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
A Failed Lending System
by Alan Collinge
September 30, 2020
Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Alan | I have a bachelor's, a master's, and an engineer's degree. I began looking deeply at the student loan problem because of my own student loan issues, and in 2006 I decided to dedicate myself to this work full time. The debt crisis, unfortunately, has only become worse since those days.
frank | And how do you articulate what the problem is?
The problem is that student loans have been exempt from the most fundamental consumer protections — some of which are called for in the constitution. Unlike every other loan in this country, student loans do not have bankruptcy protection. Student loans do not have a statute of limitations. Fair Debt Collection Practice laws, Truth in Lending laws. Even state usury laws have been restricted or eliminated for most student loans.
The founding fathers themselves were savaged under the predatory British banks and merchants. They understood the importance of bankruptcy protections. And indeed, if you look at Article I, Section 8 of The Constitution, the founders call for uniform bankruptcy laws ahead of the power to raise an army, declare war, and even coin currency. But student loans have been essentially stripped of this protection.
Within that failure, what do you seek to do as an organization?
Well, for the first 15 years of our existence, we were fighting only for the same bankruptcy protections as every other type of loan. It hasn't worked, unfortunately. Congress failed us.
When I started this, student loan debt stood at $400 billion. There is now $2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt. Some of the official numbers are lower than that, but those numbers do not include a lot of the interest charges or private loans — home equity loans, for example —that families take out to pay for college. With these taken into account, we are well over $2 trillion of college debt. Now, in addition to the return of standard bankruptcy rights, we are advocating for all federal student loans to be canceled.
The student debt crisis is a national threat. We now know that the default rate for the class of 2004 was around 40%, and students in 2004 were borrowing only a third of what students today borrow. By our best estimates, before the pandemic, 80% of borrowers were never going to be able to pay back their student loans. Today, when 50 million people are losing their jobs, many of which will not return, it seems like it is time for all federally owned student loans to be canceled.
Does the increase in college accessibility and the inability to declare bankruptcy go hand in hand?
That is a good point. College accessibility has increased dramatically since the 1970s, when some of these consumer protections were rolled back. Around 30% of the population was going to college then, and now around 60% of the population is attending college.
There are better ways to make it more accessible. We should fund community and state colleges to a point where people can take on little to no debt.
So how did these consumer protections get stripped away?
My theory might be slightly controversial. There's something called the Powell Memo that Lewis Powell authored as a special advisor to President Nixon. He wrote it as a result of watching the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Mr. Powell outlined a series of steps that conservatives should take to prevent what happened in the 60s from ever happening again. He advocated for the changing of the guard across the country. He says that monied and conservative interests should infiltrate colleges, media, NGOs, and think tanks in order to sow the seeds of their ideology.
Sallie Mae was established months after the Powell memo was published, and in the 1970s we began removing bankruptcy protections.
In 1998, federal student loans became forever impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, and, astonishingly, this exception to discharge was extended to private student loans in 2005. This gave the lenders carte blanche to hound borrowers for the rest of their lives. This led to a huge boom in lending for colleges. This is also when the colleges began to really raise their prices.
While Sallie Mae began as a government-sponsored entity, they decided to go private around the mid to late 1990s — this around the same time they acquired the largest loan collection companies and largest guaranty agency in the country. This government-sponsored entity essentially morphed into a fully for-profit, privately held monopoly over the student loan market.
And what are the consequences of stripping these consumer protections away?
It’s an incredibly predatory system. People can have their wages garnished for defaulting on loans. Senior citizens and the disabled can lose their benefits. People can be fired from public employment. They can lose their professional licenses, and in some cases, they can even lose their driver's licenses if they default on federal student loans. It is a sort of one, two punch. There are no consumer protections, and on top of that, there is also a draconian, mafia-like collection regime.
After 15 years of working on this, you have a bill in the House and a bill in the Senate that aims to restore protections.
At long last, we have good legislation. We have two bills right now: S.1414 in the Senate, and HR 2648 in the House. Dick Durbin is the sponsor in the senate, and Jerry Nadler and Republican John Katko are the sponsors in the House.
There is no good reason that this bill shouldn’t pass. The sticking point is the Republicans in Congress, to be quite frank. Right now our number one goal as a group is to get a Republican senator to co-sponsor this legislation.
Outside of Congress, we have conservative support from places like the Cato Institute, The National Review, David Brooks, the conservative commentator at the New York Times, AND conservative scholars at George Mason University. These places agree that bankruptcy protections must be returned to student loans, but because of the way the industry has courted Republicans, as well as Democrats for that matter, we are stuck.
Politically, do you feel like either party has a good grasp and effective communication plan to tackle this issue?
Again, 80 percent of people, according to the Department of Education, will likely never be able to pay their loans. That is 44 million people in the country walking around, losing sleep over their student loans. And these people vote far more than average. 44 million votes can turn a loss into a landslide; even a third of that can turn a loss into a landslide. This is an electoral bonanza, the likes of which we have never seen before. In any other issue in this election — healthcare, defense, civil rights, etc — the battle lines are drawn and it is hard to move many people from one side to the other. It is the wild west with the student loan issue. Neither party has gotten their arms around this thing, and frankly, no sitting member of congress wants to touch it because it is such a big problem that has continuously been kicked down the road.
We started a petition calling on the president to cancel student loans through an executive order.
In Congress, if you pass legislation that costs the taxpayer anything, you have to come up with funding to support the legislation. So in order to cancel $1.7 Trillion in student loans through congressional legislation, you have to find that money. That requires cutting an equal amount from other areas, raising taxes, or adding to the national debt. That is just never going to happen. Congress will never pass legislation that cancels student debt fully. If they pass legislation it will be limited; there will be many strings attached, and ultimately, very few borrowers will actually see their loans canceled.
However, the president has the executive authority to demand the Department of Education to cancel all the student loans that it owns, which is about 85 percent of all student debt. The president can do that without needing one dime of tax appropriation or any congressional approval, and, I might add, without adding one penny to the national debt. The taxpayers already paid for these loans. There is no good reason that they need to pay twice! That is the solution we are pushing for, and we have over 700,000 signatures from people who span the political spectrum. I estimate that 40% of student loan borrowers are politically independent, and about 20% identify as Republicans. This really is a huge voter bonanza for whichever candidate steps up to solve it by executive order.
Are you hopeful that politicians will acknowledge that and act on it?
I am very happy to report that last week, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer have adopted our strategy and are now championing it. They introduced a Senate resolution calling on President Trump to cancel "up to $50,000" in federally owned student loans by executive order. While their plan is frankly vague, and a bit suspicious this close to the election, it is very encouraging to see that the concept of federal loan cancellation by executive order proposed. I believe we have really started something good here.
I can only hope that both parties will converge on this solution. There is no better opportunity than this pandemic to reset this failed lending system, massively stimulate the economy, free the 44 million Americans from the jaws of this nationally threatening lending system, and replace it with a more rational and just funding model for higher education in this country.