interviews
The Nationalization of U.S. Elections
by Dan Hopkins
December 31, 2020
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
An Interview with Dr. Patricia Parker
by Dr. Patricia Parker
September 27, 2018
This interview with Dr. Patricia Parker, Chair at the Department of Communication, Associate Professor of Organizational Communication Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, and founder of the Ella Baker Women's Center, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
frank: Can you give us a bit of background on yourself. How you ended up where you are now?
Dr. Parker: There are many entry points to that story, but the one I think is most relevant to the work I'm doing now is my family history. I was born in rural Arkansas into a family of 13 children. I'm the youngest of the 13. I was exposed to an older generation that was very much involved in activism. One of my oldest sisters was the first African American students to enter the local liberal arts college that was just a few miles from the segregated town in which my parents and their parents were born and raised.
By the time it was my turn to go to college, that would have been in the late '70's, my sister and seven siblings had forged that path. My oldest sister, Jurlene, and her peers and the civil rights activists at that time had forged that path. That is something that stayed with me. When I went on to get my master's and PhD degrees in communication, I was introduced to some theories including Black feminist theory and other theories about power and anti-racist work.
I was always interested in organizing processes (perhaps because I was literally born into an in-progress organization that was my family!) and that brought me to critical organizational communication as a field of study within the larger discipline of communication. That solidified my interest in thinking about organizing processes and leadership.
At the time I was getting my PhD, there was a focus in the literature on women in leadership and it was very clear that the women they were talking about were particular women—White, middle class women. My dissertation research was focused on African American women executives who had made it to the top.
I did a study with 15 women across the country who were representative of the women who had made it to the top ranks including the women in the President's Cabinet. They connected their own success, as I did, with the communities they were born into and the influence of the Civil Rights movement and the role models there. That influenced the book that I wrote about African American women executives and thinking about re-envisioning organizational leadership from the perspectives of African American women.
It was a bold thesis, but my thinking was influenced by people like Peter Senge at MIT, and others who were thinking about organizing as a process that takes complexity into account. One argument was that leaders who are able to lead complex systems themselves need to to have the capacity to “see” complexity; they need to have engaged with complexity as a frame of reference.
That set me on this course of thinking about leaders and leadership and social justice activism as intersecting with that process.
Do you feel that the personal is political?
Dr. Parker: Absolutely. That is a foundation of feminism in general, but in particular after I finished my first book and I had done that historical study of thinking about the traditions of Black women's activism throughout history, I was thinking about precisely what you're asking. How are young women - how are contemporary girls able to make those connections in terms of looking at their personal context and being able to connect that to the larger structural conditions that might be shaping their lives. That's what my current work is and I think that it's absolutely crucial.
Doing that historical analysis was when I got introduced to Ella Baker, the human rights and civil rights activist whose work spanned 50 years starting in the 1930's. She's most well-known for being the advisor and really the catalyst that made SNCC happen, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee that's iconic from the '60's in terms of youth activism.
That is, we need to find ways to connect with the knowledge of people who are already living with and through particular articulations of oppressive conditions. Interventions become possible where there is an analysis of how capitalism and racism, and white supremacy, and so forth, are intersecting through people's bodies, in their everyday lives. Ms. Baker said, "If you give people light they will find a way." She also said that, "Strong people don't need strong leaders." Her meaning there was, people are already living through the impacts of capitalism and some of these other oppressions and that as experts, people who are doing scholar activism who have a particular analysis, our job is to work alongside the people who are already fighting it because they have a particular angle or vision. They have a particular knowledge that can be brought to bear in terms of social change initiatives.
My work with girls of color right now is founded on Ms. Baker's principles of what I call “catalytic leadership,” the topic of my next book due out in 2020 by University of California Press. Her approach is often referred to as group-centered leadership that is highly participative, but it is also grounded in a tenacious belief in community power. In Ms. Baker’s philosophy, organizing for social justice means catalyzing community power. My current work is founded on the staunch belief that girls are in the know. They know what's happening in their schools. They see the disparities in school suspensions and access to opportunities. They know what's happening in their communities because they're living it. Through the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism, my students and I work with girls and their allies in communities to create space for girls to see their own power and to do some of the amazing things that they're already doing, but also support them with resources and mentoring.
The current cohort of leaders developed a project to focus on intergenerational storytelling. They planned and organized a “Girl Power Summit.” They decided that they wanted to have an all- women space for their mothers, their aunts, their grandmothers, their sisters, anybody who's interested in girl power, to come together to talk about their expereinces. To prepare for the summit, we did some of our critical pedagogy work, and the girls worked with arts activist Kayhan Irani to facilitate the gathering of about 30 girls and women in thinking about and telling our stories. They were amazing. These beautiful women, these grandmothers and aunts who talked about when they were teenagers and young women and going through their careers and some of the things that they faced, and this resonated with the stories that the girls were telling in terms of what they face in their classrooms, and some of the sexism that they face, or not being seen. It was just a really powerful convening of intergenerational storytelling. The girls decided that they wanted to expand on the project, so they are preparing to collect stories from women and girls in their neighborhood to do a more extensive action research project.
The personal does matter and it provides a route toward this kind of contextual understanding. This is actually one of the main themes of the book I'm working on right now — mapping these personal routes toward collective consciousness about social justice activism.
I think it's really astute to recognize that the people who you are trying to help are probably capable of helping themselves given resources — especially if you believe in this idea of power within ones own body and mind.
What do you think the younger generation should be focusing on? How can they take the lessons of somebody like Ella Baker and use them in 2018?
Dr. Parker: You know, it's a great question. It's the question of the day, right, because we have such courageous activism happening right now. The Black Lives Matter movement. I was just in conversation with the southern regional director for Black Lives Matter, a young Black woman. I don't know how many people know the three Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, who created #BlackLivesMatter as a response to anti-Black racism. DeRay McKesson is sort of the face of Black Lives Matter right now, which is another story we can talk about that sort of harkens back to Ms. Baker and Dr. King. By many historical accounts, Ms. Baker was just as influential on the Civil Rights movement as Dr. King. She worked more with the grassroots, he more so at the grass tops. That's an oversimplification and I recognize the great work that Dr. King did, but it sort of gets to this idea of the context of social movements and the erasure of Black women’s labor. There are some things that don't seem to change.
Have you heard of misogynoir?
No.
Dr. Parker: When Leslie Jones, the wonderful comedienne from Saturday Night Live, was viciously attacked on social media in 2016 a lot of celebrities came out to support her and among them was Katy Perry, who used the term misogynoir to explain what was happening. It's misogyny but against black women's bodies in particular. The woman who originally coined the term back in 2008, Moya Bailey, is a queer Black feminist scholar who wanted to describe the particular form of racialized sexism that Black women experience, especially in online media platforms, but also in everyday life. Katy Perry’s reference sort of took it to this other level of visibility. All that to say, there are some things, like misogynoir, that seem to get reinvented in different contexts across space and time.
Black women figure prominently in keeping that narrative alive because it started in the time of enslavement in terms of having to have this violence against black women's bodies in order to justify chattel slavery.
With the advent of social media, there is more access... tools for people to connect.
I think that there are some foundational activist strategies that are grounded in anti-racist work that has happened, that are always emerging from indigenous communities. I'm thinking about the history of black women's activism. And indigenous women all over the world. These movements all over the world, really I think connect on a certain level to a fundamental strategy which is to have an analysis of structural power.
We have to start with analysis of how power is inserting itself into our everyday lives. For me, that has to do with these different dominating structures of power. But having that analysis, then we have to have the tactics of educating people about how that's happening in their communities.
When a girl starts to wonder, just asking a question, "Why is it in my school, Black kids are being sent to detention more than White kids?" I mean, it's just a simple question. When she is able to do that kind of research and then starts to ask those questions, that's a structural analysis. So having that structural analysis is important. And then it's a matter of asking what is the point of change? I think this is where we get some sort of divergence because I know that in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been so much emphasis on direct action which is bold and courageous and in your face. I'm gonna shut it down, right? How does that strategy work over time in terms of change? It takes such an emotional toll to continue to confront these persistent restructuring of state violence.
On one level this gets to the importance of self care in activist work; but it is also about how are the tactics of direct action fitting in with the larger strategy for change? To me, that's the question that all of us have to engage.
This is where I think we have to come to bear, in terms of trying to determine what are the strategies. Where's the point of change? Is it in these direct action tactics, sort of the social media campaigns and so forth, or is there a larger political strategy? I think it's a complex combination of all of these, starting with a structural analysis and then educating people to empower people to be able to see that analysis and then mobilizing people according to particular strategies, whether it's campaigns, voting, direct action. So that's my take.
How do you sustain engagement and energy over time?
Dr. Parker: Well, that's a great question because it speaks to what I was just talking about in terms of what is the overall strategy. I am very clear about what my intervention is in the general project of social justice and social movements.
I think it's the foundation of our democracy — and I'm telling you that I have never in the ten years that I've been doing this work, I have never encountered a girl who wasn't excited about this project. Who wasn't excited about wow, I have a space where someone is going to see me. Someone is going to listen to what I think and what I think is connected to something bigger in the world. But that's the project. That is so important because so much has happened on a structural level that gives the opposite message.
Nothing against Anthony Robbins, but this is not about finding the giant within. This is about understanding your place in history and in a democracy. It's personal routes toward collective consciousness. I can't repeat that too many times because it is really recognizing how we're connected in this project of social justice and equity.
That to me is how we keep it alive. In that regard, it keeps hope alive. So that's part one. Part two is that it's highly contextual. Part of the project is to reclaim a set of commitments to our democracy. This is where my communication background fuels my work. I understand communication as helping us to really facilitate those conversations about, what are our agreements in this moment, and maybe in this moment in history, but just in terms of thinking about who we are as a country, for example.
As people say, "Let's stay woke." Let's understand what's going on. That's the structural analysis. Then I will fight to stay connected to you in this conversation—especially if we disagree. That's what's in it for me is to know what our commitments are and if I know that you're committed to the same thing that I'm committed to ... and to me those commitments have to do with our values as a democracy. What do we stand for as a free republic? I think we go to that level of commitment. It's also about decolonizing. There are commitments related to dismantling the structures of white supremacy embedded in our institutions, our laws, our policies. So it's a particular kind of commitment. Being tenacious about staying connected with all the people who are in that conversation. People who disagree, who might be radically opposed to each other but find productive ways to keep the conversation going forward.
Do you think there’s a danger now of people feeling like they're participating because it's so easy to like something or share something or post about something? The illusion of activism.
Dr. Parker: Again, I think it has to be highly contextual. With any social action, it's going to be within a particular context. I think people have to be aware of, what is a social media campaign doing in that moment?
You should do the work of making yourself aware of all the complexities that are creating a particular moment. I think education is the key. Having that education about a particular issue. For Ms. Baker, it was always about tilting the power toward the people who are most vulnerable. Not acting unless you are able to get the context from the people who are being impacted by that particular moment.
Her approach to social change was about teaching and learning. So in other words, people should be able to educate themselves and others in terms of how social media might be moving something forward. They should also be teaching and learning about traditional grassroots organizing. There is so much more to learn in terms of actually engaging with people on issues. Being on the ground with people and learning some of the approaches to social movements in terms of doing a direct action but understanding what you're learning about, how that is teaching you to build a particular muscle in social change.