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
Rote Memorization Won't Do
by DeNora Getachew
April 15, 2019
This interview with DeNora Getachew was originally published November 7, 2018 in our Civics issue.
DeNora Getachew is the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen, the flagship local site of a nine year old national nonprofit dedicated to bringing civics education back into the classroom through a new, engaging pedagogy: Action Civics. DeNora, an attorney by training, was a democracy nerd before it was in vogue. She had her civic engagement moment as a young pregnant teen advocating for her ability to remain at her high school instead of transferring to an alternative high school for pregnant teens. But it was not until after she graduated from law school and began working to eliminate the structural barriers to participation that she realized the power of her experience as a young pregnant teen.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news editors.
DeNora: Thanks for being with me today and giving me the opportunity to talk about Generation Citizen. I'm DeNora Getachew the New York City Executive Director of Generation Citizen. We are a 9 year old national non-profit focused on educating and empowering young people to be civically engaged. Our solution is simple and it's common sense, and it's necessary. We partner with schools to implement Action Civics in the classroom in order to give them the knowledge and skills they need for lifelong civic participation in our 21st century democracy.
Why does this not already exist in public schools?
Civics education does exist. It doesn't exist in the way that it once did. If we look back in our nation's history, back in the 1960s, students took as many as three courses before graduating high school relating to civics and democratic participation. And now, we're lucky if students take one class. But it's not about whether or not there's a class in schools, it's about the quality and caliber of that class.
The reality is, School House Rock might've been great for our grandparents, but if you can like and tweet and activate yourself online using social media, memorizing government facts isn't going make you feel like you can make a difference in your community. So it's about having Action Civics, having experiential learning as a way to educate and empower young people. Civics exists, and the majority of states have some class that pertains to civics, so it's about, is it experiential learning, project-based learning, is it student-led work – Action Civics.
When structuring courses for Generation Citizen, aimed at Gen Z, do you take into account their online lives?
It's a delicate balance because we want to both meet the millennials and Generation Z'ers where they are without also tipping the scale.
I want to be clear, both as a leader, but also when we talk to our educational partners, that you have to engage students to be digitally engaged civic learners, but you also have to teach them that systemic change includes the other tools in the toolbox that require us to meet elected officials in person, call them, write letters, engage in petitioning, etc. and that isn't only going happen online. You still need the actual face-to-face engagement in order to fuel long-term systemic change.
What do you think about organizations that focus on civic engagement through celebrity?
I honestly think that participating in democracy is a full-contact sport, so when you're engaged in a full-contact sport you're going need all the tools in the toolbox. I don't want us to over-celebritize civic engagement, so I am glad that everybody from the Taylor Swift's of the world to President Donald Trump are using social media and celebrity to get people to be engaged in a way that we've never experienced, or we haven't experienced, in a long time in our democracy. We still need every day Americans to know that their voice matters and that they too can push for systemic change, and that's the work we're doing. Both in our urban centers like New York, Boston and the Bay Area, but also in rural communities in Texas and Oklahoma.
Why do you think civics has been largely taken out of the classroom?
I say this with all due respect for the STEM/STEAM movement, we can date it back to the 60s, but when we look at the history it was this moment when America was having its Sputnik moment and thinking about how it stayed globally competitive in the STEM sector, and really how do we race to get to the forefront of that. That forced us to de-emphasize, probably not even intentionally, experiential civics learning in the classroom.
Our founders founded this democracy with the goal of having an electorate, a populace, that understood how democracy works and that they were gonna engage in it. And again, I say that to go back to this fundamental notion that I believe that it takes all of us to participate actively in democracy, and that isn't all day, every day, but we all have to engage with it, and not just on election day.
Once we started thinking more about what it meant to be active Americans from a capitalist's perspective, and not as much from a citizenship perspective and a democracy perspective, we lost sight of the priority, both of our public education system but also of democracy at large and its responsibility to make sure that all Americans can participate in democracy.
What tools are most effective to get people to learn this?
We have to meet people where they are, and I think that's the power of Generation Citizen and our work, and our Action Civics curriculum. We are nine years old and we've been doing this work in six states by-and-large over the last nine. We're in Rhode Island, where we were founded on Brown University's campus at a pivotal moment for our American democracy. It was 2008, if we harken back to that moment, America was having a historic election, potentially to elect the first African-American president of the United States.
And our co-founder and CEO, Scott Warren realized at that time when he was a student at Brown University that Americans are standing in line for hours and participating at record levels at the Federal level, and in national elections. Almost very similar to this one where we are now, where we're seeing early voting turnout in Georgia, three times above what it normally is, but that people don't turn out in local elections, that people don't wait in line to vote for their city council member or their mayor or their public advocate, because they don't view it as a critical responsibility or it doesn't impact their lives in the same way.
He had this idea of, how do we get to the root cause of fixing civic participation at the local level. By reinvigorating civics education in the classrooms. He had this idea of piloting this Action Civics approach in the Providence school district, expanded to Massachusetts, down the Northeast corridor here in New York where I have the pleasure of being our New York City Executive Director. We went to the Bay Area where there's also this big urban center, and a big education system that we thought we could influence there.
Then took a pause in our organizational growth, and launched our two new sites in Oklahoma and Texas, and realized in this moment, what is missing, is we are not teaching young people experiential learning as much as we are in the classrooms anymore. With all due respect to the education system, it is by and large driven towards metrics based outcomes – how well do you perform on a standardized test. But not all learners perform well on standardized tests. In fact many young people who drop out of high school, one of the largest reasons they drop out of high school is because of the fact that they don't perform well on standardized tests, and in fact experiential learning resonates better with them.
When we think about the work that we are doing, to reinvigorate civics education and making sure that it's student led, it's project based, it is action oriented, is making sure that we could make it the most exciting subject that's taught in the classrooms again as opposed to the most boring.
By getting young people to build consensus about an issue that is personal and local to them, and getting them to understand that they can be in the drivers seat for how they can affect change in their community, we are activating them to use all the tools in their toolbox to be change-agents, be that now in the short-term in the confines of a classroom, or, and more importantly, in their lives largely.
I want to say unequivocally that we do this work in a nonpartisan way and we do it with the goal of activating young people to be civically engaged long-term. It isn't just about what happens in the classroom, it's about how does that civic knowledge, understanding the branches of government, the School House Rock component if you will, and those civic skills, so if I have a problem in my community, who are the decision makers, what am I asking them to do? Is it legislative, is it policy-making, is it budgetary in nature, is it increasing youth voice in decision making, the skills are what's going help them understand how to use that knowledge and apply it and be motivated and have that sense of agency or disposition long-term.
What are the biggest challenges you face in achieving that goal?
That that's the exact opposite of what's happening in a public school classroom. When you ask teachers, when you talk to them about the importance about civics in the classroom and experiential learning, they're excited about it, they're hungry for it, but no one's educating them, no one's equipping them to teach that in the classroom. In fact, the incentives structure and how we compensate teachers is driven towards that metrics-based, outcome-driven success for students, so if their students are performing better on standardized tests, then they achieve tenure, or they get bonuses, or they get raises. When instead we're not preparing teachers to prepare students to be citizens. Often times the barriers that we face are that educators themselves don't have that sense of civic knowledge or civic skills. And so they're like, how do I teach someone else how to participate in democracy when no one's taught me? The number one question we often get at Generation Citizen is, do you have this for adults? And the reality is, many of us need this.
It's a problem for our democracy. We don't actually understand how it works, understand why it relates to us, then how are we going engage in that full contact sport? The biggest question and the biggest obstacle we face, is educators who don't want to reveal that they themselves don't have that core set of knowledge and skills. We want to equip them to do it, so that they can equip the next generation to do it.
What's been the most surprising thing about working at Generation Citizen?
I don't know if it's surprising as much as it is inspiring, that young people, we don't give them the benefit of the doubt. So part of it is as a society, there are certain things you cannot do until you reach the age of majority. To be that 18 or 21, depending on what it is you're trying to accomplish. But that young people have this insatiable appetite for change and for thinking outside of the box that we don't always give them credit for.
What's powerful to me about this work, is that when you go into a classroom, you have these young people who started the semester skeptical, and they'll be honest. Because they're also so pure, the cynicism hasn't set in yet, they don't understand what they can or cannot achieve. They look at us and they're like how did you get here, who invited Generation Citizen to the classroom? And so they're skeptical and they're like what is this Action Civics thing, why do I care, how is this different from anything else I'm doing?
You're going let me, during class time, call an elected official, or write a piece of legislation, or advocate for something that I need in my community, be it something as simple as a traffic signal at a dangerous intersection, to legislation to allow for updating the school curriculum around how addictive opiates are? You're going to let me do that, in this classroom?
Once you see that spark get lit up for them, to me that's what's inspiring. It's both an obstacle and a source of inspiration for why I do this work. Then you see the power of young people to lead change, and if you look at it from a history-nerd's perspective, that young people are always at the forefront of change, we just don't always give them credit for it because the adults always have the bigger microphone, the bigger voice, the better kind of sophisticated language to talk about what it is. I'm always proud of that, of just seeing that if we let young people lead, if we give them the chance and the opportunity and the tools to do so, they rise to the occasion again and again.
What's one key take-away that you want people to know about civics education that they don't already?
That despite it feeling in vogue now, my phone rings more often, I get more emails inquiring about our work and how to engage with it than I ever did, two years ago when I started here, having left the structural barriers to the participation side of the house, as I fashion myself a democracy nerd for life, civics education was always this luxury item that was gonna be at the bottom of the list. If we fixed all the structural barriers, we'll make elections more accessible by having reforms like early voting, and automatic voter registration and online voter registration, you name it. And if we can have a better campaign finance system so that every day Americans can run for office, then we could re-institute civics.
I got here two years ago, and I'm like, but no we need to re-institute civics now, and forever, because if we don't, if we get rid of all the structural barriers of participation it'll be for naught because no one will understand why it matters. For me, that's the power of Action Civics and that's why we need it now and forever. I don't want to get caught up in this cliché of like, "it's the most important thing we need," or "this is the right moment." We've always needed it, the founders believed that over 240 years ago, I'm sitting here very humbly saying we need it today, and I want all of us to understand why.