Speaking on Solidarity

My talk in Plano to the American Solidarity Party

Just a brief post from the road—I had the pleasure of keynoting the American Solidarity Party Convention this weekend, and speaking on “The Politics of Dependence.”

For a little excerpt from my text:

How reasonable can our parties and our politics be if they don't start with an honest account of the human person?

Here we are, the day after a Supreme Court decision on forgiving student debt—when our president made a clumsy attempt to reckon with who we ask to bear the cost of our misaligned, administrator-serving college system.

Here we are, in the middle of a rolling Medicaid purge, as over 1.5 million people come off the rolls, mostly not because found ineligible, but because of missing paperwork.

Here we are, in a border state, as families face heightened barriers to claiming asylum, and our nation makes it impossible to “come the right way” through metering and refugee caps.

Here we are, a week after the anniversary of the Dobbs decision, in a nation still turning over the question of whether a woman and her baby are two different orders of being.

In the womb, at the border, in sickness, in debt, our politics see need as a sign that something has gone wrong.

On each issue, one party may try to fix blame, while the other applies a band-aid fix, They trade places; Republican states treating migrants and refugees as insidious invaders.

Meanwhile, Democrats plead for children separated from their parents at the border but say there should be no limits on mother-child separation in the womb.

Cages or curettes.

What does a real alternative look like? The politics of dependence begin by acknowledging that dependence is our default state, and self-sufficiency the aberration. Our lives begin and (frequently) end in states of near total dependence, and much of the middle is marked by periods of need.

A world that holds up independence as the ideal offers us two rival duties: to obscure our dependence and to be resentful of it.

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The speech is partially adapted from my essay “Dependence” for Plough, and my keynote also draws on O. Carter Snead’s What it Means to Be Human, Natalie Carnes’s Motherhood: A Confession, and Lewis Hyde’s The Gift.