the booster post

i don’t have a lot of specific policy-oriented things to say about the sales tax initiative proposed by the booster triumvirate, wichita forward. i don’t believe even in the best of circumstances it could accomplish what it purports to have as goals, and i don’t think it’s outlandish to observe that we’re not at all close to the best of circumstances to begin with. 

the initiative is interesting to me primarily because of its formal qualities (although the content of the campaign has been hilarious). in trying to hustle this program through before anyone could really get a handle on its deeply ad hoc foundation, the boosters relied on a few bog-standard tentpoles to support their largely empty messaging: homelessness/mental health (always and inexplicably paired), public safety (the most funded departments in the city), and downtown development (whatever that happens to mean this week). 

one way to imagine this campaign is as the first fully-gen-ai political campaign to hit wichita: it was clear from the first speeches and materials produced by wichita forward that they were employing generative-ai to create their messaging. most bizarrely, they cobbled together an implausible skyline of downtown wichita using gen-ai: the buildings appeared in new and unsettling combinations; a self-own given that two of wichita forward’s founding patrons are based in downtown wichita. either of them could easily have taken a picture from the lobby of their buildings and gotten a perfectly serviceable photo of the skyline.

gen-ai is a signifier of the flashy but cheap, the erudite but hasty, sloppy research producing slop results. the wichita forward campaign leaned in, taking on not only the production values of gen-ai, but the ethics, as well: the compulsion to push out a product before its finished; building the plane as you’re trying to fly it; moving fast, breaking stuff; and above all else, insisting on the inevitability and urgency of the cause. 

a value statement of wichita forward could be: a particular future is accelerating towards us and there is no escape. the only course forward is to accelerate ourselves into the singular future. if we do not fully accept the terms of this future, we will be destroyed. there is no negotiation with the future, only acquiescence. 

this is the usual play from development boosters and used car salesmen: act now to lock in the perfect conditions before they disappear forever. 

this view of the future is a marketing strategy founded in an ideology of the present: what kinds of “affordances” this particular present allows or has capacity for, who should have a voice in our current political arrangement, what values we will employ to determine our actions in this present. for all the talk of coming together as a community, wichita forward demonstrates values that suggest a more authoritarian/executive/c-suite position:

• the insistence a special election, despite the inherent risk of low voter turnout (leaving aside the irony of an organization ostensibly concerned with fiscal responsibility demanding the city spend its own money on this election when a free one was available a mere few months later)
• the lack of survey data transparency
• hosting townhalls and forums at which no public input or questions were allowed
• the utter lack of voices from the very communities they purport to be aiding, save for the occasional “spokesperson” for organizations once-removed from those communities (eg, the roster of social service organizations that ostensibly support the measure: the neighboring movement, justice together, local performing arts nonprofits, etc)

i’m personally less concerned with the question of whether or not a sales tax to support this or any array of programs will be successful. i’m more concerned with the question of whether or not this type of campaign will be successful. can a business class actually get away with running a ghostly campaign such as this? a campaign that has “no there there”, but only wisps of suggestive affect, a campaign that deploys only the second half of a rhyming couplet, expecting the voter to fill in the necessary foundational verses?

one day out from the special election, it appears that the business class will not, in fact, get away with it. aside from an unsurprising, but still disappointing, total capitulation by the city council to elite persuasion, the boosters have not been as well-received by the public they hoped to sway. trying to play to both sides of the aisle at once, the messaging was tailored to reassure the right that this would be good for the property owner by alleviating the need to raise property taxes. for the left, handwringing about the terrible plight of poor neighbors and the urgency of “doing something” in the face of impending scarcity. 

i’ll be working the polls tomorrow. the expectation is that this election, like most special elections, will be slow with low turnout. my own prediction is that it will be slightly busier than that, and that the results will be close-but-not-too-close–certainly not close enough to dissuade the bankers and boosters from trying again. 

many voices have come together in an unlikely coalition of refusal. i don’t think there’s much use in thinking too hard about how to keep this coalition together. ultimately, the right remains noxious, fascist, and dangerously orthogonal to the project of democracy. but the question of why this particular initiative (will have?) failed so deliciously should be examined. is there an actual opening for more conversations about economic equality, the disconnect of our booster elites, the “actual” needs of the city and the political roadblocks that are in place to prevent their fulfillment? 

the way forward for wichita isn’t through the bank lobby, but may be found when we start to ask what the banks have ever really done for us besides throttle our ambitions, sell us back our dreams at interest, and compel us bravely onward into a future only the bankers can afford.