the moment with Mike Rusch.

A bridge episode sitting in the tension of the current moment. Two seasons traced power in NWA from indigenous removal to present-day displacement, revealing a pattern of accommodation over resistance. When cultural agreement breaks down, force is all that remains.

Mike Rusch Immigration Season 2b

season 2 bridge, ep. 49.

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episode notes.

This bridge episode sits in the tension of the current moment. Across two seasons, the underview has traced power in Northwest Arkansas from indigenous removal through racial terror to the displacement happening right now, asking what our institutions resisted and what they accommodated. The answer, consistently, has been accommodation: going along, choosing comfort over confrontation, narrowing the scope of who counts as neighbor. That history matters because we're watching the same choice play out nationally.

When cultural agreement breaks down, when we lose our capacity to see each other, all that's left is force. The work ahead isn't shouting louder. It's the slow, patient labor of expanding who we see as "us" through stories, conversations, and relationships. Season 3 turns toward the faith communities of Northwest Arkansas to ask: where are the empathy makers, and how does faith create or breakdown belonging?

episode references

episode outline

  1. Gramsci's two kinds of power: material power vs. consent (00:00:48)
  2. The relationship between force and agreement (01:30)
  3. How cultural change precedes political power (02:15)
  4. Season One recap: empathy with Dr. Nick Ogle (03:00)
  5. Research on 200 NWA churches and the scope of empathy (03:45)
  6. Season Two recap: tracing power from origin to today (04:30)
  7. The question of resistance vs. accommodation (05:15)
  8. Season Three preview: the faith of Northwest Arkansas (05:45)
  9. Barbara Carr's wisdom on wholeness and the missing slice (06:30)
  10. The path forward: rebuilding capacity for consent (07:00)

episode transcript.

[00:00:47] mike rusch.: In 1937, an Italian cultural theorist named Antonio  Gramsci died in fascist Italy after spending his final years in prison before World War II began. He had spent years thinking of power, not just who had it, but how power actually works.

Gramsci described two kinds of power. The first is material power, political, economic, military force, coercion, blo. Brute strength, the kind of power that says do this or else.

The second kind of power is different though. It's the ability to create consent and agreement, a shared understanding of what's normal, what's acceptable, what's just common sense.

So why does this matter?

You see these two kinds of power, they exist in relationship when you have more of one. You need less of the other, and when there's agreement about how we should live together, you don't need force. The agreement does the work, but when the agreement breaks down, when consent dissolves. Then material power is the only thing left. Control through force.

This is what we're watching unfold in our country right now. The executive orders, the deportations, the defunding, the dismantling, the paralysis of Congress. When you can't build agreement, you reach for the lever of material power.

And here's the harder truth, those building this kind of consent power, they have been working towards this for a very long time.

Gramsci , he was a Marxist, but his ideas were picked up by the French, far right thinkers of the 1960s who argued that cultural change must come before political power. The paradox here is that two groups at almost opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, they're using the same theory.

They agreed that rather than seizing power outright, you reshape what people see as normal, what feels reasonable, and then political victories will follow. There's evidence to say that this has been happening here for decades in our churches, our schools, in media and families. A slow patient work moving the window of normal until ideas that once felt extreme, they become mainstream.

And over our first two seasons of the underview, this is what we've been tracing.

In season one, we sat down and talked with Dr. Nick Ogle and we talked about empathy, which is the subject of his dissertation. Not empathy is a feeling, but empathy as a practice. The capacity to understand another person's experience, to see the world through their eyes.

Empathy is the foundation of that second kind of power, the consent kind. You can't build shared understanding without the capacity to actually understand each other.

So I started asking, what are the places in our region that should be growing empathy or have the ability to grow empathy? What are the institutions that expand our capacity to see one another?

To begin to understand this, we began working to understand how one of the biggest institutions in our region, the faith communities, how they view empathy. How does empathy work out from faith into the belonging of our community?

Over the past year, we've looked at approximately 200 churches across Northwest Arkansas, looking for the language of empathy, the scope of that empathy, and wanting to understand how far does that empathy extend, who's included when we say we love our neighbor?

What we found, I'm sorry, but it's a bit troubling. Our region has a chronically low level of that empathy. Becoming a very narrow scope of who counts as our neighbor, and I don't believe this is on accident either. Rather, I think it's the result of generations of choices about who we'd welcome and who we'd exclude.

In season two, the story of northwest Arkansas, we traced power from its origins in our regions to today. In following that power, we tracked who held it, who was excluded, and how it was maintained from indigenous removal to enslavement, to racial terror, fighting for civil rights and sundown towns to the displacement that's happening right now. And through all of it, we asked what did the institutions that we created. What did they resist and what did they accommodate? The reality is that Northwest Arkansas, like most of the country, has continued to move towards accommodation. You see, we're a very good at going along at choosing comfort over confrontation, and in many, many times the churches stayed quiet where they empowered that accommodation.

Many civic leaders looked the other way. Granted, not all of them, but enough that allowed the material power to operate unchecked. The consent held and sometimes it sounded as simple as this. "Well, this is just how things are done here."

Season three of the underview is coming and it's about the faith of northwest Arkansas. We're going to dig deeper to understand where the empathy markers are in our community and how that long arc of power from the origin story to today has shaped how the institutions of our region help enable or prevent belonging and placemaking.

Our institutions have a choice, the same choice they've always had. Resist or accommodate. The prophetic tradition or the comfortable tradition and the absence of resistance. It's not neutrality. It's consent. It's agreement with the way things are.

So here we are. Well, what do we do?

I know I can't control what's happening at the national level, but here in the unsettled Ozarks of northwest Arkansas where I live, my home, this is the kind of work that we can be committed to.

I will admit, I didn't go to any of the protests that were held here locally last weekend. I know so many did, and as a community, our voice matters. It needs to be heard. But for me in this moment, caught between anger and not being sure of what to do. Sometimes it feels like I'm yelling into the wind. And I would assume that I'm not the only one that feels this. Maybe you feel this same way also, but if cultural change indeed comes before political change, then the work of culture is work that really matters. The slow work. The patient work shifting what seems normal through conversations and stories and relationships that expand our capacity to see each other.

We've created institutions to help us do this in the past. Churches, schools, libraries, community centers, our justice systems, those institutions, they follow our lead. They respond to what we require of them, what we tolerate. And what we will hold them accountable to. But this has to be an outflowing of our ability to find common ground and agreement outside of them.

If we get lured towards the extremes, if we lose our capacity for agreement, then the institutions we've created will follow us there. They'll use whatever power they have, which increasingly seems to be a material power, but it doesn't have to be that way. We can rebuild our capacity for consent for civility. We can expand the scope of empathy. We can widen the circle who counts as our neighbor.

In our last interview of season two, Barbara Carr, someone whose family story has born witness to material power across generations. She said to me, she said, "there's no such thing as wholeness. There's always a piece missing."

I've wrestled with that statement for a long time now. In those words, there is the admission that this work is not finished, that we may not be able to achieve the wholeness we want in the time that we want it. However, in our season two interviews with Melissa Horner and Quapaw Nation elders, Barbara Kaiser Collier, and Betty Gaedtke, the first people of this land, they had begun to teach us what this deep relational work looks like.

We have the ability and the permission to pursue it relentlessly, and maybe just maybe it's there that this generational work of wholeness lives and thrives.

When we stop shouting louder and begin listening deeper. When we move away from the extremes toward one another, we decrease the need for material power by building the other kind. The power that comes from understanding it is the slow work of expanding who we see as us, and that, that is the strongest form of power, a power that endures, that's the path forward, together. Not because it's easy, but because the alternative is force. And force is what happens when we've given up on each other and I don't believe I'm ready to give up, and I don't believe you are either.

This is the underview, an exploration in the shaping of our place.

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