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
As Long as You are Ashamed of Your Debt
by Melissa Byrne
September 18, 2020
This interview with Melissa Byrne, a political and community organizer, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Melissa | I have been doing work around free college and canceling student debt for about ten years now. I don't get paid for it unless I am working on a campaign. It has been a labor of taking something that impacted me on a personal level and channeling that energy into a big issue. As much as it hurt me as a person, I knew that I wasn't alone. There are 46 million Americans that have student loan debt, and our pain wasn't being taken seriously.
I grew up in a single-parent, working-class family. When I started college, I was just told to sign on the dotted line. I couldn't comprehend the degree to which I was signing my life away with all that debt.
A lot of my peers didn't have debt, so I felt a shame attached to it. Even very progressive people would ask me, in a very judgemental tone, "you have how much debt?" But I just didn't have a free choice. This was my only option. This is just what it was.
frank | Yeah. There is a lot of undue shame attached to debt.
Definitely. I had a shift in the way I thought about my debt about 10 years ago. I was working on a campaign, and I had to go with my boss to an early morning meeting where a famous advocate was speaking. There were about 20 of us sitting around a big table. The guest speaker asked people to raise their hand if they had student loan debt. I was the youngest person there, and the only one to raise my hand. And then he asks, "Well, how much debt do you have?" "I'm not telling," I said.
He asked again and I said half the amount, because, let's be real, shame is really hard to overcome. But I left that meeting with this realization that it is not my fault that I have student loan debt. This wasn’t a personal failing, this was a societal failing. And I left feeling like, oh, I'm going to solve this issue. And the person that put me on the spot was Reverend Jesse Jackson.
What are you seeking politically?
I want student loan debt to be cancelled, and I want to move towards working on making college free going forward. It's two problems at once. We need to cancel the $1.7 trillion outstanding in student loan debt, and we have to make sure that there's a path forward so that students are not harmed by student loan debt again.
Ideally, as a country, people should be able to obtain whatever skills they need to be able to do the work that brings them joy and care for their family. Higher education should not be an intergenerational wealth transfer. Poor people and working-class people should not be taxed for their ambition.
It's really bad, but it doesn't have to be this way. We have this burden because Reagan pulled funding out of higher education. We are here because education, a lot of the time, has been used to preserve wealth and power. People with privilege don't want a free market for their kids to compete with, they want to preserve access.
When we say higher education, it doesn't just mean getting a fancy liberal arts degree, it means making sure that community colleges and four-year colleges are set up for good partnerships with building trades. You go in, you get an associate’s degree, and you have a pathway into the carpenter's union or IBW.
You advocate for widespread debt cancellation for everybody rather than a targeted approach. Why?
I think one thing to remember is that nobody who is wealthy takes out debt for school - their wealthy parents pay for it. Consider somebody who had to take out about $300,000 for dental school. Sure they might be making $200,000 a year as a dentist, but $300,000 of debt at a 5% interest rate can hinder them -- it means they can't dedicate one day a week to providing free care. I've talked to dentists in this exact situation. They want to expand their services to the most vulnerable, but when they have $2,000 a month in student loan payments, they need the money coming in.
When you start drawing lines on who's worthy of debt forgiveness, you then get enemies of any change whatsoever. I advocate for canceling all student loan debt because it's both an ideological commitment to the idea that the loan itself is wrong, as well as taking away all the pain points in actually winning this policy battle.
What is the pushback that you hear the most? Do Democrats and Republicans have similar aversions to debt forgiveness?
You have this one strain of people, if you look at the work of Sandy Baum, for example, who are aghast at this idea that a rich person could potentially benefit. They miss the whole point. We don’t say that rich kids can't go to your public high school.
And right now, the federal government subsidizes private colleges in all of these different ways. Harvard receives around $60,000 per year per student in local, state, and federal subsidies. That means the billionaire's kid at Harvard is getting more federal support for their education than someone who goes to UMass, which receives around $12,000 a year in subsidies.
As someone who worked on both Bernie campaigns, why do you think it's important now that people shift over their support to Vice President Biden?
For one thing, it was really great seeing Bernie move from only supporting interest rate reduction in 2016 to full cancellation in 2020. Even in that short four year time period, we were able to really move the marker on this topic.
As of right now with Vice President Biden, he's supporting a couple of different forms of student loan forgiveness. He uses the phrase forgiveness, I use the word cancellation, but it gets us to the same point. I'm trying not to argue over words and focus on the bigger outcomes. We need him to win, so we can do the coalition work and the organizing work we need to do to get it all the way done.
Do you think you can get there with Biden if he is elected?
He is already 80% there. We are starting from a good place. We don't have to convince him of the concept, now it's just negotiating over details.
Are there any state or hyperlocal policies that we should be paying attention to?
New York state has the Excelsior scholars and, of course, because it's Cuomo, it was done in such a convoluted way. But it has proved the concept that people want free college, of course, they do. New Mexico is experimenting with a free college program. New Jersey is doing free community college and has started to look towards some parts of free college.
There hasn't been as much on the cancellation side. Right now, all federal loans paused. They are set to end on January 1st with a cliff. They were originally set to end on September 30th, but I think the Trump administration realized it would be really bad to have people make their first loan payments in the month before the election. I expect borrowers to be fucked if he wins reelection and payments to resume on January 1st.
Do you think, culturally, there is an outsized emphasis placed on higher education as a necessary means of succeeding?
I think the danger is that that can be used as an excuse to not match people to the college that's right for them. Everybody should be able to go into the higher education program that's right for them, without stigma and without being coerced into predatory for-profit programs.
A big part of higher education is the network you get out of it - it's the friends, it's the community, it's the exposure to ideas outside of where you are from. As a society, we need to get back to a place where we value education. We need to understand that it's part of what allows you to be mobile and to live life to the fullest.
But I also don't think higher education should ever be something that is seen as a marker of you being better than somebody else because you have a degree. But that is also a problem with capitalism in general. So those are bigger structural problems that we have to solve as well.