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
Poverty Framed As Neglect
by Joyce McMillan
August 12, 2020
This interview with Joyce McMillan, former director of programming for the Child Welfare Organizing Project, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
frank | How did you get involved in the child welfare system?
Joyce | I was impacted by child welfare 21 years ago, and the experience was so horrific that here I am, this many years later, doing the work to make the changes. What I learned between then and now, is that once you are impacted by these systems, you are stuck. Recidivism happens, and it is no fault of your own.
What does that system look like? How does that recidivism operate?
The majority of people who come under the surveillance of the administration for the services here in New York because either shelters or school systems make a call to the ACS [New York City Administration for Children's Services]. You have to understand, even though this is not in the news, the Administration for Children's Services in New York has contracts with hospitals, and they have contracts with schools. The ACS will make schools aware when you have a prior case. That creates an environment where they are more susceptible to find you suspicious of anything. Shelters also make calls. I was living in a shelter 20 something years ago, and although my shelter, in particular, did not make those calls, the school system was aware that I was in a shelter.
Do you remember the Bloomberg stop-and-frisk? Everyone rallied around it as a policy that was going to get guns and drugs off of the streets. That didn't happen. What did happen is that people who fit a certain description were stopped, searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and thrown in jail. These people would have never come under the surveillance of the police if had there not been that stop-and-frisk model. It created a profile of people who should and would be stopped. Stop-and-frisk reinforced and strengthened racist practices - it did not reduce crime. Similarly, mandated reporting does not keep children safe, it profiles the parents.
Once the school system or the shelter system or any other system becomes aware of your history with ACS, then anything you do is suspect. One, because that's just how it is for people of color. And secondly, because there's a threat upon people who are mandated reporters. If you see something and you don't report it, you can lose your license and can be held responsible on a criminal level. And because the mandated reporting training is very vague, people often are not sure what they should and should not report. So they report everything, which brings more families under the surveillance of the family police. Anything that looks different than what they are used to or what they would do, becomes something to report.
Right now, you have these child welfare agents holding news conferences and talking about how the lack of children in school right now leads to low reporting and a lack of oversight by mandated reporters. They say that puts children in danger.
And safety is not the issue for the separation in the first place, it is poverty framed as neglect.
Can you talk more about the role poverty plays?
Most children, about 85% of children, are in the system for reasons related to poverty that is then framed as neglect.
The family is lacking something, whether they're lacking a babysitter, childcare, food, or copays for medicine. To take a child out of the home because the family doesn't have enough food is just plain insanity to me, especially when you're going to pay how much to the foster family to take care of the child while traumatizing the child? The idea of protection is a falsehood. We are actually inflicting more harm than help on the child. Alienating a child from family because they are poor is just unnecessary trauma that this child and parent and family will forever live with.
What sort of situations have you seen that exemplify how poor people are targeted?
I am working currently with a parent whose child was removed because she picked the child up from school consistently late every single day. And she did admit to me that it was every single day, and she did say it was consistent and was on average between 15 minutes to a half-hour. But that was because mom was working two jobs and really dependent on how transportation was running that day. And even with the two jobs, she could not afford to pay someone to pick up the child.
Ultimately she was left with the choice of not paying rent and feeding her children or continuing to pick the child up late. The school called ACS, and the repercussion was that ultimately the family was separated because ACS came to the school and mom wasn't there. She was charged with child abandonment. She “abandoned” the child at the school because she had not picked her child up at the scheduled time, and because this had happened over a course of a period of time. And so these are the stupid things that ACS does, right. Plain fucking stupid.
So now what? What happens after her kids are taken from her?
Because she didn't know her rights, ACS asked her to take a drug test and she tested positive for marijuana, and so now she's completing her second drug treatment program. The children have been in foster care now for over two years and there's no end in sight because she's under ACS's surveillance. Meaning that now they are continuing to investigate and investigate her. They are following this lead and following that lead - everything becomes a problem. My mom used to say, “you turn a molehill into a mountain,” and that is exactly what happens with ACS.
They align themselves with police tactics when they should be aligning themselves more closely to social work work tactics.
What is the relationship like between parents and their children once they're separated? What's the contact level?
They do everything possible to break the bond of the family. When a child is removed, they are not just separated from their parents, they're separated from their siblings, their aunts, their uncles, their cousins, their neighbors, their godparents, anyone, and everything that they have been familiar with.
Every sensory detail in their body is touched by the removal and the placement into the new home. They may play different music. Ears. The sounds are different. Ears. What they see around them is different, including the colors that can often set one's mood. Eyes. The smells, the type of food that's cooking, the seasoning that is being used is different. Nose. Every sense is touched. Including the material of the chairs, couch, and bed sheet. Touch. It's very traumatic.
Families see their children once a week for two hours. And if you do the math on that for any idiot who thinks that would suffice, that's only four days out of the year. The math says two times 52 divided by 24 is four. How do you maintain a bond? How do you create a bond?
Are those visits supervised?
They are supervised much like the prison system. It's the same system. Someone once called it the fraternal twin. And it is.
They both strip-search. They strip-search children under the guise of checking for marks and bruises, even though they are in the system for reasons related to neglect poverty. They're both separated from everything they know and love. They both change homes or cells regularly. They both use garbage bags or pillowcases to change their location. They both have set visit times on set visit days. They both have oversight during a visiting period. They both eat what it is they are served. They both have “responsibility” to admit on some level wrongdoing if you want to ever become unentangled. So any system built to actually protect children should in no way mimic, a system that tortures adults. It just makes no sense from the foundation.
What the foster care system does is pipeline children from foster care into prison. Because you're more likely to be drug-addicted if you are in the foster system. Where are drugs going to lead you? Incarceration. You're more likely to be homeless if you are in the foster system. Where is homelessness going to lead you to? Incarceration. You're less likely to get a high school diploma. Where is a lack of education going to lead you? Imprisonment. Everything leads to imprisonment. They're saying that they are taking these children to protect them, but if you look at the outcomes, over 50% end up incarcerated.
We talked to somebody recently about how law serves to regulate morality, and how there's a lot of people who can't afford to play by the rules that are set. How do you see this play out within this system of people being punished and their poverty is being interpreted as neglect...
Poverty is not being interpreted as neglect, it is a purposeful entanglement of the two. They are taking the two and acting as if they don't understand the difference. That's not an accident, it is purposeful.
If you get a bunch of white men, Yale-educated, Harvard-educated, Cornell-educated, I'm sure they understand the difference between poverty and neglect, right? Especially since America has designed the failure of communities of color through district lines, redlining, and 60 cents on a dollar in employment fields. These work together to create the outcomes that we see now. They are not by accident. Let's not use language that would insinuate the possibility, because there's not even a possibility that this is by accident. This is called systemic racism.
Should the pressure to defund police systems and defund the prison system be tied to the push to defund the child-welfare system?
Absolutely. We should not be funding any system that's creating poor outcomes.
They tell children, you better behave. You better do your homework. You better this, you better that, because if you don't, they're building a prison for you, right? If you can't read at a certain level, by a certain age, there is a projection that is being done. They're using predictive analytics to make the assumption that that child will then be incarcerated by a certain time in their life, and they're building a prison for them.
Do you not think when they put a child in foster care that they're not utilizing that same system to make the projections based on the outcomes that they've already seen through their process? So that means there's an awareness.
It’s shocking that these very petty, petty things can have such intense and painful consequences.
White America’s punishment of Black people has been very petty, since the time that we were supposed to be free from slavery. They were angry that we were technically no longer slaves, so they wrote into the constitution that we would be slaves if we were incarcerated. That created these petty crimes to incarcerate us and maintain a mass amount of slaves in this country, which is why there is no longer just incarceration, there is mass incarceration.
They prepare children to be slaves while pushing them through the foster care system, by creating prisons instead of reading labs, It's all designed.
It's not even okay to hurt a dog. There are people who spend more time in jail for hurting a dog than for hurting a Black man or woman or child, right? Somehow Black people are not a living breathing thing, unless we are serving white people.
Think of the guy disinfecting the supermarket, sweeping the aisle. You got pissed at him disinfecting the aisle while you were trying to go shop. People would curse at him, report him to the supervisor. People did all types of little malicious nasty things because they're just fucking evil towards people who they think they are better than. And then all of a sudden the same dude becomes an essential worker, and it's "Oh my God, he's the one that's going to keep us safe. He's disinfecting. He's doing such a great job. It was spotless." Now all of a sudden, he fucking matters. Get outta here. Get out of my face with that. He always mattered, people chose to ignore that fact.
For many people and mostly white people, people only matter when they're serving a purpose for them. Not because they're a living breathing person. And so that's why white people have not taken responsibility for not acknowledging what has happened for generations. Suddenly, here's an uprising, and now it's cool to say that Black lives matter. Black lives didn't just begin to matter.
Or when husbands who couldn't see their wives? Or during all of the atrocities that have happened throughout the generations of us being in this damn country? And then to tell us some dumb shit, like "go back to Africa." Go back to where you came from because guess what? You are not originally from America either.
And so what the fear factor is, I'm not sure, but if white people would get off of their bullshit, everybody could have a piece of the pie and everyone could live happily together. White people want to have billions and billions and billions and billions, and they'll sell kids, they'll sell their own fucking mother, they'll kill their granny for her insurance policy. That's white people shit. I'm not saying that Black people don't commit crimes. Black people commit crimes of survival. You're stupid to kill your neighbor and only get $15. But in the moment you thought you needed it. You can't justify it, but it's not based on greed. You kill your fucking grandmother for her insurance policy. Really? It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous. You jump off the roof because your stocks went down. That's a reason to commit suicide? Come on.
I also think we have a really hard time understanding, when you're separated from it, the feeling of desperation or acts of desperation.
Exactly. We weren't allowed to leave anything on the back seat during childhood. Not even our toys. My dad was like, take it off the back seat before somebody breaks my window for that little bullshit.
Right. And it is not insinuating that people are bad, but that people are desperate - if I can’t put myself in that position to understand that, then I am missing the bigger picture.
Absolutely. Well thank you for your time, I have really appreciated having this conversation. If there is anything you want to add...
I'll leave you with this. I taught a class at one of the Ivy League schools. I often lecture at some Ivy Leagues. One day a white student after my lecture said to me, “I am kind of sick and tired of Black people blaming us for their woes. You know? It's not our fault that you have a bunch of baby daddies or baby mamas. It's not our fault that you don't want to learn to read. That you refuse to go to school. It's not our fault that you don't want to go to work every day and you prefer to collect a welfare check.”
Literally. I was just like, is he really going there? It's like three or four Black students in the class, all white students and me. So the class was looking at me when he finished his little speech, and I was still in shock but I gathered my thoughts quickly.
And I say, does anybody in here know what a landmark is? The class is looking at me like I am crazy. I'm just like, bear with me. I pick someone out and say, tell me what a landmark is. And they tell me what a landmark is - a building over 150 years ago that has a protective factor where you cannot even change a light switch in it without having written permission. Yes. That's a landmark. 150 years ago. Did you say 150 years ago? Yes. Who do you think built that building 150 years ago? A Black guy. Probably didn't get paid either. Guess what? Probably didn't have a high school diploma. Guess what? More than likely 99% chance he didn't have a higher education either. What does that tell you? It tells you we're not lazy. We've worked in this country for free for many fucking years. It tells you that we're not dumb because we didn't need a formal education to do it. You understand? It tells us that our work is solid because that building is still standing.