Monday night there was forum involving five of the candidates to be Wichita’s next mayor—though only three serious ones: former Wichita Councilmember Jared Cerullo, activist Celeste Racette, and the incumbent, Mayor Brandon Whipple. The forum was held at the SEIU Hall and organized by the Sedgwick County Grassroots Democrats, so it’s easy to imagine that as the reason why the other two serious candidates—Councilmember Bryan Frye, a longtime and well-connected Republican, and Lily Wu, a former television journalist and registered Libertarian—decided not to attend (though that didn’t stop Cerullo, also a Republican, from showing up). But considering how much controversy over partisanship there has already been on the Democratic side of the mayoral race so far (something that I think is partly being forced by the specific positioning of a couple of these candidates) perhaps it’s just as well that the debate on Democratic turf featured primarily those most tied up with that side of the aisle.
I say “Democratic turf,” though of course a union hall isn’t necessarily Democratic party territory. But then again, who am I kidding? That the Republican party is the friend of business interests, and the Democratic party the (at least nominal and historical) friend of labor is a broadly understood political reality. Indeed, the fact of those political assumptions is part of the story, I think.
Think about it in terms of “factions.” The concept of a faction—any group of people who act together in support of their shared interests—is a given in American political sociology. The polling and electoral data is enormously consistent in demonstrating that distinct groups of people—distinct in terms of income, religious belief, education level, race, region, family background, and more—will carry with them “factional” tools into different debates and discussions, looking for markers (frequently partisan, but also sometimes ideological or otherwise) to help them organize their thoughts and express their preferences. In other words, people vote, more often than not, along factional, and more specifically party, lines. This isn’t everyone, of course; genuinely independent voters, who switch their ballots from one direction to the next in response to non-factional variables—stuff not grounded or effectively captured by existing partisan categories, which could be anything from voting on the basis of a candidate’s dress style or marriage history, to voting in regard to revolutionary socialist or Catholic integralist or some other similarly rare ideological orientation—do exist. But there are far fewer of them than those who trumpet the “No Labels” approach would have us believe. Ultimately, as much as people might criticize groupthink, most of us, most of the time, approach questions pertaining to political or social arrangements in terms of our group, our faction, our particular and preferred shared interests.
Factions have a notable place in America’s constitutional story. For much of European history, particularly over the centuries during which what has been historically recognized (and academically organized) as the “republican tradition” emerged, factions were seen as poisonous. The assumption was that if people had the freedom to organize themselves around particular agendas, there could be no united, “common” good—no res publica, as it were. This meant societies had to stay small and simple and homogeneous, to prevent the factional temptation. This is a crude reduction of a complicated historical genealogy, but it’s not fundamentally wrong; it is reflected in the writings of many of those who defended the Articles of Confederation and opposed the proposed consolidation of sovereign authority in a national body in 1787. James Madison’s defense of the Constitution was specific, and deeply influential, on this point: factions, he wrote, were nothing less than a natural result of human freedom. As such, the goal of any responsible polity shouldn’t be to prevent them (as Madison put it, that would be “worse than the disease”) but to expand and include them, and seek to manage their effects instead.
Madisonian pluralism can be criticized (as I have!), but it remains the way the American system usually looks upon factional differences. Which brings us, relevant to Wichita’s news this week, to unions. Unions in American history owe far more to broadly late 19th-century socialist and syndicalist traditions which emerged in Europe in response to the Industrial Revolution than to the early 19th-century republican tradition of craft guilds (though those connections aren’t entirely absent), and as such unions have predictably been attacked as un-American many times, with the Republican party of the past century being particularly anti-union. Still, the fundamentals of the progressive liberal peace with unions embodied in the Wagner Act remain in place, however many obstacles have been put in their place. Here in Wichita, the big recent news, far overshadowing the mayoral race, has been recent labor unrest. The Machinists Union at Spirit AeroSystems, Wichita’s largest single employer, went on strike last week (it may, or may not, come to an end as soon as Thursday), and on Tuesday the nurses at Ascension Via Christi, Wichita’s largest hospital, went on a one-day strike as well to help propel contract negotiations forward as well. These are the sort of issues which could have a huge impact on Wichita’s overall economy, and hence you’d expect mayoral candidates to have something to say about it. And while not all of them have spoken about the strikes in detail, none of the candidates for mayor, including the Republican ones, said anything against the strikers as a faction (some, it must be said, were more supportive than others). These candidates, like most of the rest of us, have taken it for granted that when employees have differences with how they are treated by their employers, rather than just quitting their jobs, they can organize into unions and make demands, including through strikes. Factional thinking—in this case, empowering workers to advance their interests through collective action—is just accepted as a fact of life.
So why is it, to get back to the debate mentioned originally, that this fact of life is so often treated as problematic when it comes to local politics?
Of course, the obvious reason is that in Wichita—like every other municipality in Kansas—elections are non-partisan, following the pattern of our council-manager system, wherein the seven members of the city council, including the mayor, are seen less as representatives of those who elected them and more as overseers, reflecting vaguely the input of voters as they make mostly simple yes-or-no decisions regarding whatever our city manage and the city’s staff work out as appropriate policies, budgets, and procedures for running the city. I’ve been critical of this aspect of our city’s charter for years, and the fact that Mayor Whipple has been pretty unapologetic about using partisanship over the course of his first term to build a majority on the council was something that initially I was pretty hopeful about, especially considering that I consider the city’s non-partisan elections more nominal than real. But the arguments which broke out Monday—mostly over the non-discrimination ordinance which became law in Wichita under Mayor Whipple’s necessary (though also admittedly rather convoluted and less-than-expertly-orchestrated) leadership, and the degree to which the two other serious candidates on the stage either supported or would commit to building upon that ordinance’s guarantee of support for Wichita’s LGBTQ residents—only emphasized, to my mind anyway, how large an obstacle the resistance to and consternation about local partisanship can be.
Jared Cerullo is gay; while he cannot let go (perhaps justifiably) of his frustration with Mayor Whipple’s approach to passing the ordinance, no one questions that he’d fully support it. Celeste Racette is a former Democrat, who declared herself unaffiliated before announcing her run, but has carried with her a fair amount of Democratic support, in part exactly because of the contention which some have seen rooted in Mayor Whipple’s more explicitly partisan approach to local issues. For all that, and despite a generational difference which arguably puts her slightly out of step with how many of the progressive concerns which has led Democrats like Whipple to strongly embrace LGBTQ issues, there’s no serious reason to doubt that she’d insist city staff fully enforce it as well. No, the issue to my mind was entirely just how “partisan” the fight on behalf of, and regarding support for, the ordinance struck these two candidates as being, and how comfortable Whipple appeared to them while leaning into his Democratic identity, and the presumed Democratic affiliation of most of those in the room, in terms of generating support (and, it must be said, getting accusations and insults hurled around the room; I actually kind of wonder how much such contention may be something of a strategy of the mayor’s team) towards the end of the forum.
The whole final 15 minutes or so became, to me, frustratingly meta, with “partisanship”—in this case, the simple fact of identifying oneself with and trying to advance the interests of a particular faction by testing the allegiance of potential candidates against the markers by which that faction organizes and articulates itself—operating as a stalking horse. Neither Celeste nor Cerullo—despite his shared party identification—would likely see the retiring Republican councilmember Jeff Blubaugh as a model for themselves….but as legitimate the grounds for some of their criticisms of Mayor Whipple and his supporters may be, whether referencing mean Tweets or missed meetings or anything else, I couldn’t help but hear, in their frustrated push-back against the noise, the plaintive, no doubt earnestly meant, but nonetheless from my perspective whiny accusation Blubaugh made against the mayor a couple of years ago: “[Don’t] bring big city politics to [Wichita]….We just don’t have partisan issues, so to try to create them is just setting Wichita back.” Given the context of his remarks (an argument over the establishment of an ethics board capable of enforcing decisions for the city), Councilmember Blubaugh’s accusation was clearly all about the idea that partisanship and factionalism are characteristic of “big city” corruption, which one must assume he thinks little old council-manager-governed, non-partisan-election-having, Wichita has no need of. To say the least, I disagree—and that means, as much as I like these candidates personally and respect where they’re coming from, I think the insistence that the mayor’s partisanship is problematic just misses the boat.
Obviously, parties can be corrupt—in the same way unions, businesses, government agencies, churches, or any other kind of organization can be. Institutional collusion and self-interest within any kind of faction or organization warrants being called out for such (and to the extent complaints about factional interests can connected to such, those complaints are well-founded). But the simple fact is that Wichita, for all its mid-sized and slow-growth character, really is big enough, diverse enough, and divided enough for Madisonian pluralism, for all its limitations, to be, I think, much more appropriate for our city, and its elections, than the formal insistence upon non-partisanship, or even just the procedural expectation of such, allows.
This shouldn’t have to be a matter of making the basic necessities and services of urban life—filling potholes, etc.—into “Republican” or “Democrat” issues; it’s a matter of recognizing that in the midst of filling potholes there are always going to be issues (like a non-discrimination ordinance, or a strike) response to which will be grouped by voters in accordance with already existing factional patterns; responsible politicians should want to be able to identify and reach out to and distinguish themselves from various factions in reference to those issues, and that means thinking factionally. Workers do, and voters do, even locally; those who want to win their support ought to be willing to recognize that, even when it results in what they might consider to be unwarranted contention. Wichita isn’t a stereotypical small farming village, wherein we often imagine a kind of apolitical republican norm being the default. We’re urban, and urbanism is, invariably, political, which in our liberal modern world means it is pluralistic and factional. Some may imagine that factional moves have no place in hospital hallways or assembly-line floors, but most of us understand better than that. Would that the same awareness could be extended to mayoral elections as well.
