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
Waste To Energy
by Claire Arkin
February 28, 2019
This interview with Claire Arkin, Communications Coordinator for GAIA, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
GAIA is a worldwide alliance of more than 800 grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, and individuals in over 90 countries whose ultimate vision is a just, toxic-free world without incineration.
Image via Claire Arkin, GAIA
Can you give us a baseline of the work you’re currently doing?
At the macro level view, the United States has 76 aging incinerators across the country that have been around since the '80's and '90's. They're on their last legs. A lot of them are notorious for being dirty, for emitting all kinds of toxic pollutants, and in addition they're also at the end of their lifespan. Cities are having to decide in the next couple years whether they're going to renew contracts with these facilities for another 30 years with toxic pollution, or go in a different direction, the direction that communities living close to these incinerators and have been polluted for decades want them to go in.
It's a really interesting fork in the road for a lot of these cities, including places like Detroit, Baltimore, Long Beach. In a lot of these places, folks really want clean, renewable energy, and they want to have a place at the table so that they can help steer the course of the city.
Listening to the community and trying to give the community access to resources to participate in change ties in the equity part of this conversation, for sure.
What's really interesting is that, in a lot of these places, we've seen similar proposals for new incinerators come into these communities andcommunity members have demanded that the land be used for renewable energy instead. There's a really great example of a 2014 trash, tire, and sludge incineration contract in Frederick, Maryland that was defeated. In December of last year the county just broke ground on its first solar project on the same land that was propositioned for an incinerator It's a great story about how these incinerator companies come into these communities and communities fight back and they end up not only sending these incinerator companies away, but then seeing these really incredible renewable energy projects in their wake.
What does that practical transition look like?
First of all is that incinerators are not only polluting, they're also incredibly energy inefficient, and in fact they emit carbon dioxide. They emit greenhouse gases. To consider them as renewable is a lie. And that's why it's so problematic that 23 states in the country legally classify incineration as renewable.
Going back to their energy alternatives, what happens when incinerators are included within the renewable portfolio standards of a state is that then real renewable energy, like solar and wind, have to compete directly with incinerators that emit greenhouse gases in order to gain traction. It's creating an unfair playing field for actionable renewable energy sources. By getting incineration out of states’ RPS standards, more subsidies can go to real green energy sources.
How do you approach people beyond those geographically linked to incinerators?
GAIA has memberships all over the country and the world, and our members vary from incinerator-impacted communities to organizations to individuals like researchers and academics. I think one of the big strengths of the GAIA network is that it holds people who come into this topic from all different ranges of vantage points and skill sets, and we create a space where these different members can interact with each other and share their information, share tactics, so a community that sees an incinerator proposal can counsel another community that's facing a similar proposal. We can provide a community with an expert who can talk about how incinerators emit these particular chemicals and how that affects human health. Our membership is really diverse and I think that that's one of our biggest strengths.
What do incinerator alternatives look like?
We look at it from a waste-reduction perspective, so incinerators lock in status quo waste generation.And so, basically, a city that has a contract with an incinerator has to provide a certain amount of waste for an incinerator to burn. You have to feed the beast as they say. The natural resources that need to be extracted to create the products that are then thrown in the garbage, that are then burned in the incinerator, cumulatively that's a lot of energy extraction through that whole lifecycle of these products that are being burned. And we just can't afford to continue to take natural resources, make products, and then burn these precious natural resources, enabling further extraction.
There are lots of places creating waste reduction programs, like the City of Baltimore is piloting composting programs that will divert food waste from the incinerator. That's a really good example. And there are other efforts that are underway to reduce plastic before it becomes waste in the first place. Berkeley is putting an ordinance in place that would lead to a sharp decrease in disposable packaging from restaurants and eateries.
What we're doing right now is working on a project with three incinerator-impacted communities that I think I mentioned before: Long Beach, Detroit, and Baltimore. All three are facing similar situations. All three cities are faced with these aging incinerators that have been polluting the surrounding communities for decades. In each of the three communities, the incinerator contract is running out in the next few years, and so they have a unique leverage point to convince their cities to go in a different direction. They all have really strong local campaigns that are pushing back against incineration and also seeding zero waste, community-driven solutions.
Whether that be a compost program in Baltimore or a a solar farm in Maryland, communities are building zero waste systems and trying to steer the city away from the cycle of burning into one of regeneration. We're working with these communities to create support systems, so that they have the information that they need to be able to bring to their city leaders on the impact of incinerators, the viability of the alternatives, and we're creating a platform for them to share their experiences and their expertise with one another. We want to tie these stories together in a national narrative that shows that cities are at a turningpoint and incinerators are holding cities back from energy democracy, from a zero waste society, where no community is disposable.
What information is critical for citizens to have in order to feel empowered within their municipalities?
A big part of how GAIA operates is that we go where the energy is and we take cues from the people who are actually doing the work on the ground because they really know best about what they need and they really have the wisdom to steer us in the right direction, and how we can best support. We've been connecting communities fighting incinerators with folks who are seeding zero-waste solutions in their cities, so that when they talk to their city council people they can show, "Hey, here is this piece of legislation that has reduced waste in part of the country that we could try, and here's this composting pilot program that has diverted X number of tons of waste from the incinerator, etc. " We also created a fact sheet that goes over the most egregious ways in which incinerators have polluted surrounding communities across the country that I'd be happy to share with you.
We're also looking into things like incinerator ash, so the material burned in the facility had this really toxic ash or sludge which has been landfilled, and that ash can contain a whole bunch of pollutants like mercury and other heavy metals and persistent organic pollutants like dioxins. The list goes on. And so that's a really powerful piece of information that a lot of city council people might not know about incinerators.
Our work is in supporting our members in their campaigns, so I think maybe the best thing to do would be for us to highlight a few really exciting things that are happening that our members are working on around the country because GAIA doesn't have campaigns in the way that Sierra Club, for example, has campaigns. We're decentralized in that we have a wide and diverse membership that's working on all sorts of good things. We're the hub that's connecting people to each other and making sure we're all aligned towards a common goal.