Missouri voters sent a message. Will their leaders listen?

In early August, Missouri voters decisively rejected two efforts to rewrite some of the basic rules of state government.

Although Republicans hold supermajorities in the Senate (24-10) and House (111-52), Amendment 4 would have required citizen-led constitutional amendments to win both statewide and in all eight congressional districts.

Voters also rejected Amendment 5, which would have required lawmakers to phase out the individual income tax as revenues grew and allowed them to expand sales taxes to replace some of the lost revenue. Critics argued the shift would fall more heavily on lower- and middle-income Missourians. Amendment 4 lost 80% to 20%; Amendment 5 lost 83% to 17%.

A month later, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Legislature’s 2025 congressional redistricting plan was subject to a referendum and that Secretary of State Denny Hoskins could not block the public vote.

Such clear messages have done little to settle the underlying political fights. Rep. Alex Riley, R-Springfield, concluded after the August elections that Republicans needed to “go back to the drawing board a little bit.” This is like Napoleon Bonaparte interpreting his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812 as a minor setback.

Many of us who have left Missouri for work remain Missourians at heart. I grew up in St. Louis, but also lived in Kansas City and Columbia and, as a young journalist, in Perryville, giving me a good sampling of the state’s citizenry. I have lived on the East Coast, in the South and now on the West Coast, and a standout feature of most of the Missourians I have known is authenticity. This allowed them to engage others despite significant differences, and to do so with a decency and even friendliness that made room for the compromise needed for community-based problem solving and a true representative democracy.

Over the past 20 years, unfortunately, like many native Missourians who now live outside the state, I grew reticent to share my roots because my home state became increasingly associated with America’s culture wars. It became fertile ground for conflict entrepreneurs, people skilled at inflaming and exploiting natural divisions for personal fame and profit, and “rage entrepreneurs,” experts at bending collective frustration and resentment toward their own ambitions. Such entrepreneurs have made enormous amounts of money and gained unprecedented political and cultural influence by sowing distrust, anger and even hatred.

Instead of “going back to the drawing board a little bit,” Missouri leaders should reconnect themselves with their “Show Me” roots. That unofficial slogan has long been associated with a skeptical, noncredulous streak — a demand for evidence rather than rhetoric. It also reflected a traditionally conservative temperament. But the conservatism I remember in Missouri had little in common with the anger and absolutism that dominate so much of contemporary politics.

It more closely resembled the conservatism described by Russell Kirk in The Conservative Mind. In Kirk’s tradition, a conservative recognizes an enduring moral order that humans must respect if they are to flourish. Such conservatism embraces virtue, tradition and continuity while accepting that change is inevitable. Progress requires prudence, and grand efforts to reshape society according to an elite vision deserve skepticism.

What I most admired about Missouri was its ability to live with the tensions inherent in democracy’s messy process of change. Consider its history. Missouri remained a slave state in the Union during the Civil War, even as a rival Confederate-aligned state government claimed legitimacy. Records document more than 300 escapes from Missouri involving more than 1,500 enslaved people seeking freedom.

The 1857 Dred Scott decision, arising from a Missouri case, became one of the Supreme Court’s most infamous pre-Civil War rulings. In 1948, the Missouri case Shelley v. Kraemer produced a landmark Supreme Court decision barring state courts from enforcing racially restrictive housing covenants. From 1904 through 2004, Missouri voted for the winning presidential candidate in 25 of 26 elections. It took the nation’s pulse and mirrored the American people’s conflicted growth into the country’s founding principles.

I once witnessed a remarkable example of Missouri’s Show Me character at a town hall with U.S. Sens. Thomas Eagleton and John Danforth. In the 1980s, I was a chaperone for a group of students from north St. Louis who journeyed to Washington, D.C., to experience the democratic process. Both senators, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, addressed hundreds of Missourians for hours on many contentious issues.

Partisan passions were intense. But Eagleton and Danforth modeled passionate disagreement while also demonstrating decency, mutual respect, empathy, a search for common ground and, most importantly, an insistence on informed argumentation.

They offered a master class in the values implied by Missouri’s unofficial “Show Me” slogan, not to mention its official motto: “The welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.”

If Missouri reclaims this tradition, perhaps more Missourians — including those of us who now live elsewhere — will once again recognize the state we remember.

This article was originally published by Missouri Independent and is republished by MetroSTL under a Creative Commons license. The reporting is the outlet’s; please support them.