What Kansas Teaches Us About Looming Deadlines

Campaign yard signs before last week’s Kansas elections

I honestly didn’t expect the results we saw in last week’s Kansas abortion rights referendum. Just two days before the August 2nd election, polls in Kansas, a conservative Republican stronghold, showed the “yes” vote leading by four points, though neither side held a clear majority. When polls closed on August 2nd, though, the “no” vote won by a blowout eighteen points.

(Because the vote represented a constitutional amendment, the anti-choice vote was “yes,” an ambiguity which conservatives allegedly exploited.)

Pundits of every stripe have spent the subsequent days interpreting the results like sacrificial entrails, looking for guidance for the upcoming midterms and beyond. Why did Kansas, a state that hasn’t supported a Democrat for President since 1964, and which has only five abortion clinics, return such a resounding outcome? What does it forecast for future elections where the parties are hidebound on major issues?

Much pro-choice campaigning turns on rhetoric of freedom, civil rights, and obviously, choice. These displays of individual autonomy are widespread in American discourse. We love talking up the virtues of freedom and liberty. However, as Toni Morrison once wrote, American “freedom” is often defined oppositionally. We espouse “freedom” by highlighting those who are profoundly unfree, be they Black, or poor, or stateless, or whatever.

And frequently, we’ve used law to reinforce that unfree population. As Delgado and Sterancic write, legislators have frequently written laws targeting ordinary activities which disfavored populations do. Most well-off White people never realize that their states have extensive laws against “loitering” or urban camping. Racially differentiated policing is extensively documented, meaning Black people are more likely to have criminal records.

This demonstrates a moral binary in American social ethics: we individually want freedom to make decisions with autonomy and dignity. We collectively want authority to enforce our decisions on designated out-group members. Freedom for me, not thee. This duality looms large in abortion debates, because we know that women who vocally oppose abortion are no less likely to actually have an abortion.

Americans have historically maintained this equipoise between individual autonomy and collective authority by simply not looking at it. Historians like James Loewen and Ibram Kendi note that, before the Civil War, Presidents and Congresses punted on Abolitionism because, they contended, it would impinge on others’ freedom. The fact that enslaved persons’ freedom was already impinged mattered little; White slaveowners’ freedom mattered greatly.

Freedom for me, not thee.

We could continue. Dr. King’s nonviolent bids for increased freedom were perceived as impinging on existing, racially defined freedoms. Defenders of the status quo condemned permitting Black students into historically White public schools as government overreach. In 2020, an Omaha businessman claimed his freedom to defend his bar justified him killing an unarmed BLM protester; he committed suicide after a grand jury disagreed.

Last week’s Kansas election differs from these examples for one important reason: it had a deadline. Actual voting forces citizens to pick one position over others, and sign their names to it. Without a looming deadline, ordinary people can hold morally incompatible positions basically forever, by simply refusing to address them too directly. Once voting imposes that limit, though, they must make the decision they’ve actively avoided, and stand by it.

Certainly other forces similarly require binding decisions. In a civil war or revolution, for instance, everyone must pick a side, because the only thing happening in the middle ground is crossfire. Americans love myths of the Revolution and Civil War, and some want to revisit those times. But the histories of Shays’ Rebellion and the Freedmen’s Bureau reveal that the price of domestic war is always paid by those at the bottom.

When forced to choose between concrete, narrowly defined freedom for themselves, or vague, abstract authority over others, Kansans chose their own freedom. My nearly twenty points, they’d rather make their own decisions than impose decisions on the designated out-group. In practice, this is heartening, because it reveals what we need to do to resolve other important problems looming in America: economic injustice, climate catastrophe, and more.

Slap a binding deadline on it.

Don’t ask me what that means. Our government has policy specialists whose entire job is to envision technical details for elections, bills, and referendums; let them design the particulars. But let them do so with pending, material consequences, because punting down the field hasn’t worked. As we discovered with the summer 2020 George Floyd protests, Americans under pressure will explode.

Either we set a deadline to do something, or a deadline will explode upon us.