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
Can't Pay, Won't Pay
by Thomas Gokey
September 30, 2020
This interview with Thomas Gokey, founder of the Debt Collective, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
My name is Thomas Gokey. I, like a lot of people, ruined my financial life by going to school.
After I finished my studies, I started teaching as an adjunct professor. I saw that a lot of my students were taking out significantly more debt than I had to, even though they were only 10 to 15 years younger than I was. On top of that, I saw how little I was paid to teach. If just one of my students paid sticker price for tuition, that would more than cover what I was being paid to teach that class.
Why do students need to be forced into such enormous, life-changing amounts of debt, when the people who are doing the research and instruction weren't getting paid a wage that we could live on? Where does all this money go?
At the time I didn't fully understand what debt was, where it came from, and how it worked. I viewed it as an individual problem that required a clever individual solution. But when Occupy started, the way I thought about debt quickly changed.
In this classic sort of Gandhian nonviolent method, you find the way that you're cooperating with your own exploitation and then organize mass noncooperation.
What sort of noncooperation have you organized through the Debt Collective?
One of the first things we organized was the Rolling Jubilee. I learned that a lot of personal household debt gets bought and sold by investors on a secondary market. When they buy it and sell it to each other for pennies on the dollar, and then they hire a debt collector to hound you for the full amount aggressively. We raised money to buy a lot of debt and destroy it.
As exciting as that was, we knew it wasn't a solution to the larger systems that had forced us into debt to begin with. That's really where the Debt Collective came in, we recognized that we have real power when debtors start to organize and simply refuse to pay a debt that shouldn't exist in the first place.
In 2015, we organized a student debt strike among former students who attended predatory for-profit universities in the United States. In the Higher Education Act, there is one sentence that says if your school violated state law and you wound up in student debt as a result, you have the right to assert a borrower's defense to repayment. Essentially, if your school is a criminal enterprise, your debt should be considered illegitimate and unenforceable.
This law was on the books, but the Obama administration didn't want to enforce the law because they saw it as a zero-sum game between student debtors and taxpayers, and they cared about protecting taxpayers. Now, I’m not an economist, but the economists we talked to did not agree with that view. From an economics standpoint, this isn't about finding the money to pay for it. It's about political will and political power. We have the money, that's not the issue.
We organized students to go on strike to force the Obama administration to start enforcing that law. And even though we've had to fight tooth and nail for every single penny along the way, so far we have over a billion dollars worth of debt discharge as a result of that initial strike. Now, we're organizing a larger strike to get rid of all $1.7 trillion of student debt.
How do you advocate for student debt to be canceled? What legislative mechanisms do you want to see used?
There are existing laws and authorities that can be used to cancel debt, but aren't being used. The Secretary of Education has the authority to cancel all federal student debt.
I don't think that the Democrats are going to embrace these policies out of the goodness of their hearts. This is something we're going to have to win by fighting them tooth and nail every inch along the way.
What role can Congress play?
They also have the power to cancel student debt. Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders have introduced legislation to do just that.
But as part of the Higher Education Act, Congress already gave the Secretary of Education the discretionary power to cancel student debt on their own. The Secretary of Education essentially has a self-destruct button that they could press at any point. It needs to be pressed because, one, the debt shouldn't exist, and, two, debt relief can provide a badly needed economic stimulus as we are entering the first year of a global depression. There are many good reasons to cancel this debt, and there's no good reason not to.
Does the reticence come from those who are profiting off of this system? Who loses if the debt is canceled?
The entire student debt system in the United States has become this predatory for-profit enterprise. There are a lot of profiteers who are latched onto the system as it stands — and it's not just individual students who are being forced into debt, universities themselves are debt-financed to run their standard operations.
If you look at the University of California system as a whole, for example, they finance their operations through bonds, and they pay interest on those bonds. The University of California system pays over a billion dollars in interest alone to Wall Street to fund the University of California, and they have very favorable interest rates because they used their ability to raise tuition as collateral.
To what degree can we say that the University of California is a public university when most of its financing is coming from private sources, including in private tuition? We need to fully fund these public schools all —of these schools have basically been privatized. Betsy DeVos has effectively won, but it wasn't just her, this has been decades in the making, starting with the shifts that Ronald Reagan made. We are at a point where there is no genuine public university left in the United States.
What do you see as the role of debt in our society?
Some debt simply should not exist. Medical debt should not exist, period, and in most wealthy nations, it doesn't exist. We need to fully fund healthcare so that everybody has it. And we save money by doing so; we spend more money on our debt-fueled healthcare system than the rest of the world, and it delivers worse care, worse outcomes, all in the middle of a global pandemic.
Student debt should not exist. Payday loans should not exist. The only reason this debt exists is it makes a small number of people extraordinarily wealthy. We don't live in a democracy, we live in an oligarchy where this small group of people who are profiting off the system has the political power.
Is there such a thing as necessary debt?
If you want to get a little bit more philosophical, at a fundamental level, debt is simply a social bond. It's a promise that we make to each other.
And maybe the answer is I owe you healthcare. If you get sick, or if you get hurt, maybe you shouldn't be forced into bankruptcy. Maybe you shouldn't have to go on GoFundMe to get a surgery. Maybe the debt that we owe is reparations to Black Americans for centuries of exploitation, slavery, and oppression. This is a debt we don't acknowledge and don't pay. This a moral obligation that we have, and we're currently defaulting on it.
Sometimes people get the mistaken impression that the Debt Collective is trying to create some utopian society that doesn't have any debt at all, but really debt is the glue that holds society together. It's a matter of what debts do we honor, what debts are illegitimate and should be eliminated, and which debts should exist but should be renegotiated. How do we make these social bonds productive for everybody? For example, climate change is an existential crisis, and we need to finance a massive shift to decarbonize our economy.
It's less a matter of all debt is bad, and more a matter of which debt shouldn't exist and what debt is fruitful. There are certain bonds that tie us to each other, and in which everyone's better off. A society without these bonds isn't a society — it's just a bunch of isolated people, and that's not a world worth living in either. Someone said that debt is a kind of time machine. It allows you to live in the future today. There is a future worth living in, and it requires creative finance.
How do you see debt tying us to the existing power structure? Top of mind is the student debt system — you graduate with massive amounts of debt, and you feel like you need to get a certain job. What sort of systems do you see this debt ties us to?
Debt has enormous disciplinary power. Part of its power is that it tends to isolate us, it tends to make us feel like we're alone. It turns us into individuals. As individuals, our debts are massive burdens. As individuals, the options for resisting the system as an individual are very limited. As individuals, the power of the state and the power of Wall Street is to control and destroy our lives if we don't cooperate is massive. However, collectively, our debts give us enormous power.
I think the real genius of organizing debtors is that we can flip this power relationship around.
What are some of the biggest misconceptions that you've seen that people hold about debt? And how do you think that affects mobilizing and organizing around debt?
The main thing is the idea that people end up in debt because they made poor choices. People aren't in debt because they live beyond their means, people are forced into debt because we've denied them the means to live. Granted, some individuals make bad choices and wind up in debt as a result, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
If we paid workers a livable, honest wage for the value that they're creating in our economy, most of this debt would disappear. Look at credit card debt, for example. People think, well if you have credit card debt, you must be buying something like flat-screen TVs. But when you look at the data, 42% of people have credit card debt due to buying basic necessities like diapers, utility bills, food, medical bills. A lot of credit card debt is just medical debt that has been paid with a credit card.
Big changes like this have never happened without mass mobilization, without direct action, and without civil disobedience. We want people to be empowered in refusing to pay. We have a manifesto that just came out called, Can't Pay, Won't Pay. In it, we make the case for organizing. We feel like the time for this tactic has come in a global pandemic where millions of people can't pay their rent, can't pay their utility bill, are having their water shut off, can't pay their student loans, and are forced into medical debt for COVID related expenses.
Nothing in our society is going to remain the same as a result of this crisis. Everything is up for renegotiation, so we should negotiate from a position of power. The main thing that I want everybody to ask is: what debts do you owe and to whom? Which debts should be refused? How do we organize together to refuse?