current state law.

But Kobach responded that his job was to “protect the constitutional rights of Kansans in court, regardless of whether the Kansas Legislature has passed any statute on the subject,” and this is also correct: Kansas officials swear to uphold the U.S. Constitution as well as our state one, after all. So the real question is: what is the merit to Kobach’s conviction that the U.S. Constitution, as presumably reflected in the multiple Supreme Court cases which he cites, is on his side?

It is true that federal cases stretching back a century (and most of which rested upon substantive definitions of "privacy" as central to personal "liberty," a claim which Dodd v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the anti-Roe v. Wade decision, may have unintentionally (?) declared invalid, interestingly enough) have established that parents have a fundamental right to make decisions about the education of their children. However, none of them are directly applicable to the present debate over names, pronouns, and privacy. Moreover, other cases insist that parents have to demonstrate a harm which “strike[s] at the heart of parental decision-making” before public schools, which are required by federal law to consider the needs of all students equally, can be forced to change policies which had been locally and legally decided upon.

In his response to Lefler, Kobach did mention one Kansas case that was directly on point—a 2022 federal district court decision which forbade Geary County’s USD 475 from enforcing a policy to not share private information regarding a student’s gender identification because it violated how the student’s teacher understood her religious faith. Why didn’t he mention that case in his original letter? Likely because he knows there are other federal district court decisions (like Massachusetts’s Foote v. Town of Ludlow) which have taken up nearly identical cases and found for the school district instead. In the end, the Supreme Court will have to decide.

So ultimately, what is being fought about is unsettled law. I suspect that Kobach, ultimately, will end up being found correct, or at least mostly correct, in his interpretation by the Supreme Court--partly because of the contemporary dominance socially conservative justices enjoy on the Court, but also partly because some of these policies can be legitimately interpreted as requiring public school teachers to purposefully hide information from or even lie to parents, and the case law supporting parental rights, stretching back long before the current make-up of the Supreme Court, will make that possibility very difficult to uphold. But in any case, for now Kobach's his letter reflects broad cultural assumptions rather than controlling constitutional principles. So round one, I think, has goes to Lefler.

Localism, Intentionality, and Utopia (Socialist or Otherwise)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common. Sometimes that accusation takes the form of condemnations of a supposedly unrealistic idealism, sometimes in terms of contempt for what is labeled a nostalgic myopia. But either way, the heart of all these attacks is the same: attempting to build communities of cooperation, equality, and justice, in contrast to the socio-economic self-interestedness which has been the rule for 300 years or more, is "utopian," and thus nonsensical and wrong. The ease of that accusation, and the fact that it has been and still is unthinkingly lobbed at intentional communities of every sort, makes it worthy of push-back, I think.

The caveat which those who fling the accusation will insist upon, of course, is that it is not all community-building activities which they think deserves their condemnation and contempt; only "comprehensive" community-building. And for most critics, that's probably correct--it would require an insanely individualist outlook to describe every effort to strengthen neighborhood ties (organizing a block party!), to secure social justice (expanding handicap accessibility!), or to serve the public through the provision of common goods (health insurance, public schools, environmental protection, the Veterans Administration, and more!) as instances of "utopianism." (That some people do in fact affirm such a nihilistic libertarianism is worth noting but not much more. There are also people who make life-size nude sculptures of Richard Nixon out of butter, and more power to them.) The great majority of those who look askance upon community-building would insist that they do not mean to reject every communitarian project; rather, what they reject is community-building visions and efforts that aspire to comprehensiveness--or, on my reading, the ones that aspire to topography.

My point in invoking topography is to bring up that element which everyone with the slightest interest in or affection for localism must take seriously: the topos, the place or location or referent upon on which one stands or acts. Such language is, of course, what gave birth to the accusation in the first place: Thomas More's 16th-century Utopia, the rationally organized "no-place" of agrarian communism, communal eating, universal health care, and chamber pots made of gold (so as to subliminally communicate a contempt for wealth). More's neologism, it should be noted, was perhaps not his intended one; Utopia concludes with an addendum in which More remarks upon the pun in his book's title, suggesting that the city is should be understood less as a dreamy "no-place" and more as a "good-place" that inspires: "not Utopia, but rather rightly my name is 'Eutopia,' a place of felicity." Whatever his intent, though, the history of the term is grasped easily enough: throughout history, there have been 1) those captivated by comprehensive visions of how to cooperate rather than compete, to encourage virtue and inclusion, to establish peace and justice, and to witness to the truth as they understand it, with the material articulations central to those visions involving the establishment of a distinct community, and 2) those who find any and all such visions dangerous and simply flawed. (And, of course, one can find plenty of capitalists in group 2) who will insist the "placeness" inherent to most populist challenges, distributist arguments, and mutualist alternatives means they're all in the same camp as the socialists and radicals in group 1), but let's stick with the clear communalist examples for now.)

The danger which can--and, tragically, often does--accompany any effort to establish a complete community in accordance with specific intentions, whether religious or ideological or both, is well established, both historically and theoretically. The genocidal historical record of many comprehensive society-shaping visions is incontestable (though whether the kill-count of all such revolutionary movements is greater or fewer than the kill-count of non-comprehensive, profit-motivated world historical slaughters like the African slave trade or the European colonization of the Americas is something I leave to the terminally morbid to calculate). Theoretically as well, the problems with this conceptualization of humanity's fundamentally social and political nature are large, though not insurmountable. Humankind's embodiment as distinct individuals means an organic, evolving pluralism will always be present in all our social and political orders, and the rationalist temptation which is entailed by many communitarian visions directly contradicts that, with frequently destructive results. 

But the emphasis there must be placed on "frequently," as opposed to "always." Human beings, despite (or perhaps as part of) our pluralism, regularly tend towards the dialogical and aspirational and spiritual, which means that what we truly are always reasoning about and reaching for--thanks to God or nature or both--is how to make our lives fit with that we consider to just and right and good: to achieve eudaimonia in our places, our topoi, and then make those places available to others. So while dangers and flaws of comprehensiveness must always be attended to, the topographical aspect of our spiritual and ideological longings is too central to the human character to dismiss it entirely. Indeed, if Wendell Berry is any guide, much of contemporary thinking reflects an overlearning (or an encouragement towards overlearning by those who benefit from our individualistic status quo) of the lessons of comprehensiveness. To automatically reject communitarian efforts and imaginings which involve the making of actual cooperative places as obviously pointless from the start is to succumb to a false sense of "inevitability...an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant" (Berry, The Art of Loading Brush, p. 51; more here).

So perhaps we can allow that the accusation of "utopianism" is not necessarily, or at least should not be accepted as necessarily, fatal to the communitarian imagination. But does that allowance have anything to do with localist projects, which, while obviously centrally concerned with places, rarely approach those topoi with any comprehensive vision in mind? While it is true that the watch-word for most genuinely localist politics today is "incremental," eschewing comprehensive reforms for the humble and the partial, there is, I think, a utopian element usually present nonetheless, hidden in the idea of "intentionality."

Every localist concern involves looking at a neighborhood, an association, or a community, and tending to it. That tending, however, unless wholly and unthinkingly reactionary (and if it were, then no communitarian tending would take place over the long haul at all, because to think outside of one's own immediate interest and one's own temporal moment is invariably aspirational), cannot help but involve an ideal, a vision--something that is intended. That intentionality, like comprehensiveness, can be dangerous is a simple sociological fact, but it is also that which grants community the transformative promise--whether personal or collective or both--which it has always held, separating us, as Aristotle observed, from otherwise equally "gregarious animals" like bees.

The difficult-to-dispute point that we form communities for the sake of collective ideals and not just individual interests--something every Bible-reader, at the very least, should have realized as soon as they came to the second chapter of Acts--has, perhaps, been made harder to swallow for many by the legacy of 19th and 20th-century socialisms, particularly the statist, scientific socialisms of the Marxist variety. But even there, a fuller appreciation of the history such surprising diversity. The Oxford political theorist David Leopold has made a career out of exploring and undermining (or at least seriously complicating) the rationalist, universalist, non-utopian reading of Marx's legacy, arguing that even within the first century of the modern European socialist movement, when the materialist assumption of universal revolution were strongest, you nonetheless can find robust expressions of and arguments about the age-old understanding of socialism as a cooperative, communitarian ideal, as something that must necessarily be rooted in the organically constructed architecture of a locality and place. The intermingling of these became even more pronounced as the revolutionary determinism of Marx's early interpreters was replaced with a recognition of the inevitability, even sometimes the value, of party politics in democratic countries. Ultimately, Leopold suggests, the differences between place-obsessed reformers like Robert Owen, the founder of New Harmony who constantly experimented with forming small, cooperative, egalitarian communities (what Leopold calls the "communal" or "horizontal" strategy), and detail-oriented policy wonks like Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, early members of the Fabian Society who worked within the Labor party to introduce specific egalitarian and collective policies to the whole of the United Kingdom (what Leopold calls the "political" or "vertical" strategy), are not nearly as great as their similarities.

You don't need to work out the historical implications of such political theories to recognize the truth of that judgment, though--you could, instead, simply look at the real world example of dozens of intentional communities and communes and collective projects throughout history, and the mixed perspectives they embodied. You could look at the Bruderhof, an Amish-inspired movement of deeply traditional Christians, organized into communities of cooperation and equality around the world, whose communal devotion have led them to a political position of uncompromising pacifism. Or you could look at Koinonia Farm, an intentional community of believers in Georgia who humbly practice sustainable agriculture, but were also central to shaping, in the face of enormous racial hostility, the non-violent resistance which politically defined much of the civil rights movement in America.

Or, much less celebratedly but with no less admiration, you could look to the Solidarity Collective, a cooperative association of activists, artists, and democratic socialists, deeply committed to the vision of living sustainably and defending justice in Laramie, Wyoming. Close to four years ago, the collective was founded by several passionate workers and dreamers, one of whom is an old and dear friend; its charter (read it here!) is frankly revolutionary in its vision of a fully democratic and inclusive socialism, while its actual operations reflect the difficult, patient, humbling work of living in accordance with "utopian" ideals of cooperation and consensus. It was at the invitation of my old friend that I began to seriously reflect on the particularity--including the topographic particularity, or simply the "locality"--incumbent to the physically and emotionally demanding labor and negotiations involved in building a home, a refuge, and a community that seeks to exemplify its ideals, and has only the material and psychological resources which its own members can bring to it. As no doubt everyone who has ever been part of an attempt to comprehend and bring to life a community (or a church, a labor union, a co-op, or any other such idealistic effort), sometimes it seems that community "always fails." With typical honesty, the members of the collective turned their own impasses into a podcast episode, talking about how impossible it sometimes seems to bring everyone laborious work into "union" with one another...and why they keep trying anyway. (Hint: it's because, in part, they genuinely believe in the place--the house, the farm, the community, and the human resources through which they are enabling to flourish--which they're building.)

Listening to that podcast, as members of the collective honestly and searchingly challenge one another regarding the roots of their manifold struggles, I was struck at how intentionally and comprehensively pushing against the norms of capitalist modernity in the 21st-century requires practices that have not changed much since the 19th century, or earlier. In Chris Jennings wonderful history, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (though his focus is really just the story of the early utopian movements which emerged in the context of Protestant revivals in Europe and America and the Great Awakenings they were part of), he lays out one of the secrets of the success of the Oneida Community, whose radical communism--which included the sharing of not just all property and work, but of sexual partners as well--endured in the face intense opposition and deep internal divisions for more than a generation:

"[T]he biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called 'mutual criticism'....[B]y the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of [what the followers of John Humphrey Noyce, the found of the community, called] Bible Communism....As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colony's delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting our of the ordeal....One man was cautioned that he had 'masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him'....Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester" (pp. 346-348).

It is probable that Jennings would not entirely agree with my likening of the practices of the comprehensive community-builders of the 19th century with those of today. In his view, while the revival of intentional efforts to create alternative forms of life over the past half-century is admirable--"[l]ike the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily lives"--their intentionality is of a lesser category entirely: "[a]lthough the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, they...expressed a secessionist impulse--a leave-taking from the World...[and thus their] revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian" (pp. 379-380). But I find this unfair, because it wrongly assumes that any envisioning of a place that isn't millenniarian--that is, that doesn't proclaim it to be a model for a world which teeters on the edge of total destruction and/or transformation--has no radicalism, no true utopianism, to it at all.

In a world where the pluralism of the human condition has been, for centuries, from the age of imperialism to that of industrialization and beyond, both subject to and expected to express itself through an ever-evolving, ever-varying, but nonetheless also ever-expanding, technologically-enabled socio-economic universalization, privatization, and individuation, it seems to me that any attempt to build into one's topos principles and practices that aspire to, or at least are in dialogue with, ideals of social justice and civic strength and equality, cannot help but involve at least a degree of comprehensiveness, a degree to utopian hope. To quote the striving local socialists of the Solidarity Collective, "there are many potential models of anti-capitalist activism and politics," and the search for "cooperative, sustainable systems" will always be a matter of "good-faith deliberation."

Such deliberation--or "mutual criticism," for that matter--isn't a rejection of the possibility of building a locality of such comprehensive, communitarian "felicity" that others will be inspired and transformed by it, and thus go forward to build other such "eu-topian" communities in other places. (That is, in fact, exactly the primary aim of the Solidarity Collective: as they write, "We hope that by creating a thriving, fun, and engaged non-capitalist ecosystem we can demonstrate the viability of a more cooperative and less oppressive way of life and hence attract more people to our cause.") What it is, is a recognition that such places shouldn't be conceived as environments that will just rationally unfold, without particular work done by particular people in particular topoi. Thus, maybe, does incrementalism and utopianism meet. If you're looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communal--with, say, cooperative food practices, responsible energy usage, democratic decision-making, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantage--well, that doesn't automatically make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you probably share more with those inspired folk than you may think.

Why Councilmember Brandon Johnson Matters

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

My title is pretentious, of course; Brandon Johnson—the councilmember representing Wichita’s heavily African-American and traditionally Democratic District 1, a longtime community activist and an alum of Friends University where I teach, as well as someone I have a friendly (if not close) relationship with—matters to a lot of different people for a lot of different reasons, most of them far beyond the specifics of current Wichita City Council debates. But as a someone who has spent decades observing and thinking and writing and teaching about politics, Brandon Johnson’s comments, towards the end of another marathon session dealing with the proposed non-discrimination ordinance before the council, were, whether he realized it or not, a deeply profound perception about the nature of political life, and it speaks well of his intelligence and perception that he said them. Watching the whole thing is a revealing as well as often depressing slog, but if you zip to the 4 hour and 6 minute mark, you’re hear this (edited slightly for clarity):

A 'community divided' [over]...a non-discrimination ordinance? I don't know if I would go that far. There are upset people. There are people who have questions right now. I forget how many e-mails I've gotten; from organized groups I may have had six or seven hundred e-mails. We may have seen the people outside. But [whether the delay is] 90 days or 90 years, there are going to be people who are concerned about this because it is offering protection to groups who are discriminated [against]....Whenever those opportunities come up, there is disagreement; there is division. Folks [will be] upset....Everybody's not going to agree with protecting folks. It's not going happen. There are folks who want to be able to do what they've been doing, think how they've been thinking. We've seen that outside...in the/ 'locker room' talk. We've seen this in some of the stuff we heard today, the 'I love you, but'. That doesn't change in 90 days. It's not. They are going be folks who are upset, still in 90 days.

The context, and the primary point, of his comments are actually quite straightforward, I think, even if that straight path is only clear in hindsight. So bear with me as I quickly run through the past four weeks….

A month ago, a proposed ordinance that would specifically require that national and state anti-discrimination laws regarding housing, employment, and public accommodations be enforced locally appeared upon the city council’s docket. The actual details and timeline of its preparation remain unclear--though it should be emphasized that Wichita currently has no locally specific civil rights ordinance at all, and it is to Mayor Brandon Whipple’s great credit that he saw the need for one. Unfortunately, in the originally presented ordinance, many of the terms describing those classes of individuals that would be protected were vague or undefined, and despite its stated intention, it actually included no specific enforcement mechanism, nor did it identify penalties should such a mechanism be put into effect. One thing that was clear from the outset, though, was that for both proponents and opponents of the ordinance, the point was the protection it provided to LGBTQ individuals, the state-level protections of which most people sympathetic to their concerns consider lacking, hence the move by several cities to make specific their inclusion. (The proponents of this effort regularly insist that this is a broadly motivated concern—Johnson explicitly says so in his remarks mentioned above—and yet no one really believes this, and no one really should: the arguments over the past month have overwhelming involved matters of gender identity and sexual orientation and the religious—specifically, the overwhelmingly conservative Christian—objections to such.)

The problems with the original ordinance resulted in a flurry of activity over the weekend, as Mayor Brandon Whipple scrambled (while away from Wichita attending a wedding) to placate furious LGBTQ activists and organizations, some of whom saw the proposed ordinance as a hastily slapped together affront to those who take LGBTQ concerns truly seriously. He was successful in this effort: by Tuesday morning, when the ordinance came before the city council for its first official reading, it had been significantly re-written, and it was representatives of Equality Kansas, and not the city’s staff, who providing explanations of the ordinance’s fine details. The frustration over this hurried process was immense (and I think, at that point in time at least, entirely justifiable). Councilmember Jared Cerullo’s objections to having been substantively excluded from the whole drafting process, despite being the only LGBTQ individual on the city council and thus an obvious partner to these discussions, was, I though, particularly poignant. It is very likely, despite Whipple’s impassioned pleading (in contrast to Johnson’s quietly supportive approach), that the whole thing would have been voted down if Councilmember Becky Tuttle hadn’t gotten the city’s legal department to assure the council that the whole ordinance could be effectively re-written again before its second reading. With that, it passed 4-3, with Tuttle and Councilmember Cindy Claycomb joining Whipple and Johnson in voting it through.

By the time the ordinance came before the city council again, however, it was clear that enough changes had to have been made to its language, its details, its definitions, and its enforcement process, that it was substantially a brand new ordinance, requiring a reset to the whole process. The new first reading was an endless, 5+ hour parade of opposition—again, overwhelmingly reflecting conservative Christian concerns—and, in a much smaller key, support. In the three weeks since the prior discussion of the proposed ordinance, there obviously had been a lot of organizing, yet little formal discussion in the venues established for such—specifically, the DABs, the advisory boards established for each city council district. Part of the reason for this was the July 4th holiday, which made it hard for people to get together and actually have an organized conversation. And in this vacuum a lot of misinformation predictably spread, in particular from the Sedgwick County Republican Party, though the local Democratic party’s response to the GOP’s attack got things about the proposed ordinance wrong too. (It’s worth noting that some local conservative activists went beyond talking points to calling upon their followers to contact—or maybe outright harass—certain councilmembers at their homes, and tell them that their election prospects depend upon their changing their votes.)

All of this, from what I can tell, simply served to underline an emerging consensus, one which I heard repeatedly when I attended Councilmember Bryan Frye’s re-scheduled DAB meeting after the first reading of the new, substituted version of the ordinance: this whole discussion has been unnecessarily heated and hasty, and has sown division and disagreement throughout the city, because of both confusion over, and the disrespect shown for, the city’s normal legislative process. For myself, while I have no disagreement whatsoever that the process in bringing this ordinance forward has been a complete mess (and while there is a lot of fault for that, it has to begin with those who wrote it and introduced it in the first place, particularly Mayor Whipple), the result at this point in the process is nonetheless, actually, a pretty excellent non-discrimination ordinance, one that would serve an important purpose. On the basis of some exchanges I both listened to and had with Councilmembers Cerullo and Claycomb at different events during this in-between time (both of them had ended up supporting the ordinance at the previous marathon city council meeting, and both of them are up for re-election this year), I thought sympathy for the resulting policy would win out over anger regarding the process. I was wrong—which is what brings me back, at last, to Councilmember Johnson’s wise comment.

Everyone following the news knows what happened yesterday: another long parade of opponents, though this time with an almost equal contingent of better organized, better informed supporters of the proposed ordinance, followed by an even more contentious display of accusations, insults, apologies, and bargaining involving the five councilmembers who had supported different versions of ordinance at different times (most of which revolved around the mayor, who started out loudly demanding passage but quickly found himself on the defensive—as Whipple himself once quoted his wife as saying during a class I’d invited him to speak at, with his election at least city council meetings aren’t boring any longer). Councilmember Tuttle proposed tabling the ordinance for 90 days, until early October at the soonest, to allow for more DAB participation, a city council workshop day, and the involvement the city’s new Diversity, Inclusion & Civil Rights Advisory Board, which relatively quickly garnered majority support on the council and passed 5-2. (The arguments over the Civil Rights Advisory Board have been interesting—originally it was Mayor Whipple who claimed, when challenged over their lack of involvement in the shaping of the ordinance, that the board was just starting out and couldn’t productively play a role yet, but when Whipple, accepting that he’d lost the votes of Tuttle, Cerullo, and Claycomb, suggested quickly involving the board and bringing the ordinance back for another second reading in 30 days, it was Tuttle who said they board was just starting out and wasn’t organized enough to do so.) It is at this point that Johnson’s comment, which was framed as kindly rebuke to Tuttle’s successful motion, becomes relevant.

In the larger scheme of things, Tuttle’s proposal is perfectly reasonable. As Max Weber famously put it more than a century ago, politics is the “slow boring of hard boards.” It’s a difficult and time-consuming process—so why not take some more time to work through these hard questions? Johnson’s response, which explicitly referenced Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” with its condemnation of “white moderates” who told King to slow down and wait (Johnson could have just as easily referenced King’s blistering 1964 follow-up to that famous letter, Why We Can’t Wait), puts things in a different context. A focus on the legislative process, and the time and compromises involved, can be civically empowering, and is often central to any serious effort to think clearly about what “government by the people” actually means. But just as often, unfortunately, a focus on process can become an almost rote incantation, something imagined—usually not explicitly stated, though it sometimes is—as an entirely apolitical, non-partisan, and non-“divisive” way to address the reality of disagreement in our pluralistic society. As I observed in a recent column in The Wichita Eagle, this ideal is an old one, but it is also one that has never consistently worked, and today increasingly does not represent reality. The growing recognition by some that the contentious “management” of deep disagreements, through allowing everyone to organize and have their say (sometimes endlessly) and then somehow discovering a compromise in the midst of the fighting, rarely results in a policy that satisfies anybody or even works is, to say the least, kind of frightening.

Johnson’s comments, without ever going into this kind of theoretical detail, foregrounds this reality. When you are talking about really deep disagreements—and you can’t get much deeper than those between people who, on the one hand, draw upon long personal histories with discrimination of and contempt for their sexual identities and orientations, and people who, on the other hand, draw upon devout religious beliefs and (more relevantly) presumptions about the legitimate social expression of those beliefs—why would you think anyone will change their mind? However poor the process of shaping the proposed ordinance was up until yesterday (and it definitely has been poor, though there are examples from recent Wichita history of controversial decisions being made with even fewer and less transparent conversations than this ordinance has gotten over the past month), there is no reason to believe that the process going forward from this point on promises any kind of revolutionary break-through. As Johnson subsequently said, the only options going forward now are maintaining the protections provided by the ordinance, or weakening them by allowing more exceptions to be introduced. (Johnson didn’t mention the third, entirely obvious option: that more discussion might actually result in the ordinance being defeated entirely, despite a clear majority of members of the city council being on the record saying that local enforcement of state and national non-discrimination laws is necessary.)

Tuttle defended herself politely here, insisting that she wanted this ordinance passed, but believed that the delay—with more DAB discussions, with a council workshop, with formal Civil Rights Advisory Board involvement—will actually make it stronger, with broader public support, or at least great public acceptance. Johnson clearly disagreed with her, and I feel he was right to do so. I can’t emphasize this enough: taking the painstaking, slow, civic-minded approach to crafting rules and making decisions is absolutely essential when your goal is to increase public involvement with a problem, because the problem is general and the possible responses to it are multiple and unclear. This is exactly why I and many others have insisted, for example, that the city council must go slow in making decisions about the future of Century II; despite the efforts of some to present it as an all-or-nothing choice, it obviously is and shouldn’t be.

But as you get close to the point—by whatever the means you get there—where all those multiple options narrow down to one solution or one proposal or one course of action, one which you can only support, oppose, or amend, the civic essentialness of continuing engagement rapidly diminishes. There comes a point where rehashing the process becomes mostly a way to make attacks against (or defend yourself from against) the existing solution. Again, we all know this—we’ve all been part of meetings which never end and never accomplish anything, because someone is always upset with whatever might be done. As Councilmember Johnson said, the one thing you can count on in a free and pluralistic society like our own is that “there is disagreement, there is division.” You can argue, of course, that when it comes to this non-discrimination ordinance, Wichita—or at least our city council—is not at that narrow decision-making point yet. But that is a judgment call, not a determination that can be made in a dispassionate, objective, principled way. And if I may conclude by beating a favorite dead horse of mine, this is exactly why parties, and partisanship, is both 1) useful, and 2) unavoidable.

Why useful? Because parties frame for voters the sorts of priorities that will guide the judgment calls which different politicians will make after everything that goes into the legislative process is done, and thus allows voters to have some input over how and when and for what reason their elected representatives will say “okay, no more talk; it’s time to vote.” And why unavoidable? Because, as much as many city councilmembers (including Johnson himself!) may profess a deep commitment to just neutrally following what staff provides them with and making whatever decision their constituents seem to prefer, much of the time, in actual fact, voting in response to party priorities is exactly what they are doing anyway. I’m sorry if some take offense at that, but I can only plead that it’s very difficult to look at the votes that have been cast and the justifications that have been offered over this past month and yet still believe that the necessity of these people to negotiate the reality of both Republican and Democratic voters in their districts isn’t a central part of their decisions as well.

As another old saying puts it, politics is like making sausage—you shouldn’t look at it too closely. For better or worse, the people of Wichita have been granted, over the past month, a close tour of one particular sausage factory. The process was flawed, as legislative processes so regularly are, and if you want to hold Mayor Whipple responsible for that, you certainly could (I do, at least in part). But the resulting sausage is also, if you’re in political agreement with people like Councilmember Johnson, pretty good. Of course, if you’re not in political agreement with people like Councilmember Johnson, you probably don’t think it’s good at all. That’s called disagreement; that’s the nature of politics. When a city like Wichita comes to the point of division, you could wait in the hopes the divisions go away, or that your staff will come up with some new approach to mollify things, or that some other process could be tried to moderate extremists on both sides. I might work; hey, I might be wrong! But I don’t think I am, and I don’t think Councilmember Johnson is either. Hence today, after a very long month for every member of the city council (and three more months, at least, before they do it all again) I salute him and thank him for his clear-eyed perspective. As the man said, eyes on the prize, sir; eyes on the prize.