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
Came as a Journalist, Stayed as Friend
by Celeste Fremon
October 15, 2019
Celeste Fremon is an award-winning freelance journalist specializing in gangs, law enforcement, criminal justice and education policy, the founding editor of WitnessLA.com, and author of "G-Dog and the Homeboys."
In the midst of the media's drug war hysteria of the 1990's, Fremon's perspective was divergent. Her integration into a Los Angeles community allowed her to report beyond headlines.
As we focus on the press, this interview with Celeste Fremon reexamines how relationships can change the depth of a story.
This interview was conducted and condensed by frank news and originally published on June 12, 2018.
Can you introduce yourself a bit?
The fall of 1990 was the first time I took the drive that would change my life, which is to go to meet this priest I had heard about that was working with gangs in Boyle Heights, he was the pastor of Dolores Mission, which was the largest parish in Southern California. He was having a lot of luck working with street gangs, and it was at the height of the gang crisis in Los Angeles.
This little mile-square area that was then the Pico-Aliso housing projects had, according to the LAPD, the highest level of gang activity in Los Angeles County, and since Los Angeles was at that time the gang capital of the world, that mile-square area was probably the most intense area for gang activity on the planet. It seemed like a really interesting laboratory to see what this gang thing was about. I talked an editor of mine at the Los Angeles Times Magazine into letting me do a story on an alternative school that this priest, Father Greg Boyle, had started.
I realized very quickly that the story was about the kids he was working with and that the guy and the school was just a tiny part of it. I wrote the story for the Times, but I was so fascinated with the depth of the stories I was seeing with the moms and the dads and the sisters and the homeboys and homegirls and the family interaction and the community interaction and the complexity of it that I sort of never left. I developed an unlikely expertise of LA street gangs.
We were madly passing, in the state of California, legislation that was getting tougher and tougher with sentencing enhancements. What I was seeing was hurting kids. That was the beginning of how I started reporting on criminal justice and juvenile justice because, once I pulled on that thread, all kinds of other topics came down, and I think finding out what you want to do is as mysterious as falling in love.
Had you met me 30 years ago, you wouldn't have said, "As a white chick, former USC song girl, what you should probably be reporting on is Hispanic street gangs." But I felt at home and this is what I'm meant to be doing, and one topic led to the other, and I've reported a lot on law enforcement and prison policy and all kinds of juvenile issues having to do with the justice system, and most of it here in LA.
Long answer to a short question.
Who is most impacted when a member of the family disappears via incarceration?
In the incarceration mania that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, what we failed to take into account — and what I saw up close because the more I reported in these communities and became friends with moms and sisters, are all of the collateral effects. I came a journalist, and stayed as a mom and auntie and friend.
Right now, of the 2.3 million people in prison in the United States, 52 percent of the state inmates and 63 percent of federal inmates are the parents of minor children. To put it another way, according to the Bureau of Justice, 2.3 percent of the US population under 18 have a parent or parents in prison. In addition to all of the shame and stigma that occurs with kids, it has such a profound effect when a family member is removed.
A guy who might have been low level, selling drugs — that was only part of who he was. He was also the guy who babysat for his sister who was struggling or was there for his mom or had all kinds of other functions in the community and in the family. You see all these people disappear from the community and it had a crippling effect, not just on families, but on the communities themselves, and watching that close up, anecdotally, you could just see the damage that was being done.
I remember I talked to Father Greg where I'd seen most of the people in the community where I was reporting were suffering from a high degree of what appeared to be PTSD. Now, we talk about it as early childhood trauma. People have been rigorously studying it, but at the time, all of these effects of being in a war zone and also having seen family members vanish into prison, the trauma led... There was a study done at Stanford where they went into some of the most intense Los Angeles neighborhoods and tested a bunch of the middle school kids and found that they had a high degree of PTSD — as severe or greater than service people returning at that time from Iraq and Afghanistan.
I even saw symptoms blossoming in me because I'd been in situations where I got shot at accidentally. They weren't aiming at me, but I was in the line of fire. More importantly, I saw kids I got to know be killed and went to a lot of funerals. For most of the people in these communities, it seems like everybody's been through that, and the trauma is very deep from being around a lot of violence and also having family members removed into the prison system. It's only now that we're starting to address that stuff and see the harm that's being done.
How does this adolescent trauma stay with people as they become adults? Are they being equipped with any tools to deal with it?
We're starting to see a little bit of it, but it's largely absent. A high majority of the kids that wind up in our juvenile system are suffering from a high degree of trauma. That affects their attention span. It affects their health. PTSD or early childhood trauma can mimic ADHD.
If nobody acknowledges that, it can have long-term health effects. If it starts to be acknowledged, there's stuff you can do. There's a lot of good work being done finally. We're acknowledging that these things are going on and that kids having a brush with any one of our governmental systems and our county systems, whether it's foster care or the juvenile justice system, are by definition coming in there with a high degree of trauma. If we don't admit that and address it, we're going to have problems and we're not going to be helping these kids.
Looking at LA county probation, which is the largest juvenile probation system in the country, they're trying to train staff in trauma. This is like a day-long training. That's not enough.
This is an agency where it's being talked about and the supervisors are all on board. The probation commission is all on board, and it's hysterical trying to get this done.
Thinking of you last night, I was talking to my friend about a then-young man I met, during the early-to-mid-'90s when I was reporting in Pico Aliso in Boyle Heights. He's not a young man anymore. He's been in prison for 17 years. He just got out and he called me because he remembered I'd been sort of an auntie way back when and felt I was a person he could trust and could talk to.
Turns out he spent 10 years in solitary confinement absolutely for no reason, under completely torturous circumstances. For so many years, we thought this would never change, and now in the state of California, we're starting to understand that the use of solitary really, no kidding, is torture, and that we do great damage.
At least it's actually changing. For so many years, it was very, very difficult to get public policy to change. But it's changing now.
How has gang culture shifted since the 90s in Los Angeles?
The gang culture is very different. Still a high percentage of homicides in Los Angeles according to Chief Charlie Beck. They are still gang-related, but our homicides are way down and the gang culture is very different. There are so many other ways people are looking to do rehabilitation, and it's not gang-centered. It's re-entry centered. The gang problem is still a problem, but there are a lot more problems.
So many of the communities, and the moms, and the fathers, and the men are feeling that they are the solutions to their community problems, and they're feeling, to use that horrible word, empowered to start organizations and programs to fix their own communities.
There are a lot of remarkable people who are doing work that come out of the communities themselves, rather than people coming in from the outside to be the helping entities.
The Youth Justice Coalition, they've got policymakers scared to death because you don't want to get in their way. They're relentless, thank heaven, and they're kids who have seen that they can help change policy. When I first began reporting, there were groups of mothers that had found their voices, but that's expanded many, many, many times over. That's a big cultural change.
Are you optimistic about what this next generation is facing? Do you think this generation coming up will see less incarceration and less violence?
I think that's the direction everything is turning, and oddly enough, there seemed to be a breakthrough around 2007, 2008.
I don't think that made all the difference, but the rest of the populous went, "Oh. Maybe we need to cut back on some of this nonsense."
But, yes, I'm much more optimistic because there's real reform coming out of the communities, and policymakers are listening and a lot of them are doing their own part to lead the charge. I'm much more optimistic when I watch kids like those at the Youth Justice Coalition. I was at a meeting recently, and one of the people on this board was a young woman from YJC, and she was just formidable. I don't know what her background was, but most of their kids have come out of a very at-risk situation and many of them have been locked up themselves.
They're becoming activists and organizers, and their blooming is really an inspiring thing to watch. There's still a lot of work to be done. I'm still amazed that so many people don't feel an urgency to make changes, particularly when it comes to the county's kids who wind up brushing up against these systems.
I think it's a very interesting generation.
Because I've followed the same people for such a long period of time, often since they were teenagers to people in their 40s, I see some of the people I knew and cared about get killed or get locked up for a very long time, but I've seen so many who, according to the cultural views of that time, people wanted to cross off. They were wonderful kids who were struggling with some really incredible burdens and were up to no good and were very, very at risk and very involved with gangs.
Now they're good moms and good dads and responsible working people. They were able to redirect the arc of their lives toward a very positive future with tremendous burdens affecting them while they did it. They're the best of victory stories. I don't know how I would have done with the kind of childhood and adolescence that they had, that were not of their choosing.
It's been both humbling and joy-bringing to have the privilege of knowing people over time who have really gone through the steps of trauma and have come out the other side to something really good and healthy. They're great miracle stories.
What do you feel most urgent about?
Any of the things affecting kids is really urgent. When I hear from policymakers and people in some of these big agencies that affect kids say,
That's how I feel. We have to feel that urgent. All of these kids are ours. We belong to each other. Are we willing to sacrifice a generation of kids in certain communities? Is that okay with us? If it's not, then we need to move heaven and earth to get to them. It's that urgent. It makes me nuts.
Somebody who worked for one of the supervisors a couple of years ago said, "It sounds like you're really upset about this."
I said, "Yeah." She said, "Well, yeah, but juvenile probation has always been that way. Why are you so upset?" I went, "They're children!" We can't ever be complacent. Most anybody I know, if they met the kids being adversely affected by the policies we have, if they just met personal kids and got to know them, they would be absolutely aghast.