“That’s Not Normal”: Arkansas Politics and the Fight Against Wokeness

Arkansas has always been a one-party state. It remained so following the shift from Democratic to statewide Republican dominance after the 2010 and 2012 elections. But, Arkansan’s political attitudes did not change significantly. According to Hal Bass, the shift in party control occurred as a result of the conflation of state and national politics. Arkansas had voted Republican in all but two national elections since 1972 and was one of five states to increase its percentage voting Republican from 2004 to 2008. Yet, local and state-wide offices remained largely in the hands of Democrats. Since it assumed control of state and local politics in 2012, the rhetoric of Arkansas Republican leaders has reflected what another author in this series referred to as the “calcification of partisan distinctions.” In Arkansas, this calcification was accelerated by Republican leaders vilifying national Democratic Party leaders and liberal movements instead of campaigning on state and local issues.

Arkansas Republicans aided in that calcification by gutting their own party’s center. For some time, Republicans maintained that center, electing Gov. Asa Hutchinson to two terms. Hutchinson was, as Bass notes, a politician for whom “governing and economic development were higher priorities . . . than being a cultural warrior.” The Arkansas Republican Party of 2023 has, however, fully embraced the rhetoric of the culture wars. It has identified an ideology (“Wokism”) which has little power within the state, but against which its leaders can wage a righteous war. And, they have at last found a governor to do it for them. Unfortunately, a multitude of opportunities to implement policies that better the lives of average Arkansans have been obscured by her hyper-partisan rhetoric demonizing national Democratic leaders and “the radical left”. As a model for good governance (to use her own words), “that’s not normal.”

With the swearing in of Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders on January 10, 2023, Arkansas Republicans began fighting a war on the “woke mob”. The day she took office, Sanders signed a series of executive orders prohibiting both indoctrination and the teaching of Critical Race Theory in public schools, eliminating the use of the word “Latinx” in all official state documents, and banning Tik Tok from all state-owned computers.

Less than a month after she took office, Sanders gave the Republican response to President Biden’s State of the Union address. Framing her message around a culture war she sees raging in our country, Sanders characterized our politics as a choice between “normal and crazy”. She’s for freedom and against hate, higher taxes, and empty grocery store shelves. She’s for loving America–a land in which she says violent criminals roam free and law-abiding families live in fear. The remainder of her response outlined a program for saving us from the “woke fantasies” of the “radical left”. This program would focus on jobs, higher pay, personal safety, freedom, and the “civil rights issue of the day”, public education.

Having outlined what amounts to a Make Arkansas Great Again schema for her administration, one would hope the Arkansas General Assembly might take up the task of crafting policy to improve Arkansas’s rank among its sister states. Afterall, Arkansas ranks among the lowest states on almost every measure of regime stability, economic development, and quality of life. It ranks 49th in crime control and boasts the 3rd highest incarceration rates. It also ranks 43rd in quality of education, 40th in infrastructure, and 47th in health care. Governor Sanders, unlike many Arkansans, was able to get quality health care after her own cancer diagnosis. Acting to address issues that affect the lives of average Arkansans seems like a reasonable thing to do. But that’s not how Arkansas representatives used their time.

The 2023 session of the Arkansas General Assembly was dominated by the culture wars Sanders encouraged them to wage. The Assembly passed and the Governor signed laws requiring use of bathrooms that align with gender assigned at birth (Act 317), creating standing for minors in Arkansas courts to sue physicians who administered gender-affirming health care (Act 274), and requiring Arkansas public school teachers and professors to use assigned birth pronouns and names (Act 542). Act 612 required pornography web sites to verify users are at least 18 years of age. Despite state-wide support for medicinal marijuana use, Act 629 reclassified Delta 8, 9, and 10 cannabinoids as Schedule IV controlled substances. And, it eliminated implicit bias training for employees of public colleges and universities (Act 511).

The General Assembly felt the pressing need to clarify that one does not need a permit to carry a concealed firearm (Act 777). While instituting work requirements as a condition to receive federal housing assistance for all able-bodied adults between 19 and 64 years of age (Act 160), it also lifted employment certification requirements for children under the age of 16 (Act 195). On the other hand, it rejected efforts to broaden exceptions to the 2019 law banning all abortions in Arkansas except for “medical emergencies”. One bill would have provided an exception for survivors of incest, the other would clarify that a medical emergency included a threat to the life and health of the mother. Act 371 (implementation of which has since been suspended by a federal district court) revised obscenity laws that had previously shielded public schools and libraries from prosecution for providing materials deemed obscene to minors. 

Finally, the General Assembly set about gutting Arkansas’s Freedom of Information Act, one of the most robust in the country. In one instance, the General Assembly passed legislation setting new reasons why a school board can meet behind closed doors and who can be present (Act 883). In another instance, the Assembly moved to eliminate certain records from public inspection because of reporting on potential misuse of public funds by Governor Sanders. Sanders claimed that exempting records of her past travel plans was necessary to ensure her security. And, in the name of transparency she signed a bill into law that restricted the public’s ability to discover where she had traveled, with whom, and at what expense.

Education, however, did take center stage during the 94th General Assembly as the legislature passed the Arkansas LEARNS Act. The act constitutes a far-reaching and radical overhaul of state education policies including teacher pay and dismissal, benchmarks for literacy, school voucher programs, and a student loan forgiveness program covering tuition costs for current and future teachers at $6,000 per year. It increases teacher pay, but also requires school districts to determine their own pay scales. This provision prompted some to speculate that smaller and failing districts will experience a serious disadvantage when competing with larger districts to retain the best teachers.

Other provisions appear as window dressing for the central aim of the legislation–to privatize public education by providing vouchers amounting to 90% of instate funding per pupil to attend private or homeschool. Baker Kurrus, a former Little Rock ISD superintendent, noted that the voucher program would likely divert money to students already attending private schools, lead to economic segregation in a state where (unlike school choice) “poverty is not a choice.” One representative characterized the LEARNS Act voucher program as “[t]he rich want vouchers. That’s who this legislation is for. The rich. They want it and they are going to get it . . .” leading him to conclude that educational equity is no more in Arkansas.

Politics in Arkansas shows no signs of moving toward a center in which the economic outlook of the state, the skill of its workforce, and the well-being of its citizens take center stage. What continues unabated is the creation of an authoritarian utopia where racism doesn’t exist, radical liberalism has been expunged, public education fights with one hand tied behind its back, the government operates in secret, mental health and health care generally are given minimal attention, and state leaders turn their attention to banning books from public libraries. The calcification of Arkansan’s political preferences has brought this regime to power. But, as H.L. Menken noted, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”