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Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst grassroots activists seeking to mobilise against political and religious extremism in the Kansas Republican Party, I ask what is lost - analytically and politically - when crisis is not met with urgency?

Paper long abstract

‘Crisis’ has been a productive organising metaphor for government policymaking as well as political and intellectual life. Invocations of ‘crisis’ are often matched with calls for ‘urgency’. But so many of these crises (e.g. climate change, growing economic and social inequalities, war) appear to be worsening in an increasingly febrile and polarised world. Are our communities, institutions and nations ill-equipped to answer the call for urgency? Or does urgency predispose us to shut down debate and curtail new analytical and political opportunities in our rush to be seen to be speaking to crisis?

I will address these questions, drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork I have been carrying out on American democracy and political culture since 2006. My field site is the greater Kansas City metropolitan area, where I studied the now-defunct ‘moderate’ wing of the Kansas Republican Party. For several decades, the political and social sciences framed the fate of the secular Republican moderate – a figure progressive on questions of civil and reproductive rights, ‘culture war’ issues and public education – as a ‘canary in the coal mine’ of American democracy. This trope also enjoyed currency in wider media, politics and popular culture.

What is 'lost' when crisis is not met with urgency? Has the moderate Republican, that rarest of political species, become another victim to a lost political future, in Mark Fisher’s world of ‘capitalist realism’? And how might both my ethnographic subjects and the social sciences (including anthropology) be complicit in the ‘killing’ of the metaphorical canary?