By RUSSELL ARBEN FOX
WSU
There’s a mayoral election taking place in Wichita, Kansas’s largest stand-alone city, right now. Also, strikes have been declared at Spirit AeroSystems, Wichita’s largest single employer, and Ascension Via Christi, the city’s largest hospital. What does all this have in common?
Potentially many things. The business slowdowns, budget deficits, and unemployment which any labor unrest may contribute to, are obviously all topics that people seeking political office are going to have to struggle with. And similarly, the positions taken by a city’s mayor can play a large role in determining how and when strikes or contract negotiations may be resolved. So, these topics are going to be entwined in Wichita, as they would in any community.
But there is another similarity between them, one that isn’t often noticed, but which I think lurks behind the scenes in how we approach either an election or a strike. When voters organize in support of someone running for political office, or when workers organize and make collective demands of their employer, we are seeing “factions” at work.
The concept of a faction—people who act together in support of their shared interests—has a storied place in our constitutional order. For much of history, factions were seen as poisonous; the assumption was that if people organized around particular agendas, there could be no united, “common” good. This meant societies had to stay small and simple and homogeneous, so as to prevent the factional temptation. But James Madison defended the proposed U.S. Constitution in part by insisting that factions were a natural result of human freedom. The goal shouldn’t be to prevent them, but to expand and include them, and seek to manage their effects instead.
Madisonian pluralism can be criticized, but it remains the way the American system usually looks upon factional differences. When employees have differences with how they are treated by their employers, they can organize into unions and make demands, including through strikes. True, many are suspicious of unions, and the Republican party, both nationally and in Kansas, has often opposed them. But even with the challenges the striking machinists and nurses might pose to Wichita’s economy, none of the candidates for mayor, including the Republican ones, spoke against the strikers as a faction (though some were more supportive than others).
It is odd that our recognition of factional differences on the factory or hospital floor often disappears, though. When it comes to City Hall. As I wrote above, there are Republicans running for Wichita’s mayor, as well as a Democrat and a Libertarian and unaffiliated candidates, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Yet when it comes to local elections—in contrast to national and state ones—many share the belief that “partisanship” (which can just mean thinking and acting factionally, in support of the interests of one’s supporters) is poisonous, like was assumed by many long ago.
Parties can be corrupt, of course—in the same way unions, or for that matter businesses, can be. Institutional collusion and self-interest within any kind of faction or organization warrants being called out for such. But as the Wichita mayoral race moves forward, it will be interesting to see which candidates, if any, will be forthright--like the striking machinists and nurses have been--in defense of the factions they represent and the particular agenda they offer to voters, and which will instead insist that specific shared interests must be set aside in the name of a “unified” good.
Madison had some doubts about that approach, centuries ago; there are good reasons for us to doubt it still today.
Dr. Russell Arben Fox teaches politics at Friends University in Wichita.