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
Consequences of Incompetence
by Vishaan Chakrabarti
April 6, 2020
This interview with Vishaan Chakrabarti, the founder of PAU, was conducted and condensed by frank news.
I want to talk about New York specifically, as it’s an epicenter of this crisis. How do you see the city through a planning perspective?
Right now, planning wise, obviously everything is about public health. That obviously necessitates public health expertise, which is not what I really do, so I like to defer to the experts on that.
In terms of how we move forward, I think about how my entire experience was forged through essentially a series of crises. I moved to New York right after the 87 stock market crash and saw the architecture firm where I worked go from 485 employees to 90, and I got to be one of the unlucky 90. And then after 9-11, I watched major leaders say, we're going to have to diffuse all the office space in the city. We don't know how many attacks are coming.
What's really interesting is that after each of these things, there is a move to de-densify. There is a tendency to say, oh, the city's not working, but after a few months we get over that. Just think about the 1918 influenza. What comes right after 1918? The Roaring 20s.* It's New York City's heyday for a decade, before the depression hits.
Will this change a few things? I think a lot of the battles that we've been fighting in urban planning for the last 10 years have become all but irrelevant. New York City is probably not going to see a lot of gentrification concerns over the next couple of years. Real estate demand is going to go way down, and there just won’t be that kind of building. The homeless crisis will likely get worse, and I imagine a need for much more housing. Culturally, maybe we'll stagger some more work hours or people will work remotely more. But, I just don't think that this is the death of office space or the death of cities. I think that everyone's yearning to get back to normal – and that is an immediate sign you're going to see people move back to the way cities were.
Do you think there will be a rejection of density again? As we’ve seen historically, or are we seeing through that rhetoric already?
I’ve seen some writing arguing that this is why sprawl is better, but the total bullshit about that is places like South Korea, Japan and Singapore, and Hong Kong, some of the densest environments in the world, are dealing with this crisis way better than we are.
To me, the thing that's really remarkable is that I have now witnessed, in my own lifetime, twice, New York City having to bear the consequences of a president ignoring their intelligence briefings. There were intelligence briefings that told us 9-11 was going to happen. And we had intelligence on Coronavirus.
Plenty of dense cities are out there proving you can manage this virus and actually defeat it. I am sure there will be a bunch of rhetoric about how we need to de-densify and then we're going to come out of that, and people realize why we've always lived in dense circumstances and that we’ve continued to despite technological advances.
Technology has actually promoted more density, not less. I remember reading an article about how the fax machine was definitely the death of the city. But cities didn't die. Fax machines died. We've had a huge exponential growth and change in technology since 2007. Within the same period, we see more people living in cities than in any other form of human inhabitation. This idea that telecommunications is de-densifying us or providing some incentive to de-densify, doesn’t hold. Even at the level of Tinder and Grindr, what is that about? It's using technology to actually get together.
There's both an economist and technologist mindset that says cities are necessary evils, and if you take the necessity away, people will not live in cities anymore. Which belies the fact that human beings actually like human connectedness and they like to get together. Cities are just constant proof of that. I am very bullish about the future of the city. Nothing about this has shaken my aspirations and hopes for cities.
I do think that perhaps the bigger victim of this crisis is neoliberalism. It's really hard to put up a Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan defense of the current system. The private market and tax cuts are not helping us right now. We don't have a national pandemic office. Our infrastructure is failing us. And I think that's just four decades of neoliberalism coming home to roost.
The jig is up.
Right. The stimulus package is not a neoliberal package, let's put it that way. Where I think it gets interesting is looking at what this means for city planning in the coming years. What I would imagine it means is the need to make huge public investments in, what I call in my book, an infrastructure of opportunity. Meaning not just traditional infrastructure – water, power, waste management, transportation. But expanding it to include things that create social mobility – like housing and culture. Assuming the administration changes in November, I think there's going to be a huge move towards multiple packages that can wake us up out of the neoliberal fever dream. Maybe the way out of this crisis is we have a national high speed rail program. Maybe we have a new national housing policy. Like you just said, things that sounded absolutely nuts during the primaries are going to come to fruition now.
There's something about the ugly underbelly of this country that this exposed. The fact that in New York City, they hesitated so long to close the city school system because basically it acts as a homeless shelter for a lot of kids, is really, really ugly. Things like this were made really, really apparent to the world. We’ve become a Banana Republic.
We spoke to the Dean of Boston University's School of Public Health, he talked about how public health isn’t about just healthcare, but rather, affordable housing, good schools, fair wages, clean water, etc. I wonder if you feel like within this broader definition of public health, there is space for planning to improve?
I think that that larger point is correct. You can't have a healthy society if you don't have housing. That is a really basic thing. I think what's going to be really interesting about what follows out of this moment is the question of whether the power structure of this country is going to recognize this? Lots of people have been talking about different aspects and angles of this issue for years now, but is the power structure going to really realize that like the jig is up?
I wonder if even something of this scope can reach enough people to alter the power structure? Can people see their votes in action and see the difference between what is said and what is done?
I don't know how you feel about it as someone who actually works in the news, but like I feel like this is going to really put ideology to the test. Look at this sudden enormous popularity Andrew Cuomo is enjoying. That is extraordinary, right? This guy was not a popular guy, especially among progressives, and yet so many people are so hungry for core competence. Ideology is proving to be way less important than core competence.
I do think that that's going to take hold for a while because, let's face it, some of the ideological battles that we've been in over the course of the last decade are a consequences of the country that feels like it's at peace, even though it's at war, and is extraordinarily prosperous, even though that prosperity is incredibly uneven. So there's just been this ability to have a lot of noisy dialogue. Let’s face it, the fake news phenomena is not reserved to the right side of the spectrum. I wrote an op-ed about Amazon today, and even if you hate Amazon, what is really clear is that people who considered themselves progressives who are fighting that deal, were churning out a lot of false facts. When it comes to something like this, it cuts all that clutter away and begs the question, ok who can do the job?
It will be interesting to see how long that lasts. The issues that we have with things that feed into the public health infrastructure - mass transit, housing - these things take patience and time. Catherine Bauer wrote the National Housing Act in 1937 and the first public housing project was built two years later. But it doesn’t really take off until after World War II. It takes 20 years for that to actually manifest.
Yeah. I wonder. The other thing that I think about is how information is acquired and dispersed. Will information start flowing upward?
You've got people drinking fish tank cleaner because the president told them to. I do think it'll be really interesting if the epicenter shifts from New York to some of the red states, like, Dallas or Houston where a lot of the people will suddenly see their friends and neighbors on the ground experience something that's diametrically opposite from what the president is saying.
Exactly.
Right. Like will that change the way they think about this? I don't know.
I mean the president's clearly trying to turn this into a blue state and red state thing. He is trying to pin it on the governors and that will influence infrastructure funding and public health funding. But clearly, while this virus might start in big population centers, if it goes unchecked the way it is without a testing regime, it's not going to stay in those population centers. And when the red states start feeling it, what is going to happen?
Right, it still feels really far away to some areas. Is the news manipulating the seriousness or the horror? People can still imagine that might be true.
All the other tropes come out too. If you look at the comments on any of the news articles, you'll see well of course this is happening in New York, there's all these public housing projects and they're dirty. All of these dynamics about race and class that are embedded in people's narratives about a city like New York or a city like San Francisco all come out. What is going to happen when it's Dallas or Houston, and they can't hang on those same tropes?
There has to be this culture of government matters, right? We started this interview discussing urban planning. One of the big challenges of urban planning in this country is that people are very anti-government. And not just on the right.
I am not a public health expert, but there are those who have been warning about a pandemic for 20 years. And they just have to sit there and watch our government fail to act accordingly because no one trusts authority.
I don't know if we have the capacity to think one hundred people removed from us. We need leadership and clarity.
Well that and expertise. I think that's the other really interesting thing here – the postmodern period is defined by this gutting of expertise, and that could also fall victim to this virus.
To me, this seems to relate directly to thinking on climate change. If scientists were right about this, maybe they're right about climate change. I think that's going to be one of the most interesting things I'm going to be watching in the coming years. Whether this influences how people think about science, and think about expertise. And about why people who are trained to think about things have a more earned voice then just anyone who can pop off on social media, and say well this is my take on it, and it's equally valid.
I don't think by having this critique that says that we need to have experts and we need to have government means that we're somehow going back like to some 1950s socialists model. I think there's a big difference between staying within the framework of the culture and the society we have. There should be an ability to listen to experts, to plan for the future. That is not contradictory to the American model.
When the left talks about their Scandinavian fever dream, I’m like, I’m a brown guy, I don’t want to live in Scandinavia. There are things about the American ethos I hold really dear, so there has to be some nuance to the conversation. You can have expertise and an assertive government without us talking about going back to Yugoslavia. There is a middle ground, these things are not so cut and dry.
There’s a world where what is provided by government is not antithetical to personal freedom, but actually enables freedom for the individual. The idea of freedom and the reality of freedom in America is vast.
No, I know. I think this is going to be a very interesting time to talk about the future of human habitation and environmental design. For decades we’ve been responding to neoliberalism, which is really hard to do because the things that we care about in this discipline require a mental framework that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal thinking. One that says you plan for the future. You don't let private markets do everything. You know, you do have an assertive government. You do have to have expertise.
I think it's going to be a really interesting moment to ask if we regain that sort of thinking and actually use it to address public health, climate change, these large systemic things that we haven't been addressing.
I hope so.
Yeah, me too.
*Author has amended original quote “The Gilded Age” to the “Roaring 20s” for clarification