2. READ: Lost Children Archive. A novel by by Valeria Luiselli.
4. READ: There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration. A book by Ali Noorani.
5. READ: What the first 24 hours on U.S. soil looks like for detained immigrants.
6.LOOK: Our 2018 photo essay in the midst of a rally outside the gates of Tornillo, Texas.
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
Losing Our Religion
by Lonna Atkeson
October 14, 2020
This interview with Lonna Atkeson, professor at University of New Mexico, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Lonna Atkeson | I study political science, election science, and election administration, and have been studying these subjects for a very long time. I like to think of myself as someone who has elections in my DNA. When I was a very little girl, around seven years old, I set up my own ballot boxes around my neighborhood. I have always loved elections, and see myself as having a long term connection with these questions and interests.
frank | How do voters establish their perceptions of election integrity? How does rhetoric affect the perception of integrity?
In political science, we measure the perceived integrity of elections with a couple of questions. How confident are you that your ballot was counted correctly? How confident are you that all the ballots in your state were counted correctly? In the nation? From these questions, we can assess how people feel about the legitimacy of the process.
This election year is obviously complicated with COVID, and the election process itself is much more complicated this time around for voters. That can lead to confusion, and confusion can go on to affect how voters ultimately feel about this election's integrity. The way people perceive the election is largely rooted in their own experience.
We have also been presented with two very interesting narratives about election integrity— one on the left and one on the right. On the left, you hear concerns about the potential for voter suppression. On the right, you hear issues about voter fraud.
Is there legitimacy to those narratives? Is voter fraud something to be worried about? Is voter suppression a legitimate thing to be worried about?
To begin thinking about this question, I think it is important to ask — what is the goal of an election? There are three pillars: integrity, access, and finality. These pillars work in tension with each other. The more accessible the system is, the more open it is to mischief. The more you tighten the system to prevent mischief, the lower access is, and the more likely you are to prevent some people from getting the opportunity to vote. You can make changes to both integrity and access, but then you change the finality of the election — when is this process going to end? We need some sort of finality, and finality is almost certain to be affected in this election as we expect to see a longer counting process.
So the way people perceive the election is going to be in part affected by the narrative that they're placed in, as well as whatever experience they have with their own ballot and their own election system. Does their ballot get rejected? Do other people's ballots get rejected? How many ballots get rejected? People are seeing all these things on social media where people are receiving someone else's ballot. These are all new experiences for people, and they're having to evaluate them individually. What does that mean for the integrity of the process? We haven't talked about these things very much, but they could be very important in this election, and they're important in elections generally.
The conversation seems very specific to the United States. Why do you think that is? And how does the public perception of elections affect the democratic underpinnings of the U.S.?
I think it's about the affective polarization going on in the US — voting is just another space to be polarized. Again, the left and the right see things differently. Integrity and access are both natural things to look at when looking at an election. You can be more concerned about one or the other, depending on what your experience is, or depending on what the narrative of your party is.
The question of how the public is going to view the legitimacy of this election, is really the major question at hand.
The aftermath of the election is also going to be hugely important. Obviously, if it's a blowout election, then things are going to be easy to resolve. But if it's a close election, and there's a lot of rejected ballots due to people engaging in a process that they're inexperienced with, how does that affect the perceived legitimacy?
In May, in a local New Jersey election, there was an average of 10% rejection rate across all of the counties. If we see that kind of rejection rate in a close state like Pennsylvania or Florida, how is that going to affect our perception not only of the legitimacy of the election, but the legitimacy of who takes office?
It's one thing, to feel like, I voted in this process and I don't like the people who got elected, but I believe that they're legitimately elected. It's another thing to feel like, I don't like the people in office and I don't even think they belong there — in fact, I don't even think we elected them. That has the potential to undermine democracy. That is what is scary about this election.
What can people do to prepare for a disputed outcome?
If you're concerned about the post office, then drop your ballot off. Most states allow you to drop your ballot off at an early voting location or the county election official office. People should be primarily concerned about securing themselves. I think that's fundamental, because if I'm in control of my process, if I know what's happening, and if I have some sense that other people are doing the same, then I am going to have greater confidence in the election.
A lot of people are looking to the 2000 election and to Florida. It seems that the difference is, both candidates were prepared to walk away based on the result. How does this moment feel by comparison?
Gallup polled people's perspectives on the legitimacy of both the 2000 election and the 2016 election. The public response was the same in both elections. Despite all the loud rhetoric, most people accepted the legitimacy of the election, no problem.
Sometimes I wonder how much the voices, and the extremism of social media, enhances fear, outrage, and anger in an outsized way. If you were to just look around your own life, it's not that dangerous. But when we look at images, we have these mirroring neurons in our minds that make us feel like we are there too — that's why we like watching sports and dancing. And of course, that is a problem in politics, because it enhances the extremism in our society. No one's going to get away from social media, but, probably, that is what we should do.
How should the media participate in the narrative about the election's integrity and legitimacy?
I think that's really complex because, again, there are two, rather extreme, narratives circulating. And everyone seems to be embedded in these narratives in a way that I have not seen before. Historically, we have not seen high levels of attitude constraints — the level of consistency between attitudes within an individual belief system. However, in the last decade, attitude constraint has increased. That is largely because we are embedded in systems, the media being one, that encourages us to create more constraint among our belief systems. It aligns everybody into much clearer tribes and camps than we have seen before.
People on both the left and the right clearly feel that the government is unresponsive, but their solutions and policy preferences are distinctly different. And we have gotten much worse at being tolerant of each other. I teach political behavior, and I added a moral component to my class where I actually try to teach intellectual humility. I think that we have lost a reasonableness.
We have such a tendency to see such undesirable traits in each other.
I live in a home where my sons are Republicans and I'm not, so I have to deal with this all of the time. Living in a home that is divisive makes me have to be not divisive, and I don't think we're living in many places where that's an opportunity anymore. I live in this unique home, in a unique environment. I come from a working-class family — I'm very educated and my family's not very educated. My family could be considered more Trumpian right now, and we have to be really tolerant of each other, but most people don't have to be.
As a professor, I go out and talk to my community all the time. Even eight years ago, I could go out into the community and have a discussion about interesting ideas. Now when I go out in the community, I feel like people mostly want me to tell them what they want to hear. That's a switch. It wasn't like that a decade ago.
Regardless of the result of this election, I find it hard to think about what happens beyond November 3rd. The polarization seems hard to overcome.
I'm expecting a whole barrage of litigation regarding the integrity of ballots or arguments about the counting of ballots on November 3rd, but I can't think much beyond that either. If I try to think about what a different administration would look like under COVID, is it really going to be much different?
Between the parties, there are push and pull factors. When you think about how working-class Americans have turned to the Republican party and turned to Trump, that is not just a pull factor. The Democratic party has made a huge effort to push those people away. It's part of the rhetoric these leaders use as well. Both Clinton and Obama spoke about working-class voters in a certain way that sent a message to working-class voters that they were not wanted in the party.
It seems to me that we only ever focus on the pull factors, and we don't think about how it's both a push and pull system that works to move people into different camps. That is much more dynamic and a much more complete understanding of what is going on in our political system.
I think if we are adamant Republicans admit the failure of their party lies in race, we should be equally staunch about Democrats acknowledging the failure and abandonment of the working class.
My family is all working class, they're all out there in the grocery store, while all of my professor friends are locked away in their houses, Zooming along. To me, this moment seems like such a class issue, but we don’t seem to be talking about it in that way at all.
Our conversations in the political realm seem to consistently fail to get to the root of people’s needs. There is an underlying feeling in this country that the government is unresponsive. I mean, I have heard politicians talk about bringing businesses together for cheaper health care and lowering the cost of prescription drugs for basically my entire life. I've heard the same messages, from both sides, over and over and over again. People have experienced this over and over again, and who is or isn’t in power hasn't mattered much to their bottom line.
There are many reasons why people could find Democrats unattractive and Republicans or Trump attractive. We all think that politicians are liars. The thing about Trump is that he wears that all on his sleeve. He’s honestly dishonest. Do you know what I mean? I think for some people, they look at him and think, well yeah he's dishonest, but so is Biden, so is my Congressman.
Right, and when people operate under the guise of morality and ethics, it feels more evil.
Morality is something that worries me so much in politics. It results in equating politics with religion, because moral authority is what religion has. If you have a moral reason to do something, you can't and won’t compromise. There is no ability to compromise — if you claim moral authority, there's a line in the sand.
The whole design of the American government is to try to compromise — to thwart majoritarianism, to thwart the passions of the people, and to thwart moral authority. Madison was obsessed with the possibility of the majority being tyrants, and the whole system is designed to stop that and to enforce incrementalism.
But now, I hear politicians regularly use the word moral – easily, which is dangerous because morality prevents them from compromising. It leads the people to believe there is only one right outcome. And as we see the decline of religion globally, is politics the next religion? We tried hard in this country to remove politics from religion, but it seems that as political ideology becomes more constrained and more important in people's lives, we are moving to a place where politics is our religion. Especially on the left, because people on the right actually have another religion that they are attracted to. That is very worrisome.
Promoting politics as religion is dangerous, and promoting politicians as idols or celebrities is dangerous too. It makes it easy to forget they work for you, because celebrities have fans, fans act as a congregation, not as a critical electorate.
It's too affective. It's not rational. Where's the rationality? We've been moving away from rationality towards affective politics, and that is problematic.
When I think about candidate campaigns, I think of them as love affairs. I think it is a really great metaphor for the way you are introduced to a candidate. You can think about this in the context of 2008, where there is this love affair with Obama. And what happens in a love affair? You project onto a person and see yourself in them — they believe this, or they are just like me on this. And over time, you come to realize, well, no, they're not just like me. And the love affair starts to change. But because politics is a collective love affair, not an individual one, the projections can remain longer. In a collective world and as a collective person, I can continue to project onto them because what is the real impact on me?