Category Archives: Local Government

The Middle Finger Of The South

Ah, Indiana! Long understood by sentient Hoosiers as the middle finger of the south, a state trying valiantly to replace Mississippi at the bottom of the civic barrel.

I thought about Indiana’s retrograde governance when I came across an article from The Bulwark, arguing that while Trumpism is clearly incompatible with liberal democracy, it is quite compatible with the governance of  states that have never quite emerged from the Confederacy.

Liberal democracy has never put down deep roots in the South in the way it did across the rest of the country. The region never really abandoned its warped electoral politics and inclination to single-party cronyism, a Southern political instinct that helps explain how Democratic dominance transformed so completely into Republican one-party rule following the civil rights era. Inequality continues to define economic life in the region. Southern states have remained hostile to many minority groups, particularly LGBTQ Americans, and they are wildly out of step with most other states on reproductive rights. And incarceration in the South remains both less humane and more common than in other regions.

Trumpism is intent upon “southernizing” America. (Okay, I know that isn’t really a word…) The article quoted our creepy vice-president, JD Vance, who during the campaign opined that “American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons” and went on to conclude that “whichever side the hillbillies are on, wins.” He added that he applies that image to America’s current politics , because–in his (Yale-educated) hillbilly view– ” the Northern Yankees are now the hyperwoke, coastal elites.”

The Bourbons, in this understanding, were the Southern planters and professionals who opposed Reconstruction. They fomented discord among poor whites to ensure that they would focus their political energies on their peers rather than those who were their de facto rulers. That elite applauded when, In 1896, the Supreme Court approved segregation with the principle of “separate but equal.”

In 1898, America’s first coup d’etat took place as the Democrats of Wilmington, North Carolina issued a “White Declaration of Independence.” They were attacking the coalition of black Republicans and white Populists that had control of the local government in the 1890s, which the old Confederates of the city found intolerable. With their resentment and rage being fueled by white Democratic powerbrokers, two thousand armed men forced out the duly elected government. None were more pleased by this result than their Bourbon backers.

The article reports that this “banker-planter-lawyer” class is largely responsible for the South’s political and economic underdevelopment–that it was “ostensibly pro-business but viciously self-interested” and that as a consequence, the South as a region still lags economically—pinned down by poverty and hobbled by the absence of public investments. The states have few worker protections, and its working classes have difficulty earning a living wage, making It “virtually impossible” to exist on the income of a single, low-wage, 40-hour-a-week job, especially in the absence of social welfare/healthcare.

That paragraph could have been written about Indiana.

From “Right to Work” (for less) legislation, to one of the nation’s most regressive tax systems, to the legislature’s constant knee-bending to landlords who prey on the poor, to vicious cuts in Medicaid, to restrictions on abortion that are sending medical practitioners out of the state, to the theft of tax dollars from public schools in order to subsidize wealthy Hoosiers and religious schools…the list goes on.

Some years ago, I wrote about ALICE, an acronym for Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed; it applies to households with income above the federal poverty level, but below the actual, basic cost of living. United Way of Indiana found that more than one in three Hoosier households was unable to afford the basics of housing, food, health care and transportation, despite working hard, that 37% of households lived below the Alice threshold, (14% below the poverty level and another 23% above poverty but below the cost of living), that these were families and individuals with jobs, so most didn’t qualify for social services in Indiana, and that the jobs they fill are critically important–these are child care workers, laborers, movers, home health aides, heavy truck drivers, store clerks, repair workers and office assistants—and they are unsure if they’ll be able to put dinner on the table each night.

And just like those southern Bourbons, our elected overlords couldn’t care less. They focus instead upon deflecting responsibility by turning struggling Hoosiers against each other–hence the legislative attacks on trans children and DEI and moronic pronouncements that Black folks benefitted from the 3/5ths compromise. 

The theory is, if we’re provided with scapegoats, perhaps we won’t notice the Bourbon corruption, or the lack of public investment in social and physical infrastructure…

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And In Trumpy Indiana

I’ve been seeing calls for a national protest on February 5th–to take place at all 50 statehouses. I believe from noon to 2:00. If anyone can confirm, or identify the original sponsors, please post that information. If you need something tangible and Hoosier to protest, today’s post should deliver…

If you wondered whether Indiana’s new Governor, Mike Braun, would follow the agenda of his running mates–Beckwith, Banks and RoQuita, all of whom are “out and proud” White Christian Nationalists–there’s no longer any doubt. Braun is slavishly following Trump’s assault on anyone who isn’t a straight White Christian Male.

Mike Leppert has accurately described Braun’s assault, which consists of “othering” any group that doesn’t fall into that slice of Hoosier citizenship. Braun immediately followed Trump’s lead by purging state government of any DEI efforts. Then his budget proposal took an ax to disfavored “others.”

He began with the Indians.

In 2025, new Governor Mike Braun, in his first budget proposal in office, proposes to end funding for the Native American Indian Affairs Commission. The cut comes as part of his 15% cut to the Indiana Civil Rights Commission. That may sound like a lot of money, but it isn’t. The state is spending less than $3 million a year on the ICRC in the current budget.

It got worse from there.

As Leppert quite accurately noted, budget proposals from a newly elected governor are a marker, defining his priorities– and in this case, defining his character as well.

In addition to withdrawing from his predecessor’s agreement with the Pokagon Indians, Braun’s budget eliminates funding for the Indiana Commission for Women, an organization created to assess the needs of Indiana women and their families and promote their full participation in Indiana society. Also gone is $10 million earmarked for Martin University, and the College Success Program. Martin University is Indiana’s only predominantly Black institution; the Success program assists minority and first-generation college students.

These cuts by Braun won’t change the lives of any white, male, Christian. Except for those comforted by real or perceived harm to the other. It’s a foundational change in governing philosophy that is still taking shape…

Braun isn’t managing money with these cuts, he’s managing messaging. These moves are proclamations of what he supports, or in these cases, what he opposes. And the fallout is not simple addition and subtraction in this one document.

As Leppert says, the message is obvious: Native American, Black and female populations are now officially “the others” in Indiana. Those populations now join the GOP’s ongoing attacks on trans people–and by implication, all LGBTQ Hoosiers.

We certainly won’t see any pushback on “othering” from a legislature that owes its GOP dominance from persistent gerrymandering. Senate Bill 235, for example, co-authored by the odious Mike Young, gleefully prohibits “state agencies, recipients of state contracts or grants, state educational institutions, and health profession licensing boards” from taking account of diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

Indiana’s legislature has also continued and deepened its all-out assault on education. Senate Bill 202–a sweeping bill attacking academic freedom in Indiana’s public colleges and universities– has been joined by HB 1002, a “high priority” of the Republican leadership. Its 130+ pages includes three especially noteworthy efforts to dumb down public education in the Hoosier state:

  • It removes all prerequisites for a person to be appointed to be Indiana Secretary of Education, paving the way for the Governor to appoint a non-educator or non-resident. 
  • It removes a requirement in current law that requires a governing body to provide a non-charter school that students of the same age or grade can attend.” This should be seen as a companion bill House Bill 1136, which would dissolve IPS and other urban districts and turn all of their schools into charters.  
  • HB 1002 also removes an existing responsibility of charter authorizers to ensure that the school is in compliance with applicable law. One of the ways charter schools currently differ from the private schools that accept vouchers is that they are subject to more stringent legal oversight; this provision would dramatically undermine that oversight–which is entirely absent from the voucher program.

It is impossible to miss the GOP’s agenda, both nationally and at the state level. That agenda follows the anti-democratic, anti-civic-equality prescriptions of Project 2025: ensure that straight White Christian males recover social dominance; continue and strengthen the anti-majoritarian systems (gerrymandering, electoral college, etc.) that facilitate governance by the Republican minority, make it difficult or impossible for higher education institutions to maintain intellectual integrity, and destroy the public schools that bring different students together, replacing them with religious schools that harden tribal affiliations. 

And while all that is going on, eradicate sources of information inconsistent with White Christian nationalist dogma–not just educational institutions, but media outlets unwilling to bend the knee, and government websites that might accidentally contain factual information about the composition of the American polity.

Blue states might resist Program 2025, but not the racist, misogynistic, homophobic troglodytes in Indiana government.  

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Return of the KKK

James Madison–my favorite Indiana historian, not my favorite Founding. Father–has recently written a column documenting what many of us have come to recognize: White Christian Nationalism is the contemporary KKK.

Madison should know. He wrote the book tracing the history of the Klan in Indiana.

The inauguration of Gov. Mike Braun and Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith sparks thoughts of the similar inauguration 100 years ago, on January 12, 1925, when Edward Jackson and Harold Van Orman took their oaths. The past never repeats itself exactly, but in this case there are lines that rhyme and questions that cause concern.

At the dinner following Gov. Jackson’s inauguration, William Herschell recited his beloved poem, “Ain’t God Good to Indiana.”  In the reception line next to the new governor stood Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson, the man who boasted that “I am the law in Indiana.”  The two men had plans.

Madison notes that Jackson is considered the worst governor in Indiana history, and most Hoosiers know that Stephenson–Madison calls him “vile”–was a murderer and a blot on an already dark Indiana history.

The forces that created these two men remain with us. Indiana’s new governor and lieutenant governor are not Klansmen, but in the religious and political culture around them are scents of a century ago, when the Klan dominated the Hoosier state.

Those white, native-born Protestants who flocked to the Klan in the early 1920s called themselves 100% Americans. They boasted that only they were the real Americans. They created enemies to exclude and people to hate. Jews, African Americans, immigrants and, above all, Catholics were “the others.” By 1924, one political operative lamented, “Ideas of race and religion now dominate political thought.”

Those Klan boasts sound eerily like the rhetoric employed by MAGA cultists. Madison tells us that fear of Russian Bolsheviks and German Huns widened to include all immigrants and non-White Christians. The Klan repeatedly insisted on “America First.”

In rhetoric that sounds a lot like Trump’s, the Klan claimed that the country was going to “hell in a handbasket.”

A Christian crusade was the remedy. The Klan promised to enforce prohibition, censor Hollywood films, stop backseat sex, end political corruption, and keep women closer to the kitchen, nursery, and Sunday school room. Giving women the ballot, reported the Klan’s weekly newspaper, The Fiery Cross, “would foster masculine boldness and restless independence, which might detract from the modesty and virtue of womankind.”

Shades of today’s “tradwives.”

Madison explains that Klan members were convinced that they were the real, “100% Americans.” Much like today’s Christian Nationalists, they were motivated by White Supremacy. “Onward Christian Soldiers,” became the “beloved hymn of the Klan.”

Indiana had (and I think it is fair to say, still has) what Madison called “low expectations for government and high tolerance for corruption” –an environment that invited the state’s descent into a Klan stronghold.

Along with a governor, a majority—perhaps a supermajority—of the 1925 General Assembly were Klan members or sympathizers. Nearly all were white, Protestant and native born, joined by only four Catholics, four foreign born, and not a single African American or Jewish member.

The 1925 Klan legislature was mostly a bust. Internal divisions and self-aggrandizement led to only modest success in pushing through the Klan agenda. All assumed there would be other sessions to make good.

Madison’s column includes information about the resistance to the Klan. Stephenson’s conviction for rape and murder in 1925 added to the growing awareness of the Klan’s threat to basic American values, and Madison tells us that by 1930, the Klan was mostly gone in Indiana. “Nobody wanted to admit he’d ever belonged,” one reporter recalled.

Perhaps the most important observation in Madison’s essay is the following:

The intolerance in the last 50 years has come not from an out-of-date Klan but from a potpourri of sprawling and amorphous groups and movements, often linked to versions of Christian nationalism. As with the old Klan, today’s Christian nationalists tend toward binary choices of good and evil, toward a willingness to force their religious and cultural views on all of us, and toward use of government power in undemocratic and authoritarian ways that Indiana’s pioneers would have found appalling. Those pioneers wrote a Constitution in 1816 that contains the finest words ever penned on Indiana soil, including such commitments as “no preference shall ever be given by law to any religious societies, or modes of worship.”

Too many of our lawmakers have failed to heed that state Constitutional provision.

You really need to click through and read the whole essay–and then join us at tomorrow’s rally to kick off resistance to the re-emergence of the Klan, this time wearing red hats rather than sheets.

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Extremism’s Costs

Important notice: Due to the cold, the rally on January 20th has been moved to Broadway United Methodist Church, 609 E 29th St, Indianapolis. Indoors.

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I have lived in Indiana almost all of my life. I was born in Indianapolis and raised in a small Indiana town (Anderson). After a brief hiatus in college, I returned to the state and have spent my adult life here. I’ve participated in the state’s civic and political affairs, and been part of Indianapolis’ government. During my stint as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I sued the state on more than one occasion.

Given that history, I think I’ve earned the right to comment on the state’s deficits–deficits that have grown more concerning over that timespan.

On this platform, I frequently criticize what former NUVO editor Harrison Ullmann called “The World’s Worst Legislature.” Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, that body is controlled by extremists–culture warriors pandering to the White Christian Nationalists who want to eviscerate the very notion of a diverse “public” entitled to a government that serves the common good rather than the interests of political donors and fundamentalist churches.

The most vivid example of the General Assembly’s misplaced emphases–but most definitely not the only example–was the legislature’s unseemly rush to impose a ban on abortion in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. That ban ignored medical science, endangered the lives of pregnant women, and rode roughshod over the rights of women whose religious commitments differ from those of fundamentalist Christians.

Indiana is now reaping the negative consequences of that ban.

We’ve already seen reports that the state has growing  ob/gyn “deserts,” where women–including but not limited to pregnant women–must travel long distances to access a wide range of care. (The legislature’s decades-long effort to shut down Planned Parenthood clinics had already made it difficult for poor women in much of the state to get birth control or mammograms.)

We’ve already seen reports that doctors of all specialties are leaving the state, and that fewer medical students are choosing to intern in Indiana’s hospitals.

Now we are seeing evidence that others are joining those medical refugees–that people are choosing not to live in Red states with abortion bans.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, the majority of justices decided that the right to an abortion should be left up to individual states. Two years later, thousands of Americans in parts of the U.S. with strict abortion bans are deciding to leave those states, new research finds.

Following the Dobbs decision, the 13 states with strict abortion bans, from Alabama to West Virginia, collectively lost a net 36,000 residents per quarter, meaning the difference between the number of people leaving the states versus those migrating in, according to the analysis from economists at Georgia Institute of Technology and The College of Wooster and published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The analysis, which is based on change-of-address data from the U.S. Postal Service, found that the state impact is larger among single-person households, which may suggest that younger people are moving out of abortion-banning states at a higher rate than families. That could be due to the greater challenges for families in trying to move, given the need to change schools or uproot careers for parents.

The freedom of young people to choose where they will live carries significant implications for states’ economies. States with bans are already having difficulty attracting and retaining workers, especially younger workers. Indiana companies are reporting such difficulties, which will likely have a negative impact on the state’s already struggling economic development.

“Younger Americans are paying attention to a state’s access to reproductive care. In a 2022 Axios poll, about 6 in 10 people 18- to 29-years-old said a state’s abortion laws would sway their decision on where to live from “somewhat” to “a lot.”

Surprise!! It turns out that things like quality of life and respect for individual liberty have a greater impact on young people’s residential choices than low tax rates.

Researchers found that most states with strict abortion bans also fail to provide adequate social safety nets. They make it difficult to access programs such as food stamps, and have growing numbers of maternal care deserts. That is certainly true of Indiana, where our legislature routinely imposes punitive measures on–and erects barriers to– people needing public assistance.

People who claim to be pro-life, who advocated for these abortion bans, often suggest that these policies are designed to protect children, women and families,” said Dr. Nigel Madden, lead author of the study. But weakness in the safety net shows “the hypocrisy of that argument.”

The kindest thing one can say about the culture warriors who dominate Indiana’s legislature is that they are incapable of connecting the dots.

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A Delusional Nice Guy

Indiana’s outgoing Governor is Eric Holcomb. Holcomb has always seemed like a nice guy, and has mostly governed like a throwback to the time when Republicans were a political party and not a MAGA cult. (Mostly, but not always–when our demented, ideologically extreme legislature sent him the ban on abortion, for example, he caved and signed it. On the other hand, he did reject a piece of mean-spirited anti-trans legislation that our Christian Nationalist General Assembly then passed over his veto.)

The Indianapolis Star recently did a typical “retrospective” with the Governor as he leaves office. it was the usual sort of puff piece, and it began with a quote from Holcomb:

When I took office as governor in January 2017, I was determined to pick up where my predecessors had left off and make our state an even better place to live, work, play, and stay. I said we’d take Indiana to the world and the world to Indiana, and over the past eight years we’ve done just that.

How? With civility and a common sense approach, along with the collective efforts of Hoosiers from all walks of life. We’ve turned the Crossroads of America into the No. 1 state for infrastructure, with projects like double tracking the South Shore Line and completing Interstate 69 from Evansville to Indianapolis, and I’m grateful to INDOT and a labor force of thousands who built them.

Holcomb is either willfully blind or delusional.

Indiana routinely ranks at the bottom when states are rated on quality of life. Physical infrastructure is certainly important–although I might point out that our state roads are hardly models of competent maintenance–but when it comes to the governmental responsibilities that matter most to citizens, state government continues to fail. Miserably.

Quality of life indicators typically focus on education, the economy, the environment, social and health conditions,
public safety, culture and recreation, and civic participation.

Our radical legislature has waged a persistent and successful war on public education–a war that continues to see college graduates leave the state. Economists tell us that war has hampered economic development, since businesses looking to locate new enterprises typically seek out places with highly educated workforces.

Thanks to our lawmakers’ numerous misplaced priorities, the Hoosier economy is–at best–mediocre, and it’s not improving.

When it comes to health, Indiana’s abortion ban is currently driving ob/gyn doctors out of the state, exacerbating longstanding health delivery problems that include closings of rural hospitals and underfunding of Medicaid budgets and mental health programs.

Indiana state government is actually an impediment to environmental protection–lawmakers oppose even eminently reasonable environmental measures. (Indiana legislators recently tried to ban early coal-fired plant retirements that had been proposed by the utilities.)

When it comes to civic participation, Indiana is pathetic. We rank at the very bottom for voter turnout in general elections, and according to last year’s Civic Health Index, Indiana has consistently placed in the bottom 10 of all states on midterm voter turnout since 2010.

Thanks to extreme gerrymandering, the legislature disproportionately represents rural Hoosiers, and for years has pursued a vendetta against the state’s urban centers. Research has repeatedly confirmed that Indianapolis and its suburbs are the economic drivers of the state, but that hasn’t seemed to penetrate the resentment that has motivated members of the General Assembly to hobble the city. The General Assembly overrules local lawmakers on matters large and small, and tightly limits the decisions urban folks are entitled to make for ourselves. (It took three sessions before Indianapolis got our overlords’ permission to tax ourselves to expand mass transit.)

The legislature’s single-minded focus on low taxes–especially for the business interests that exert a major influence on our representatives–is largely responsible for Indiana’s low quality of life. Rather than focusing on improving–or even maintaining– the state’s physical and/or social infrastructure, our lawmakers shamelessly pander to big business and to the state’s culture warriors.

Most of the problems of Indiana’s governance can be traced to extreme gerrymandering. Among the many deleterious effects of partisan redistricting is the fact that the “real” election takes place in the primary, when only the most ideological members of either party vote. Republicans protect their Right flank, Democrats their Left. In Red Indiana, the result is the election of more and more extreme Right-wingers and–if survey research is to be believed–a thoroughly unrepresentative legislature.

It’s nice that we have a new Interstate and new tracks for the South Shore. Those accomplishments hardly compensate for the multiple deficits of a state that is competing to be the new Mississippi, but they will smooth the departure of the Hoosiers who are fleeing.

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