American politics features two political parties that cannot agree on much of anything. On the biggest and the smallest of issues, what candidates and officials from the parties do and what they say increasingly diverge. But there is an exception: left and right, coastal or flyover, first-time candidate or long-time incumbent, almost all candidates for elected office identify themselves as in and of the community they aspire to serve. While the power of place is constantly visible in our politics, it is rarely visible enough in our scholarship.
Consider, for instance, two very different candidates running in two very different districts in the most recent elections for seats in the House of Representatives from New York State. In the Democratic primary in the very urban 14th congressional district in the Bronx and Queens in June, now-Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attacked the incumbent Joe Crowley because he “doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air [and therefore] cannot possibly represent us.” In the general election in the very rural 19th congressional district upstate, Republican incumbent John Faso—a 35-year participant in the area—criticized his Democratic challenger Antonio Delgado for “just moving here.”
These whispers of the prominence of place are drowned out by the shouts of nationalization. Not hearing Americans saying that place matters to them—and not engaging enough with the empirical evidence that it actually does—means we have misdiagnosed a problem with our current constitutional reality. It is not that American politics has nationalized, for better or for worse. It is that American politics has selectively localized, meaning that the political personalities, perspectives and priorities of a few places dominate the politics of all other places. With place made prominent as the diagnosis of our situation, it must also be prominent in the prognosis about how best to move forward. Only by ensuring that places left behind are structurally empowered can all places be treated equally (enough).
One means by which the power of place is ignored in our discussion of nationalization is because we do not realize which version of nationalization we are discussing. Nationalization can be defined in one of two ways, which are related but conceptually quite different. One version of nationalization in American politics is that our politics has suppressed what our neighborhood wants by adding it together with the preferences of other neighborhoods and averaging these preferences out. Take one drop of New York, add a little North Dakota, and the median voter between those two places is what prevails. North Dakota’s voice is still being heard, but not just North Dakota’s voice. In this version of nationalization, many places still matter, because North Dakota’s distinctive existence must be combined with New York’s distinctive existence to give us our median voter.
Another version of nationalization focuses not on averaging out neighborhood sentiments but on prioritizing a few neighborhood sentiments. North Dakota features campaigns between candidates from a few other places whose priorities and perspectives are set by those few other places. North Carolina features similar candidates from those few other places with priorities and perspectives set by those few other places. North Dakota’s or North Carolina’s or any state’s voices are not being heard as part of the averaging of places. In this version of nationalization, place still matters—but only for the very few places that matter. For these areas, the concerns they have from their distinctive place-based experiences are prioritized and imposed on all of the other places regardless of their relevance or rightness.
It is the latter version of nationalization—of selective localization—that I have argued elsewhere better characterizes our reality. America is increasingly unequal across economic places. New York City alone has twelve times the number of millionaires (based on net assets) that the entire state of Mississippi does.
America is also increasingly unequal across political places. Elected officials are from and of very few places. The wealthiest of places can more easily generate the human capital and social networks that candidates need to run for office, stay in office, and succeed in office. It should not be surprising, therefore, that candidates for statewide offices “virtually never emerge out of [the] rural areas or small towns” that are struggling in the American economy.
It is not just that political elites from and of a few places are faring better. It is that political place still matters. Individual experiences in particular places for all kinds of people shape what issues they prioritize and what perspectives they bring to bear on those issues. Our local neighbors succeed in getting us to turn out to vote more than distant strangers, and campaign volunteers that sound and seem local are more effective than volunteers that sound and seem distant.
This should be no surprise, because place remains paramount in so many other dimensions of our lives. Americans—and those around the world—are moving to the largest metropolitan areas in record amounts because being across the street or across town from the best and the brightest has never mattered more. Technological tools like Facebook that are meant to eradicate place in many ways reinforce it. A major study of Facebook friends nationwide found that nearly two-thirds of the people we friend live within 100 miles, and often even closer than that.
For constitutional scholars, it is certainly true that these place-based divisions do not map state borders perfectly or precisely—if they ever did so. It is harder for us to say that New York State has substantial influence in North Dakota than it is for us to say that Manhattan and Brooklyn have substantial influence in North Dakota. But the fact that place-based identity still exists and still matters should give us pause before dismissing too much any notion that state identity still exists and still matters.
Second, because place-based inequality is one of the reasons for our nationalized politics, it has to be part of the analysis of whether our nationalized politics is normatively desirable or undesirable, and if it is undesirable how to localize politics again. Since place is part of the problem of our politics, it has to be part of the solution.
Some scholars—such as Jessica Bulman-Pozen in her fantastic scholarship—have questioned whether nationalizing politics is entirely a bad thing. For Bulman-Pozen, if state governments adopted truly distinctive policies, these policies might still often be evaluated based on nationalized heuristics, and would have “little effect on whether officials [were] reelected.” But just because we do not see distinctive state policies and distinctive state politics does not mean we cannot create them. If place still matters as much as it does in so many other domains of American life, and if many are signaling that they want it to matter in our political life, there is good reason to believe that distinctive local approaches could exist but are being suppressed from existing.
Solutions to mitigate the corrosive effects of excessive nationalization that rely on creative and compelling changes to election law can work. But bigger problems might require bigger solutions. Our Constitution makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” Our federal government employs the overwhelming supermajority of its most important federal officials making the supreme law of the land in one place—Washington. Because place still matters, that means that localism requires state and local officials (most very far away from Washington) to be able to convince federal officials to stay out of policy areas entirely so that states and localities can regulate them, or to agree to let states and localities regulate them together with the federal government. But persuasion and respect will often be harder from across the country than from across the street.
One more substantial solution, then, that should be considered is not to ask federal officials to respect state officials, but to turn federal officials into something more like state officials by placing federal officials into the states that they are meant to hear and respect. If we want federal officials to respect localism, we should make more of them into locals. In my other work, I have discussed federal decentralization—the idea that has led to regional Federal Reserve Banks or lower federal courts being placed outside of Washington—as creating a permanent institutional mechanism by which America remains part North Dakota and New York.
Like any structural design question, there is no clear answer as to how much or what types of federal decentralization are desirable. But once we foreground federal decentralization as another dimension of constitutional design, we can start to see it as alleviating the symptoms of the durable constitutional disease of nationalization that we constantly diagnose but have yet to cure.