Recent years have seen many books emphasizing political division in the contemporary United States. Daniel Hopkins’s The Increasingly United States draws the eye with its counterintuitive title, seemingly challenging the idea of a dissolving polity. Upon closer inspection, Hopkins does not argue that American politics is not polarized—one of the chapters is entitled “E Pluribus Duo”—but, rather, builds an insightful argument about a source of our mass political division. Resourcefully marshaling a vast range of quantitative data, he argues that the nationalization of American political behavior is a major long-term trend in American politics. In this account, subnational places—states and cities—matter less than they used to for mass political behavior because politics is increasingly nationalized into one big conversation, and we can increasingly account for Americans’ political positions based on individual characteristics rather than geographic position. (Maybe it is more precise to describe Hopkins’s Americans or states or localities as increasingly comparable, but “united” certainly makes for a better title.) The result is fewer opportunities for national compromises rooted in place-based mutual exchange or subnational ideological variation. Simultaneously, contra Duvergerian expectations, subnational layers of the federal system cease to serve as democratically responsive venues for local problem solving, but instead become epiphenomenal echoes (or intensifying distillations) of national political programs.
For Hopkins, nationalization entails a combination of two dimensions: a covariation of political choices by voters across levels of the federal system and a prioritization of national over subnational politics. The book’s empirical core unfolds in two sections, which describe and explain nationalization, respectively. Throughout, Hopkins draws on surveys, experiments, election results, campaign contributions, media content, and other original and found sources to test the observable implications of both descriptive and causal-origin theories of nationalization. His lean text belies the mountain of work behind its creation. In the biggest-picture descriptive analysis, Hopkins shows that partisan choices are now more consistent across levels of office than they were decades ago. This is more than a little troubling for representation, as issues and funding streams (for House, governor, or mayor) are increasingly likely to originate outside the territory being contested (pp. 75–80), skewing lines of accountability. He later demonstrates voters’ lower interest in subnational affairs. In one chapter, he interrogates his own “politicized places” thesis by examining whether geographical proximity to an object related to a potentially controversial issue (like a nuclear power plant or a wolfpack) affects opinion about that issue; mostly it does not (Chap. 5). This is a great exercise (though I agree with the author that the test fits some of the cases better than others).
The author then turns to causes. Rather than pushing a sole factor for a big change, Hopkins appropriately identifies several parallel factors working in combination (p. 128). Economic shifts, southern realignment, and more centralized government activity drive the first dimension of nationalization. He argues cleverly that the second dimension is driven by the increasingly national geography of media technology. Drawing out Benedict Anderson’s (1983) insight that nations essentially are common media markets that shape members’ identities, Hopkins looks hard at that mechanism. Changes in technologies entailed a change in media content. Geographically constrained media like newspapers and radio waves tend to include local affairs along with national news. Not so for cable and Internet-based sources, which arrive instantly everywhere—and their business model is national news only. This nationalized conversation weakens citizens’ knowledge and interest in local affairs. Local officials notice this as well, adapting their own strategies to address national events remote from their home constituencies. This single national conversation drowns out all others and ultimately strengthens national identity and issues relative to subnational.
As if to illustrate this point, while I was reading this book, a Chicago alderman appeared in my Twitter feed protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policy in San Diego, far from the potholes and policing that constitute his actual portfolio of authority, but possibly nearer the consciousness of his most engaged constituents. This is a big piece of Hopkins’s argument: While our representative institutions remain rooted in territory, the rest of the game has nationalized for both politicians and constituents.
In a book with thoughtful analyses from as many angles as this one, there are countless small decisions one might interrogate, but the big picture here seems more important. One central implication is that place does not matter much for mass opinion. Although places “can and do differ markedly [in their politics], . . . those differences are primarily due to compositional differences in who lives where rather than the contextual effects of living in specific places” (p. 8). Hopkins makes this case based on a number of analyses that include census measures of respondents’ contexts or their proximity to potentially controversial objects (see, e.g., Chap. 5 or p.189). But what if we think more flexibly about place as a thick, consciousness-shaping concept as Philip Ethington and Jason McDaniel do? Even if we are increasingly sedentary Web crawlers plugged into our national newsfeeds, we sometimes (even if less than before) emerge from our lairs to partake in common life with those around us. What if the message we receive from our places when we do is that place does not matter?
In rough parallel with the nationalization trend identified here, the United States has suburbanized. Research by Eric Oliver, Juliet Gainsborough, Nancy Burns, and Amy Bridges (among others) suggest that we now have generations of citizens who have only lived in new places with local governance institutions emphasizing fragmentation, nonpartisanship, professionalized insulation from democracy, social homogeneity, and low-stakes local affairs. Perhaps it is natural that citizens hailing from places where local affairs have been intentionally “depoliticized”— where elections and local democracy are only obscurely connected to actual governance decisions—know little about their local affairs.
Concurrently, the nationalization of the economy (probably strongest in these new places, where national chains build on a blank slate) means that our experiences as consumers and workers have also flattened across the nation. Hopkins and I might have differential access to Philly cheesesteaks and Chicago deep dish in our old places, but Taco Bell is never far away for either of us, or for most Americans. In this newly built America, there is less “place” in the sense of locally developed, distinctive communities with particular traditions or outlooks. The European nation-building projects described by Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism, 1983), Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities, 1983), and Eugen Weber (Peasants into Frenchmen, 1976) strengthened national identity, but long-held, place-based loyalties (and associated distinctive politics) to prenational communities persist, as in Catalonia or Scotland or Brittany. Not so in the suburbia where I grew up, 20 miles from Chicago and 20 years from farmland. Should we say place does not matter for identity if it is the (placeless) character of places that makes them seem less important? And do we have a meta-compositional effect, in which the pool of representative Americans has been largely drained of place-ness because they do not have experiences with it? These institutional and cultural questions do not touch Hopkins’s findings about the relative salience of state and national politics, but they are important for those optimistic about a reinvigoration of American localism, and might sit alongside media changes as a cause of nationalized political behavior.
We might gain insight about place from one finding from Hopkins’s analysis of local identity. African Americans, a group that was relatively excluded from the new places of twentieth-century America, stand out as a group that does still value place and local identity (p. 189). In a nation where racial subjugation’s most powerful forms remain very local (as theorized in recent work by Vesla Weaver and Joe Soss), is it natural or paradoxical that a group that is particularly vulnerable to the lived reality that the “police are our government” is also distinctively local in its identity allegiances? What might these exceptional respondents tell us about the modal American for whom place does not entail quite such contentious local politics?
This raises a second question, about the content of our nationalized politics. Race dances around the edges of the analysis, but maybe it should just be at the center. The realignment of the (white) South is noted as an important cause of nationalized partisan voting behavior (p. 128). Before this midcentury racial realignment, American policymaking was constrained in many areas by a subnational southern bloc that thought about race on every issue (as shown most recently in work by David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski). After the realignment, on Hopkins’s chronological and causal timeline, we have been nationalizing. Perhaps we have actually been southernizing, as race takes center stage in shaping the coalitions and electoral decisions of Americans throughout the nation. For instance, in tests of politicized places, what draws this reader’s eye are the issues on which proximity does seem to matter: terrorism, crime, immigration. There is recent compelling evidence provided by Hopkins, Ryan Enos, and others that (white) Americans respond to their local racial context in ways relevant to both dimensions of nationalization. Racial conflicts once compartmentalized as local or sectional are now unavoidably national; how different, really, are nationalization and racialization? And how does nationalization constrain officials who might find creative ways to address local group-based conflict, as I observe among mid-twentieth-century American urbanites in The Cities on the Hill, perhaps keeping us from addressing other challenges?
Adding the vocabulary of nationalization as a way to connect many seemingly unrelated findings by itself makes this a vital contribution to our current conversation about American politics. The dozens of smaller pieces within The Increasingly United States that advance and outline the contours of that process make it a durably invaluable one.
