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
The Question of Trust in American Politics
by Nick Penniman
December 11, 2020
This interview with Nick Penniman, founder of Issue One, was conducted and condensed by franknews.
Nick | I started Issue One six years ago with the explicit purpose of developing a bipartisan organization to pursue political reform at the federal level. Since then, we’ve developed a staff of about 30 and have supported more than a dozen pieces of legislation. Last year, we had three legislative victories. We have recruited 200 former members of Congress to join us as something called The ReFormers Caucus. Nearly half of them are Republicans. Most recently we've pivoted heavily into election integrity issues. We launched a $20 million campaign in October called Count Every Vote to help make sure that the 2020 elections were safe, secure, and complete.
frank | How do you ensure that? What do your specific efforts look like?
Our campaign is mainly a public relations campaign. The purpose of which is to validate the democratic process in this country. The campaign is overseen by the National Council on Election Integrity, which is a group of more than 40 individuals, half Republicans, and half Democrats. It's everyone from Madeleine Albright to Leon Panetta to Tom Ridge to Bill Frist to Tom Daschle to Dan Coats, who was President Donald Trump's director of national intelligence. It's a mix of Democrats and Republicans. There are seven former Cabinet secretaries, nine former U.S. senators, two retired admirals, and one retired general. It’s a great group.
Going into this cycle, we knew Trump was going to try to do exactly what he's doing, which is to proclaim that if he lost, it was because of fraud because of a rigged process. We predicted that that would happen. So we wanted to put up some kind of a counterforce to that that had bipartisan credibility and integrity.
Since the election, we've pivoted into some of these state-by-state fights. We are doing ad campaigns. In sum, it’s a public relations campaign to spread the reassurance message that the democratic process was safe, secure, and definitive, but also, when things go south, to stop things from happening.
Legislatively, it doesn't seem like there's a huge argument on the Trump side, but there’s a lot at stake in terms of people's faith in the electoral system.
Right. Step one was to put forth the propaganda of fraud, and repeat that, and convince enough people within the Republican Party, and enough Trump voters, that this was a fraudulent election. The Politico poll that came out the other week showed that 70% of Republicans believe that the election was not free and fair. Step two is to file the lawsuits to help put forth the notion of fraud. But they've won just one out of over 40 of the lawsuits! They have failed to produce any evidence. They are, in effect, doubling down on the propaganda. Step three is to try to convince states that because the election was fraudulent, it's really up to the legislatures to do the right thing and send Republican slates of electors in order to express the will of the people.
Has anything ever come close to that 70% threshold?
No.
How do you measure your success with your ad campaigns?
It's very hard to measure success. In order to show that the ad campaign is moving the needle in some way, we would have had to have begun a daily or weekly tracking poll a long time ago. But we haven't. Our assumption is that spending a lot of money in these states and putting it on Fox, on conservative talk radio, in bipartisan op-eds in the Milwaukee paper, and things like that, will somehow open up enough room for enough of the Republicans that Trump has been courting to think twice about what they're doing.
What seems to have been revealed through this election is how much hinges on a handful of individuals adhering to democratic norms. Have those norms been broken irreparably
If you go all the way back through 19th and 20th-century presidents, I don't think we've ever had this close brush with true authoritarianism before. You have a president who is willing to destroy all the guardrails, all the democratic norms, and standards to maintain his grip on power, with not enough of a substantial pushback within his own party. It's pretty terrifying. I'm deeply concerned about the future of what the next election cycle looks like.
Trump has done a great job at demeaning and degrading the integrity of our election process in America. It is not unlikely that in future elections, people will continue to feel that it is all rigged. The consequences of that are potentially profound.
That is contrasted, of course, with the recent press release from the Cyber Security Infrastructure Agency that said that they believe that this is the most secure election in U.S. history. At the very moment that we should be celebrating that we voted in the highest percentages in a hundred years, with the highest numbers ever, during a pandemic, with the least amount of interference, we're sitting here scared to death that the president of the United States is going to undermine the popular will of the people. It's a pretty striking moment to be in.
The public trust in our election system and the actual efficiency & reliance of the system are not converging. Our actual progress in terms of election administration is not driving the public perception. What, instead, do you think is driving these narratives?
I think it's been a long time coming. The destruction and depletion of the political system in this country through gerrymandering, through the domination of money in politics, through the barriers that have been put up to people voting, through tribalization of media and information — all of those combined create an environment that's really fertile for authoritarians to claim that the system's rigged against the regular people in this country. That is what Trump did. He claimed that he was going to do something about it, that he was an outsider, and that he was the only one who could do something about it. It was a very appealing pitch in 2016.
For the first time in U.S. history, the majority of people in this country said their children's lives would not be better than their lives. I have three kids. If I actually woke up every single day of my life and looked at my little kids and thought that their lives would be worse than my life and thought that my life is worse than my parents' life – that’s a horrible feeling. Combined, it creates a huge opportunity for someone with an authoritarian mindset to come in and say we need to wreck the whole thing because it's obviously not working for anyone.
If I really had to pin what's occurred in the last month on one phenomenon, it would be on the tribalization of the media. The disparity between the 70% of Republicans who believe that this was not a free and fair election, while our own Department of Homeland Security is claiming that it was the safest and most secure in history shows that we have people living in totally different information environments.
Why do you think that is?
It's a really hard one to solve. We need to reconsolidate the national narrative around journalism. To do that, I think we have to create a campaign equivalent to what we did with smoking. We have to teach people that consuming totally biased, totally propagandistic media is actually bad for them.
I spent 15 years of my life as a journalist before this. I was a newspaper editor and a magazine reporter and then a magazine publisher. My dad was a newspaper publisher. When I grew up, the conversation was centered around a handful of media outlets. I grew up in St. Louis. There was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. There was the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. At our house, we got Newsweek and Time. We would watch the nightly news. And maybe we would get the National Review, a conservative magazine, sent to our house, but that was about it.
What was powerful about that is that all of those places were committed to the project of journalism and to getting it right. The conversation that we were having in this country was not about whether or not the facts existed, but what to do with the facts. That's what we've got to get back to.
The only solution that I can think of is treating it like tobacco. You can do those things if you want, but you should know what they're really bad for you. Ultimately, if you're going to be consuming media a couple of hours a day, you should be going to places that are committed to the art of journalism and to the truth.