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.

Justice Together: Pushing for Justice one City and one Step at a Time

[A version of this piece has appeared in Kansas Reflector and Religious Socialism.]

Back on May 9, something remarkable happened in Wichita, something similar to other remarkable things which have happened in recent years in Lawrence, Topeka, and elsewhere across Kansas.

At the Century II building in downtown Wichita, elected and agency leaders—specifically Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Sedgwick County Commission Chairperson Ryan Baty, the managers of both Wichita and Sedgwick County, and leading representatives from COMCARE, and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services—stood in front of over 1300 people and committed to take certain specific local policy actions to address homelessness and mental health crises. At least one of the commitments they made—supporting the creation of a municipal “Air Capital” ID card--will be controversial, and may already be in the process of being walked back slightly by Mayor Wu. Still, you don’t often see such public support for social justice actions coming from city and county leaders in Kansas, so applause—and encouragement!--for those who brought them to the stage is much deserved.

The group which brought them together and laid out the commitments which gained their assent is called Justice Together, a group I’m proud to have been a participant in from the beginning, though I play no organizational role in it. In early 2023, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, a friend and occasional interlocutor from the Ahavath Achim Congregation here in Wichita, told me about an interfaith group that was coming together to try to move social justice issues forward in Sedgwick County; I’m not a leader in my religious congregation, but I started to attend out of curiosity. At the very first meeting, I was gratified to find Louis Goseland, a Wichita-born community organizer that I remember from Sunflower Community Action and other justice-related associations from more than a decade before. He was back in Wichita as a regional coordinator from the Direct Action and Research Training Center or DART, an umbrella organization that has been working with church congregations and other community groups to help them apply the best lessons of religious activism to motivate their members towards specific social justice goals.

DART started in Florida in 1982, working primarily with church ministries that served the interests of senior citizens; since that time, it been able to help build over 30 additional interfaith movements across the country, including several here in Kansas. DART was instrumental in the formation of Justice Matters in Lawrence, which has raised millions of dollars for a locally managed Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and JUMP (Justice, Unity, and Ministry Project) in Topeka, which is working to bring a mental health crisis intervention program to Shawnee County. Similar interfaith organizations, representing dozens of different churches and faith-related groups, have been formed with the assistance of DART in Wyandotte and Johnson counties.

In Wichita, Justice Together includes nearly 40 denominations—mostly mainline Protestant, but with Catholic, Mennonite, Unitarian, Baha’i, and Jewish synagogues part of the effort as well. Over the past 14 months, they have worked through their church groups to develop specific plans to assist those struggling with mental health (funding to provide free bus passes to those in crisis and to pay for staffing for 24/7 on-call psychiatric help) and homelessness (sustainable funding plans for an integrated agency center, and the aforementioned municipal IDs). It is those plans they asked all these local leaders to support, and which all of them committed to do so.

This is DART’s method, one that they’ve adapted from the history of activism in so many of the churches which they work through, as well as directly from the history of civil protest. Months of research, parishioner outreach, and consensus-building culminates in what they call a “Nehemiah assembly,” an idea taken directly from chapter 5 of the book of Nehemiah in the Bible—specifically Nehemiah 5:12, where the prophet Nehemiah, having heard the cries of the people for justice, presented their pleas to the nobles, rulers, and priests, and “took an oath of them to do as they had promised.”

Justice Together’s strategy, following those of dozens of other similar church-based DART organizations across the country, isn’t directly confrontational; their goal is explicitly not to generate walks-outs and protests. But it does aim to generate tension: to make a well-researched and achievable case, and then publicly, in front of hundreds of newly activated religious citizens (the great majority of whom are, crucially, registered and informed voters!), demand action. This is the kind of tension central to Reverend Martin Luther King’s position, which Justice Together explicitly cites: to raise just enough heat that “a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”

It's true that the plans Justice Together developed don’t involve structural change. Their call for more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, and a sustainable budget plan for a Multi-Agency Center to bring together resources for homeless individuals are all needed and important, but not radical; nearly all of these involve projects that the city of Wichita, or the county, or COMCARE already have in front of them. But the fact that Justice Together managed to elicit public support for a free municipal ID program? That is a genuinely transformative step.

Having a reliable form of ID is desperately needed by many in recovery or on the streets when it comes to accessing welfare, getting housing, applying for jobs, and so much more. And it is also something which Republican leaders in Topeka have repeatedly attacked as a backdoor to legalization for undocumented immigrants, leaving aside the complication that access to state services often depends on a simple form of reliable identification. Wyandotte County introduced municipal IDs in 2022, and former Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple had pushed for his city to do the same; both such efforts, as well as those being contemplated by other cities seeking to address this genuine need on behalf of their poorer and unhoused residents, were knee-capped by the Republican majority in the legislature, leaving this small, crucial reform very much in limbo. Mayor Wu’s comments after the commitment-making assembly, during which she said her affirmation “was really a commitment that we will sit together between [the] city and county to talk about this,” reflects the political disagreements which lay ahead.

Thus, a real test confronts Justice Together: will they find a way to publicly hold city and county leaders accountable to their promises. Will they be able to push the negotiations that will have to take place in such a way that the municipal ID goal, which everyone in the movement has extracted a commitment towards, doesn’t get killed by elected and appointed leaders fearful of blowback from ideologues who share the paranoia about illegal immigrants that is unfortunately common among Kansas Republicans? Time, as always, will tell. Whatever their ultimate success, though, the fact of this group’s existence is a reminder of the long history in America of people of faith organizing public support on behalf of specific social justice actions. 

To me, their presence here in Wichita is a blessing in itself.

Wondering About a (Highly Unlikely, But Not Inconceiveable) Local Wave

At the Great Plains Political Science Association annual conference held last weekend at Wichita State University, four political observers--three of them Insight Kansas contributors--were asked to make their predictions for next week’s elections. All four said they believed Sharice Davids would win re-election in the Third Congressional District; three out of the four said they believed Governor Laura Kelly would defeat Derek Schmidt and be re-elected; and two out of the four said they believed Chris Mann would defeat Kris Kobach and be elected Kansas’s attorney general. But further down the ballot, and pretty much everywhere else besides, maybe, the 3rd District and Kansas's northeast corner? The agreement was near unanimous (and in line with the latest public opinion analysis): November 8 will likely be a red wave, terrible night for the Democrats.

“Near unanimous,” of course, means at least one voice of dissent. The dissenter was me.

Am I totally confident in my belief that Kansas, come November 8, may provide national Democrats with some tiny, consoling blue ripples during an otherwise rough night (which, on the macro level, I agree it will be)? Not remotely. So why bother saying so, when the usual political science variables—a midterm election during the first term of an unpopular President at a time of high inflation—point towards a Democratic bloodbath?

Maybe it’s just contrariness. Or maybe it’s the lesson of two elections. Or maybe, once again, it's the yard signs.

The first election I’m thinking is the one we just had: the August primary vote on the “Value Them Both” amendment. That the size of the victory enjoyed by abortion-rights supporters has been much commented on—but more relevant here is just how much of a surprise it was.There had never really been a vote like that one before: a straight-up, yes-or-no vote regarding the right to at least minimal abortion services. Frankly, no one really had any data to work with. Reasonable guesses could be made on the basis of demographics or party affiliation—but no serious observer could have guessed that the amendment would lose by nearly 20 points (I certainly didn't). 

The 2016 election of Donald Trump similarly took a huge number of people by surprise—but in that case, the surprise wasn’t because of the lack of data, but because so many people (myself included) didn’t take seriously all the relevant information—the unpopularity of Hillary Clinton, the shifts in white voting patterns in upper Midwestern states, etc.—which pointed to the real chance that Trump could win. It seemed to so many of us just so unlikely and bizarre that we discounted it. 

So we come to the Kansas 2022 elections, where we’re not in the same situation as before the August amendment vote. In fact, thanks to that vote, the Kansas Speaks survey, and some other data points, we know a fair amount, particularly about high levels of voter engagement among Democratic-leaning groups, and the early numbers which suggest that engagement may be continuing into the week of the election. We also know that Kelly’s approval numbers are pretty good, and that abortion, along with Medicaid expansion and medical marijuana legalization, are motivating many voters--presumably in a Democratic direction.

But are they motivating enough voters to entirely overcome the huge, historical advantages which Republicans enjoy in Kansas? Or all the other already-mentioned disadvantages weighing down Democrats this year? Probably not. 

But in this election I don’t want to discount the data out there, however limited it may be. Yes, the election fundamentals and the polling (as flawed as much of it may be) suggest fairly comprehensive Republican gains, both across the nation and here in Kansas as well. Nonetheless, I believe there really is a chance that not only will we see some top of the ballot Democrats winning in this state, but also see enough Democrats holding on to or flipping state houses races—perhaps in Manhattan, Shawnee, Emporia, Hays, Hutchinson, or even here in thoroughly polarized Wichita—such that the Republican super-majority in Topeka could actually be lost, bizarre as that may sound in the wake the Republican redistricting of state and congressional legislative districts earlier this year.
(I admit that I added Wichita to that list out of simple self-interested curiosity. I'm looking at Representative Dan Hawkins, my neighborhood's representative in the state house, and the House Majority Leader--a pretty powerful figure in the Kansas legislature. Yet in light of what I've written before about Wichita slowly turning purple, if not blue, we've seen Hawkins's percentages consistently decline in this strongly Republican area through the election cycles since the last redistricting, from 70% down to 60%. And against that you have some local Democratic urgency, an urgency I see with his opponent Mike McCorkle--learn all about him here--whose team is managing to place yard signs simply everywhere around our little part of Wichita, meaning that he is either better funded than past local Democrats, or has a better team knocking doors and placing signs than candidates of the past, or just plain has more voters out there willing to show public support for him. Add it all up, and I wonder if Hawkins might actually be brought down to 50% of the vote this time. Or, dare I say it...maybe even a smidge lower?)

Again, I’m not remotely confident about any of this. All the macro level stuff I mentioned above remains true--and frankly, the smart money is to always bet on what the macro trends say. But after 2016 and 2022, I’m not so confident as to discount the possibility of the truly unlikely happening either. I mean, what's the worst that can happen--I get it all wrong? I've eaten crow before, I can do it again.

On Medicaid Misinformation and Missed Opportunities

[When my own west Wichita representative in the Kansas House, Dan Hawkins, laid out some misleading and vaguely paranoid claims about Governor Laura Kelly's push for Medicaid expansion in Kansas, I knew what my next Insight Kansas column had to be about. Here, as tend to do, is a slightly longer and updated version.]

With the end of sine die on Monday afternoon, the 2022 Kansas legislative session has finally, officially, come to an end. As Clay Wirestone put it in the Kansas Reflector, it could have been worse. Still, once again, Medicaid expansion didn’t pass, and that's a frustration.

True, the legislature took the the important step of expanding the postpartum health coverage offered by KanCare to new mothers, an action which found support from Republicans and Democrats alike. But the money for that additional aide comes from the state’s own budget, not money which the federal government would provide, as would be the case with Medicaid expansion. The fact that this health care reform has nearly 80% popular support among Kansas voters, yet continues to face opposition from the majority of the Republicans those same voters elected to control the legislature, is a puzzle. Party polarization is one explanation; ideological divides that allow cultural issues to dominate media narratives and voters' headspace is another. And then there is the misinformation about Medicaid expansion frequently spread by Republican leaders--often intentionally, but also sometimes due to their own confusion.

The traditional conservative line against expanding Medicaid to help those people who have no medical insurance through their low-paying jobs, and cannot afford private insurance, but still aren’t poor enough to meet KanCare’s strict requirements, is two-fold. First, there is the libertarian booga-booga talk of the "risk" that Medicaid expansion "will cost state taxpayers more than initial estimates indicate" (ignoring the fact that those estimates show such drastic savings that even significant cost overruns would leave taxpayers in the black), or that Congress will change the law to put all the financial burden for Medicaid expansion on the states (ignoring the fact that representatives from the 38 states which have embraced Medicaid expansion would vote against such), or old reliable fear-mongering about America's debt levels. Second, there is the allegation that expanding Medicaid would increase the number of “able-bodied” Kansans receiving government assistance, and if one believes in up-from-your-bootstraps individualism, that’s a bad thing. There’s plenty to argue with both of these lines of argument, but at least they reflects a consistent (and for Kansans, familiar) ideology--the libertarianish position that Sam Brownback pushed so hard during his seven years as governor, with what most Kansans recognize today as terrible results.

Of late however, some leading Republicans in our state--perhaps because like Republican gubernatorial nominee Deterk Schmidt wants very much to distance himself from Brownback's legacy?--have taken to making what can only be called a pro-welfare argument, claiming that by fighting Medicaid expansion, they are actually the true defenders of Kansas's poorest and most needy citizens: specifically, the disabled already on Medicaid. Representative Dan Hawkins, the Republican majority leader in the Kansas House, recently made this case, insisting that in states which have expanded Medicaid (a total of 38 so far, including every state that borders Kansas), high enrollments have “crowd[ed] out other state budget priorities,” lengthened waiting lists, and left those states with “less to spend on things like education and public safety.” These claims either lack proper context or are outright wrong.

It is true that Medicaid enrollments in the states which have expanded their programs have been far higher than anticipated, especially during the pandemic. But the evidence for Rep. Hawkins’s claims about Medicaid expansion forcing cuts in other sorts of welfare support is very thin. Medicaid expansion, it must be remembered, was part of the overall reform of American health care which the Affordable Care Act created over a decade ago, and ties by law (and thus, of course, to the political interests of every elected representative from those states who accept it!) federal resources to state expansions of Medicaid. Admittedly, those ties require some changes in Medicaid policies, and those bring with them some other statutory costs. But still, when the non-partisan Commonwealth Fund conducted a very extensive review of the budgets of all the states which have expanded Medicaid and aligned their health care policies with the ACA's insurance exchanges and more, their conclusion was that the budgetary burden of traditional Medicaid payments in most states actually declined, even with higher than estimated enrollments. It also determined that the statutory costs which came along with national ACA requirements simply were almost never significant enough to require spending cuts or tax increases for states to maintain existing programs and a balanced budget.

Hawkins’s warning about ill people dying while on Medicaid waiting lists in expansion states sounds worrisome—until you wonder how many may have died while on waiting lists in non-expansion states. When dealing the health needs of the working poor and disabled, there’s always plenty of frightening statistics available, but pitting those currently receiving KanCare assistance against those Kansans struggling to survive on incomes that put them below the poverty line, but not far enough to qualify under current law, misses the whole point of Medicaid in the first place. Keep in mind that whatever the impact of Medicaid expansion on the insurance policies currently available--thanks to the exchanges set up by the ACA, which Medicaid expansion was designed to be part of!--to low-income Kansans whose jobs put them barely above the federal poverty level, there remain even poorer working Kansans, struggling to survive below the poverty line and yet still not poor enough for KanCare. They're worth caring about too.

Ultimately, when Hawkins writes that “expansion in Kansas will result in the same outcome as it has in every other state where it has been implemented,” he’s actually arguing in favor of a positive change. So my recommendation to anti-expansion, politically conservative Republicans like Hawkins is to stick with their usual anti-welfare,small-government, conservtives-hate-welfare, libertarian arguments, much as they might see political advantages in not doing so. In the end, trying to turn the policy changes which Medicaid expansion would entail for some of those already receiving it into an argument for denying of its benefits to many more, often equally needy people, simply doesn’t work.