2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
This interview with Dan Hopkins, Professor in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
What were the original assumptions in the Constitution about state-level loyalty versus national government loyalty?
It's a good question. The Constitution is now far enough back in our collective memories that I think it's really valuable to start by having some sense of what the U.S. was like at the time. There were some scholars who argued that the Constitution is well understood as a peace treaty between sovereign states about how they were going to govern their affairs.
In 1776 and even in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted, the U.S. was a collection of 13 quite different colonies. It took the Georgia delegation six weeks to travel to Philadelphia in order to participate in the Constitutional Convention. Different colonies had very different economies and different religious heritages. This was a quite diverse country and, thus, the Constitution was designed to protect substantial levels of state-level autonomy. I think it is really important to recognize that at the time, many of the people thought of themselves as Americans, but also to a certain extent, as New Yorkers or Virginians or Pennsylvanians.
When do you start to see a shift towards politics in the U.S. becoming more nationalized?
To some degree, it's an ongoing process that has unfolded in fits and starts over our 200-plus year history. I do think that the Civil War is a critical turning point. In the run-up to the Civil War, you see many more implications of state-level identities. I'm a Georgian, I'm a Virginian. And obviously, the Civil War pitted state against state.
It's generally been the case that the Republican party has been more likely to invoke federalism. Of course, the exemplary issue is the issue of civil rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Even in more recent times, the Republican party has advocated for there being less of a role in the federal government asserting itself to protect the rights of African-Americans, especially, but not only in the South. I think it's fair to say that if you've heard a state rights argument in the last 50 years, it's more likely to be coming from the Republican party.
There's also an element in which as power shifts, we see changes. When the Republicans control the federal office, sometimes it's Democrats who say, "Hey, it's important to let California write its own laws with respect to clean energy or car emissions standards." At the same time, the extent to which we see Republican states moving to block sanctuary cities, for instance, is surprising.
If you're a principled federalist, then presumably cities shouldn't be punished for diverging.
In general, I see very few principled federalists in American politics. I think that all too often in contemporary American politics, federalism is just the clothing we use to dress up certain arguments instead of being a principled approach to a range of policy problems.
What factors contribute to a nationalized political landscape?
I actually think there's a relationship between the transformation of campaign finance, the transformation of voting, and the transformation of what's getting covered in our newspapers. There's a unifying element to all of this.
Let's look at campaign finance first. In many of the most competitive 2020 Senate races, large majorities of money came from out-of-state donations. What does that do to the candidates, and how does that affect the way constituents perceive elections?
I think that the nationalization of the campaign finance structure is an example of our nationalized set of divisions. What we're trying to do is refract these highly nationalized divisions through our federalist system. And the result often distorts representation in critical ways. One of the key facts about campaign finance has been that as late as 1992, two-thirds of all donations to federal candidates, to members of Congress, were coming from within the state that they represent. 20 years later in 2012, only one-third of all dollars were coming from the states that people represented.
The danger is that the representatives and senators increasingly have one constituency where they get their votes, but a separate constituency from where they get their money.
That is not how our system was designed to work. It was not designed for members of Congress to spend four hours a day raising money from people who are not their constituents.
And simultaneously, there has been a collapse of local media. I wonder how the decline of local news plays into this landscape?
When the internet first became a sizable presence, there was a hope that it might actually lead to a proliferation of local news. With the internet there are very, very low production costs, so, theoretically, I could put up a newsletter about my neighborhood. But in fact, as you said, the rise of the internet and the rise of cable television led to this dramatic concentration of our attention on a very, very small number of nationalized news sources. Partly that's because the news media would target us based on where we lived. The Philadelphia Inquirer targeted a set of people who wanted to know about life in and around Philadelphia.
But more recently we instead see that the business model for many media companies is to compete based on who voters are and who readers are and who consumers are, rather than where they live.
Rather than providing me with information specific to Philadelphia, they will identify me as someone who likes the National Football League or cares about politics.
That has led to the fragmentation of our media environment. One of the real losers in this has been people's attention to state and local politics. State and local politics have never been on the top of people's priority lists. It used to be that if I were reading the Philadelphia Inquirer, as a by-product of learning what the Eagle's score was, I also learn a little bit about who my mayor was or who my governor was. And nowadays, since I can go right to ESPN or I can go right to Fox News, I can skip over all that state and local information.
In a world where state and local politicians want to be well-known, they're much more likely to attach themselves to a lightning rod federal issue than they are to actually dive into the challenging, complex issues that face their local community.
Which really allows issues to be manipulated. When we focused on immigration, something I found interesting was how much immigration was used as a campaign tool in Ohio or Maine. It’s easy to make a border terrifying when you don’t live near one. Do you feel like campaigning has changed based on the ability to take issues that don't have anything to do with your constituents, but are made to look like they have everything to do with constituents?
Yeah, absolutely. One of the real challenges with a nationalized political environment is that it encourages attention to issues that are evocative and emotionally charged and often have to do with specific groups of people, but ultimately do not have clear policy effects. I think one prominent example of this is not long after President Trump was elected he attacked football players who refused to stand for the National Anthem. I think it's a very instructive case because he wasn't proposing any policy. This was purely about symbols.
I worry that in the nationalized political environment, it's very hard to put together a political coalition that speaks to auto workers and nurses in the suburbs of Detroit, and retirees in Maricopa County. This is a very diverse country. One of the easier ways to knit together a political coalition is to reach for these divisive, identity-oriented issues, even if that's not actually what's going to motivate the policies that you're proposing.
I do think that there's been a real connection between the way in which our politics has nationalized and the way in which our politics has become more identity oriented.
It's these kinds of identity charged issues that can have an intuitive meaning to people in places from Montana to North Carolina.
Has your work clarified your opinion about how national politics should work? What do you advocate for moving forward in terms of policy and campaigning?
I certainly think that voters do better when they have the information that they need, and I think that we are missing an opportunity to really use our federalist system, because there are so many different kinds of issues that face the different communities in our country.
If we are trying to force all of those issues onto a single divide between Democrats and Republicans, we're going to miss a lot of critical issues.
I think some of the disaffection with contemporary politics stems from the fact that many of us deal with problems in our day-to-day lives that are not represented by the Republican-Democrat divide.
I do want to be wary of nostalgia — or suggesting that some earlier period of history was markedly better. Yes. I worry a lot that today's voters just don't know much about state and local politics, but state and local politics wasn't always vibrant and democratic in previous generations, right? As a social scientist, I think part of my job is to lay out trends. I do think that nationalization is something that we should forecast as being a major part of our politics moving forward.
I also think that there are some policy changes on the edges that I would advocate for that I think would help reinforce the connections between places and voters, and to make better use of our current federalist system. For instance, I think campaign finance matching, so that every dollar you get locally is amplified, is a great idea. I think that could encourage politicians to lay down roots in the specific communities they represent and to spend less time trying to raise money from Manhattan or Dallas.
I think we should also do everything in our regulatory capacity to help promote, protect, and foster high-quality, non-partisan coverage of states and localities.
As a country that is hemorrhaging reporters who cover states and localities I do think that given how many important decisions are made at the state and local level, as a society, we have a real stake in the quality of local news media. There are fewer statehouse reporters, there are fewer city hall reporters, and there are fewer people who are tracking state and local politics to hold our politicians accountable. I think that has been underappreciated, and one of the real dangers in contemporary American democracy.
interviews
We Saw The Limits
by Dr. Sandro Galea
April 2, 2020
This interview with Dr. Sandro Galea, a professor and Dean of Boston University School of Public Health, was conducted and condensed by frank news. Follow him on Twitter: @sandrogalea.
We spoke with a doctor [Dr. Michael Brumage] earlier this week working in West Virginia – he described what was happening now as evidence of a societal failing and undervaluing of public health.
I couldn’t agree more.
When we say public health, what do we mean?
I think we mean two things here. I think we mean the functional, operational mechanics of the public health infrastructure. By that I mean how city, state, and federal agencies work and interact together – and have suffered from decades of underinvestment.
The second part of it is public health is about health, and the health of the world around us. It's about your health and how that might help our health collectively. And it's about creating a world that generates health to build a world where we have safe housing, good schools, clean air, drinkable water, livable wages, fair economies, gender equity. These are all forces that ultimately drive health. And we have deprioritized these forces because we have focused our health thinking on a very individualized biomedical approach. This failure shows our disengagement and disinvestment from public health at both these levels, both the more mechanical core functions of public health, and the creating a healthier world aspect of public health.
Right. We need to look beyond healthcare and healthcare institutions.
Exactly.
You mentioned the coordination between hospitals, state, local, and national. How is responsibility managed and tasked both in and out of crisis? How do you help those in charge at every level?
Collectively, we need to keep reinforcing the messages of public health. Public health should be about all of us paying close attention to the foundations that generate health.
I think the way to do that is by being clear about the message. This is not a one off pandemic. There will be other pandemics. The only thing we don't know is when and where, but there will be others. There have been others in the past, and there will be others in the future. If this is not a wake up call for us to create a healthier world, I'm not sure what it is.
What do we know for sure we need to do to take care of the most vulnerable populations?
There's a lot to do for the care of a lot of our most vulnerable populations. We need to make sure we are paying attention to the homeless, to the low income populations, those who have unreliable sources of income, those who are in prison, and our immigrant population. And each population requires different solutions. The health equity approach means not doing the same thing for everybody, but actually paying particular attention to what needs to be done for those who are most vulnerable.
Right. This virus has made it exceedingly clear that we are only as healthy as our least healthy populations or people.
Exactly. I think that this teaches us that there is no such thing as health for one, without health for all. Health ultimately is a public good, whether we like it or not. Seeing health as a private commodity, as something that you can buy and sell, fails. Because what you can buy is healthcare, and healthcare can only help us if we're already sick. We need to move to a health system, not the sick care system. To do that, we need to invest in the infrastructure that builds health.
Do you think that the stimulus bill that was just passed does what it needs to do?
I think it's a good first step. It has provisions for individuals, for small businesses to keep people employed, and for unemployment insurance. A lot of these provisions will depend on how they're implemented. However, the stimulus bill doesn't at all affect those who are living on the margins. For example, the unemployment insurance does not affect those who do not file tax returns. Twenty percent of Americans don't file tax returns. It doesn’t do anything for you if you're an immigrant living in this country and you're undocumented. I understand why that is the case from a political perspective, but we should be clear that this is a first step. It’s a good first step from where we need to be, but it’s a first step.
I mean, 3.3 million people filed for unemployment yesterday. That was an extraordinary order of magnitude, higher than the highest at the peak of unemployment during The Great Recession. This shows that the people who are losing their jobs are low income people who already had no savings. These are people who were already living on the margins, and these will be the people who are going to be affected hardest by this.
I read something you wrote recently that addressed the mental health component of all of this. You wrote, “first it's important to disseminate accurate up to date information on COVID19 to counter the misinformation that can lead to undue fear.” What pieces of information right now are critical? Beyond what I feel is necessary, I’m also consuming a lot of information that might not be. When is it enough?
I think it's important to try to keep yourself informed, but I also think there's been a lot of information, much of it inaccurate.
People need to be sure they are listening to sources they trust, and sources that are reliable. It is up to the individual in some respects to identify sources that they consider to be reliable. But I would encourage people to, as much as possible, not filter through information, to go to sources whose biases they understand, and who they think are reliable and who are trying to help educate the public through a combination of science and reason, with a very clear moral purpose to generate health for all.
Do you have recommendations on an individual level for mitigating the difficult mental health components that come with this?
Yes, absolutely. I think that, number one, people need to stay connected in this time of physically and socially distancing as much as possible. People need to maintain a community of their friends, their loved ones, and their workplaces. Number two, people need to be educated and realize that symptoms of depression and anxiety are common at a time like this. We need to be educated and aware of the challenges that those symptoms can pose. Number three, people need to be able to go to a health provider to get help if their symptoms start to impair their ability to get on with their life. Number four, I think people need to maintain healthy routines. People need to continue to exercise, to continue to maintain daily routines.
You spend your life in public health, do you see a way out of this? I think a lot of the anxiety is that it's all indefinite.
I mean, by the grace of God we will emerge from this and we will survive. I think that the key question is how we deal with the long term consequences of this. The long term consequences are going to be very much consequences of the economic slowdown and the people who are affected by that. Number two, how do we make sure that when the next pandemic hits, and it's good to remember that there will be a next pandemic, right? There will be. The question will be have we learned our lesson and built a world that's better able to handle a crisis.
I would go back to these two pillars that spoke about at the beginning of this interview. One is the, the actual public health mechanics of dealing with the pandmeic. And number two is creating a world that is resilient that has the pieces in place so that we are healthier. Those are the questions.
Right. And you're hopeful?
I prefer optimism. I think optimism is a form of resistance in the face of dark times. So yes, I am optimistic.