2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
Daan Roosegaarde on his practice and Earth's future.
by Daan Roosegaarde
May 15, 2018
This interview with Daan Roosegaarde, the founder of Studio Roosegaarde, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
Studio Roosegaarde is the social design lab of Dutch artist and innovator Daan Roosegaarde. Together with his team of designers and engineers Roosegaarde creates landscapes of the future for a better world. The studio connects people, technology and space to improve daily life in urban environments and spark imagination.
Image via Studio Roosegaarde. Poland.
Thank you for taking the time, I appreciate it.
My pleasure.
I’m curious how you move between planning, performance art, public art, and design.
I'm a hybrid. I remember when I was 16 my parents asked me what I wanted to do. I said, I want to do art, I want to do science, I want to travel, I want to be entrepreneur, I want to make things. Everybody got really confused and a bit worried. For two weeks they had me do interviews and tests with teachers, a psychological person, and other students. The conclusion after two weeks was what I wanted did not exist. I was sad for one day, and the second day was like, I'll just do it myself. That mentality, that kind of curiosity, always remained.
I look outside my window and see traffic jams, air pollution, CO2 levels rising, and don’t understand the world.
It’s definitely about connecting all the different sectors you mentioned.
How do you conceptualize such large scale projects?
It starts with the statement. The global challenges, the rising sea level, the air pollution, the CO2 emissions. They're bad design, that we created as human beings. We can do two things: cry and be sad in a corner, and blame other people. Or, we can say, we created it, let’s engineer, and design our way out of it. A lot of the projects have a practical attitude, as well as a poetic approach. The Earth is our playground. It’s our canvas.
Does permanence mean something to you?
It’s about impact. We’ve done Waterlicht, the blue light show about the rising sea level, in different locations. At the United Nations in New York, or Museumplein Square in Amsterdam. I think people are still talking about it, even though it was only three nights. I don’t see a different value in permanent or temporary. But we definitely do both.
Image via Studio Roosegaarde. United Nations Headquarters, New York City.
Can you tell me about the Smog Free project? Are you looking to expand them?
Image via Studio Roosegaarde. Beijing.
Yeah that’s a project that we initiated in the studio — self commissioned. Fighting for this dream of clean air. And again, correcting reality.
It created a trigger where new smog free solutions are designed. Like the smog free bicycle, or smog free ring. We're also working on designs, not just correcting reality, but doing it right the first time. Like the energy harvesting kites [WINDVOGEL] which generate power through the push and pull of cables via the wind. At 100 kilowatts per hour, that’s enough to supply 200 households green energy. We can generate energy without polluting.
We’re infiltrating and correcting reality, and making proposals of how to do it right in a whole new way. The projects are definitely growing in terms of scale and cities.
How far does the Smog Free Tower reach?
You can clean 30,000 cubic meters per hour. A soccer stadium in a day and a half. The range depends on the type of pollution, wind, humidity, things like that. We know how much cubic air we clean, that’s a solid number. It’s really varied per city.
For example in Krakow, we really made an impact on the park scale. Making parks 27% cleaner than the rest of the city. These kinds of fine particles are 40 times smaller than your hair, they’re nano-particles. They’re really hard to measure. You don’t smell, feel, or taste them, but they’re there, and that’s why they get so deep into your body. We really have to do extensive scientific research to have the validation. We try to in every city.
How long did it take to develop?
Two years to build the first one. And then it really kicked off. The Chinese government got on board. Poland, the Netherlands, and we are developing in Mexico, Columbia, and India. For me, it’s a movement. It’s making clean air parks with the towers, clean air bicycles so you can bike without being polluted. You’ll see a whole new series of smog free solutions in the coming years. Of course, we workshop with universities who are experts in the field to say, hey, what do we need to do to make a whole city smog free? It’s a long term campaign. It’s not just the tower. One tower is never going to fix the problem.
Image via Studio Roosegaarde. Poland.
Are you optimistic about the future of our environment?
[Laughing] No! No, no, no. It’s a bleak world. Somehow we're very creative in finding ways to not adapt and not change. We’re spending 1.9 billion euro every day on war on planet earth. But somehow, we find excuses not to invest in new ideas. Out of mismanagement, or hesitation —
It feels like we’ve run out of time. I don’t think there’s a lack of money or technology in the world. There’s a lack of imagination and curiosity in how we can live a better life. And that’s a bit sad. Because we’ve created the problem, so we should also fix it.
And even worse, it’s not just Earth.
Our latest project, launching in October, is focused on space waste. 29 thousand particals, caused by us. Broken satellites, missiles, etc. If a particle hits an existing sattelite, because of the speed, 17,000 kilometers per second, the sattelite goes down. No more Facebook, no more website, no more banking.
And nobody knows how to fix it, ESA, NASA, Space X — nobody knows.
Then again, I think we have an obligation to persist and to be curious. And to be honest, I don’t know what else I should be doing with this life. I’m a voluntary prisoner of my own ideas in that way. A happy voluntary prisoner.
But the answer is no, to your question. I’m sure you expected a yes, but no. It’s problematic.
Do you find your work engages and incites a curiosity where we’re otherwise neglegent? Because it looks and feels like art.
Absolutley. It’s great to inspire people, but it’s also factual. The Energy Harvesting Kites can produce electricy. The Smog Free Tower creates clean air parks. So it’s inspiring, but it’s also making sure it works. The facts matter. The science matters. The poetic and inspiring part is as important as the pragmatic, make it happen attitude.
That might also be a Dutch thing. We live below sea level here. Without technology and without creative thinking we’d all drown. We’d all die. But somehow we stayed here and created a system of windmills, pumps, canals, and rivers. We could've easily moved to Germany to keep it safe. But we didn’t. We live with nature, we fight with nature.
Do you have scientists on staff?
Yeah. I’m the son of a math teacher. I was raised by scientists. I’m definitley more of the creative. I have a team of designers and engineers and they work on the idea that I have. To go from idea, to prototype, to pilot, to final product or project. On some projects we work with external experts.
With The Smog Free, we work with experts in smog. We have our own core team, Studio Roosegaarde, and then per project you want to work with the best.
Every week I learn a new word. It’s a good life. You’re always an amateur when you start something new. I'm learning every week, and that’s really fun. I’ve done all this stuff, but I’m still learning. It makes it fun for me. These are group processes, but I’m at the beginning and at the end.
Are your parents okay with how this all worked out?
Ha! I’ll tell you a personal story, it’s funny. They’re both teachers. And of course my work is always about art and architecture and design, but it was always a bit abstract for them. They see it’s going well. But a year ago I became a visiting professor at Tongji, in Shanghai. They called me to say, we’re so proud! That’s the world they understand. They come from education. A visiting professor, it’s like the highest goal. It’s just a title, I think I’ve done other things to make them proud. But everyone has their own world and way of appreciating.
They’re not worried anymore.
Congratulations!
Take a closer look at Daan & Studio Roosegaarde's work below.