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
The Symptoms of Our Food System
by Nathan Sayre
May 6, 2020
This interview with Nathan Sayre, a professor and geology chair at UC Berkeley, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
How do food systems propel or participate in diseases?
The connection between food systems and pandemics is indirect, but it's critical. The emergence of novel viruses is strongly determined by how food is produced, because how humans interact with wildlife and livestock shapes the conditions in which deadly types of pathogens can emerge.
The emergence of several very deadly germs of the past, such as smallpox, was the result of mutations that were made possible by high concentrations of people and livestock living in close proximity. Often, wildlife play important roles as the source pool or as an intermediary host for germs that “jump” to livestock and then to humans. The frequency, intensity and location of animals and people matter as well, and these variables are affected by human activities such as deforestation. In West Africa, for example, forest clearing appears to have intensified contact between humans and wildlife in ways that may have increased the likelihood of outbreaks such as Ebola, whether through the so-called bushmeat trade or some other pathway. More generally, the fact that there are people who either need to consume wildlife, or consider wildlife a delicacy, or gather food in places that put them in contact with wildlife (e.g., bat urine on fruit that humans collect) are conditions of a food system.
We think that the novel coronavirus emerged from bats. Though the exact pathway of transmission from bats to humans remains uncertain, it appears to intersect with a wet market: a place where humans interacted closely with live and freshly-killed animals, both domesticated and wild.
We may feel like people who consume wildlife are in an entirely different food system from the one that we are accustomed to, but we are connected, if only through the global movement of people and goods.
Roughly two-thirds of all the antibiotics consumed in the US are administered to livestock--not to cure illnesses but because the drugs make the animals grow faster, which enhances profitability. Nothing could be more effective in spurring bacteria to develop resistance to antibiotics!
Do you feel like this is a moment in which big agriculture will find ways to further consolidate its power, or do you think we’ll see systemic change come out of this?
Given how extraordinarily concentrated the food system is already, it is hard to imagine how it could get more concentrated. We are talking about groups of three to five corporations with a combined 60, 70, 80 percent of market share (or more) depending on the product. Most are huge conglomerates with unbelievable market power already. They will undoubtedly attempt to grow further and grab whatever market advantages they can find--they always do--but I don't know that this crisis uniquely privileges them any more than crises tend to privilege those who are already in positions of advantage anyway.
However, the contradictions and inequities in the food system have been amplified and made more conspicuous by the pandemic, bringing them into view for many people who might barely notice them under business as usual. This presents an opportunity for change.
What are some of the inequities?
I would say the biggest concerns labor, and the conditions under which our food is produced, harvested, processed, distributed, served. One of the great contradictions of our current system is that the people who are most directly involved with the production of our food, are among the least secure in their access to that food: they’re paid to handle it everyday but they can’t afford to buy it themselves. Those who grow food, harvest it, handle it and prepare it, make some of the lowest wages in our economy, and they experience poverty at some of the highest rates in our society. This is also true for restaurants. The people who cook, the people who serve, and the people who clean up are paid brutally low wages. On top of that, they’ve been among the most likely to lose their jobs in this crisis.
We are telling these people they have to work, because we have to have food, even if it puts them at high risk of contracting COVID. But then how can we expect them to continue to work for low wages and no benefits? Of course, this is not something that we do individually. It is collective, market mediated behavior, but it is incumbent on us to demand that food system workers receive better pay and working conditions. And the easiest, most effective way to do that is through public policies--that is, the political process.
How can we be cautious of the health and safety of the people providing us food?
If public policy can embrace mandatory paid sick leave for people who work with food in factories, restaurants and hotels, that would be a huge gain. Organizers and activists have been fighting for this for years and years, and it has been staunchly resisted by the National Restaurant Association, among others. This could be an opportunity for a very basic, logical reform.
Restaurants are really vulnerable and interesting. David Chang tweeted “Restaurants are too small to fail”, early in this ciris. Many restaurants are small businesses with payroll coming out of last night's patrons. The industry is crumbling on all levels. Workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and small businesses are struggling to stay afloat. What policies are you looking for to affect change all the way through?
Who will recover from this, and how, depends a great deal on how banks and government programs are put together to help cope with the situation. I’m not an expert in this area, but the signs don't look very good so far, I must say. Once things begin to return to normal, presumably people will start going back to the restaurants. Hopefully the people who have built their lives around running good, small local restaurants, will be able to open back up and return to better times. But their ability to do that will likely depend on the kinds of access to credit that they have through the current crisis. The economy needs to go into hibernation, you might say, without having stored up reserves to survive the winter; credit is what small businesses need to survive. At this point, it's hard to feel like the powers that be in Washington are as worried about small business owners as they are about big corporate donors and lobbyists, but that almost goes without saying.
What else have you found yourself thinking about right now?
I teach my students that our food system is profoundly capitalist. What does this mean and how did we get here? We have allowed our food system to be shaped to its core by the imperative to make profit. This has resulted in tremendous technological innovation and productivity, but also tremendous surplus. Our food system is plagued by overproduction – which sounds weird to most people, because the dominant discourse around food is that we don't have enough food, that we have to produce in the way we do now because of scarcity. But if you look at the history of our food system, especially as it has evolved in the last hundred years, the biggest problem over and over again has been that there's been too much food.
Put those two together: the profit motivated, capital accumulating character of the system and the overproduction that plagues this system. What do you get? You get cheap food, suffering farmers, and smaller players struggling to stay afloat in a system dominated by bigger and bigger entities. The fact that we need to eat, and the fact that what and how we eat matters to us in all kinds of affective and cultural ways, are subordinated to the need of these firms to make profits. In other words, the use value of food – its quality for sustenance and nutrition – has become secondary to its exchange value – its quantity in processes of capital accumulation.
This crisis is forcing all of us to recognize and appreciate the use values in our lives, while the exchange values begin to look secondary or even meaningless. The things that really matter right now are quite basic. Do you have access to food? Do you have decent shelter? Are your loved ones safe? Are you healthy? Money obviously matters for all these things – are the inequities along these basic lines are shocking – but only as a means, and no longer as an end in itself.
It doesn't care how it treats the land. It doesn't care how it treats workers. It doesn't care whether the food it produces is healthy. It cares about competing for market share and profits, return on investment, and “growth” – not the growth of plants and animals and people but growth of capital.
We have all kinds of health related problems that are symptoms of these facts. The obesity “epidemic” is a symptom of the food system – and by the way I don’t think we’ll keep calling it an epidemic now that we understand what a real epidemic is about. Obesity is not a symptom of people being lazy and sitting on the couch. Sociologically, obesity correlates with poverty, race, and geographical-environmental marginalization. Its astonishing growth over the past half-century is the result of a food system that uses people's bodies to absorb the surpluses of our food system, even if it makes them sick or eventually kills them.
That's a brutal way to describe that.
Maybe so, but the real brutality is in living it, right? Maybe now we'll think more critically about our food system. Maybe we will realize that the production of food for the sake of nutrition should not be entirely subordinated to the production of food for the sake of profits.
Right. And can we think of profit as something that is exponentially growing in any business? And at what cost?
On one hand everyone needs food and everyone needs food every day. That means that there's a sort of guaranteed demand for food. It’s a captive market, you might say. But demand for food is also inelastic, in economists’ jargon: You only need so much and once you have what you need, you don’t really want much more. So it’s hard to get you to eat five or ten times more.
On one hand, this makes it hard to refuse to participate in the food system. On the other hand, it's hard to make infinitely expanding profits from it. This makes food fundamentally unlike other commodities. I think there is definitely a contradiction between quality and quantity.