What's the Kentucky Party for?
by Anna Keller, editor
Join the Kentucky Party's 2025 Statewide Convention, this Saturday, May 31, from 9:30 AM to 4 PM at First Christian Church in Berea.
What's the Kentucky Party for?
In 2024 when the Kentucky Party started, there was a statewide movement against arming and providing diplomatic cover for Israel. Our movement in Kentucky was part of a national and international movement. The Kentucky Party offered a path to political power for the movement's moral and practical concerns.
Now, as Israel's US-backed genocide reaches its most brutal point, public participation in the movement's in decline. From Kentucky to strongholds like Chicago, movement groups have gone quiet, numbers dwindled.
The Kentucky Party steadfastly remains for Kentucky, against war and corruption. It continues to offer a path to power. Its base of support remains Kentuckians learning how to work with others to understand and change the political causes of our hardships and errors. As the mass movement it came from wanes, the Kentucky Party inherits the task of widening public civic understanding and political participation.
Electoral politics is poisoned by big money and by lack of civic literacy. The big parties run candidates for public offices most people don't understand. Candidates and officials represent murky donor networks. At best, the parties get out the vote, at worst they fearmonger and teach contempt and smug superiority. On the campaign trail and in office, elected officials generally have little to no contact with constituents.
Popular participation in politics is twisted into a mostly passive spectator sport. Cheering, booing, arguing about stats, feeling outraged or terrified, resenting and casting blame, even voting often has about as much effect on public policy and the distribution of public resources as if politics were college basketball. As a result, Kentuckians, like Americans more broadly, have a fatalistic or naive understanding of how politics work.
People with a fatalistic or magical understanding of politics blame no one or everyone for how things are. They endure poor health, short staffing, debt, high prices, lack of work, anxiety, and destruction of their homes by disasters as facts of life they cannot change. They ignore elected officials or see them as saviors and devils, but not as people with durable bases of support. Fatalistic people are exploited, but dependent on those with authority and power. They're afraid to run for office, afraid they'll be harmed or dirtied, afraid they're inferior, unable to master the skills and ideas of people they see as better than themselves. At best, they share some skills or resources in small groups to help them endure what they can't imagine changing.
People with a naive or incomplete understanding of politics don't passively accept hardships. They adapt to do the best for themselves they can while accepting the values, rules, and social order imposed by those with authority or power over them. They tend to look down on their own people's customs and beliefs. They blame fellow Kentuckians' hardship on ignorance or laziness. They may vote or participate in their county's Democratic Party or Republican Party chapter. They may campaign for a candidate or even run for office, but don't critically examine or attempt to change the political order that produces the serious ills of both the rich and the rest of us.
The conformism of the fatalist who asks, "what's the point?" and the contempt of the reformer who cries that their neighbors are hopeless fascists, idiots, pedophiles, or cultural marxists keep the political class narrow as war, corruption, and the hardships of most people grow.
The Kentucky Party formed from Shauna Rudd's strong run against KY 6th District US House member Andy Barr and Berea for Palestine's extended confrontation with US Senator Mitch McConnell at his last Fancy Farm. Those two public officials beggared our Commonwealth to arm Israel and Ukraine from companies like Lockheed Martin. The "defense" companies extort criminal profit from public spending, enrich their executives and shareholders, and fund corrupt politicians.
The Kentucky Party will be boycotted and ignored by candidates with big-money donor interests in 2026. Instead, it will be a laboratory for Kentuckians outside narrow political dynasties to learn how politics work. Some offices, especially local, non-partisan offices, are just as open to a Kentuckian as to a Democrat or a Republican. The Kentucky Party's an opportunity to learn what those offices do, and accumulate the support to do better.
Statewide or federal offices are tougher to win, but the Kentucky Party will get candidates on the ballot so they can take outsider, populist runs strong enough to force big-party candidates to say the quiet part out loud and back down from unpopular positions, or lose.
Along the way, Kentuckians and Kentucky Party candidates will keep building skills, understanding, and confidence. Through the Kentucky Party, people will continue to learn to debate and clarify their positions, raise money, analyze and propose policy, determine where powers and responsibilities lie, prioritize concerns and determine how widely-shared they are, and take power and use it wisely for the people of Kentucky.
The Kentucky Party's strategy may be shifting, but its positions have not changed. After Fancy Farm last summer, US House member Barr accused Kentucky Party members of being Hamas supporters. They responded that unlike him, they support no foreign governments. The Kentucky Party's for Kentucky.
This article, like all original content in The Kentuckian, is released into the public domain. The Kentuckian is an independent publication. It doesn't represent the opinion of the Kentucky Party or any of its committees.