Ask What You Can Do for Your State
Any college freshman can tell you that America is not as homogeneous as we pretend. We come to Washington University in St. Louis knowing we will meet people of different cultural backgrounds, but heritage manifests itself in ways we do not expect. No one talks about North Dakota’s culture, West Virginia’s culture, or Michigan’s culture, but our home state’s unique history is imbibed in our values, the way we were taught history, and the kind of life we expect to lead. State pride fell by the wayside in the whiplash of history, and now we fail to acknowledge this beautiful kind of diversity.
The United States is an enormous country, with fifty nation-sized states. Many empires have failed to organize so many disparate communities on even a tenth the scale. The Founders’ great insight that has kept this unwieldy clot of humanity together is the division of power between federal, state, and local government: federalism. Each of the thirteen original colonies had its own culture and pride to the point of tribalism, and the Union was a wary compromise. Even now in the era of interstates, national news media, and Starbucks, each state is unique.
I had always thought state borders were perhaps the least significant divisions amongst humanity. I was surrounded my whole life with reminders of national heritage, immigrant heritage, and political partisanship, but until college I never noticed how much my state’s heritage had molded me. I am an American, I am a mixed race woman, I am a Democrat, but I am also an Alabamian. My state heritage is growing up in the tracks of civil rights marches and an economy ignorant of its own dependence on a healthy environment. I joined the Washington University Political Review to experience a political spectrum I knew Alabama had been missing. My suspicions were valid; Democratic and Republican beliefs and platforms vary across the states. In fact, the two parties can often agree on local policies that would disgust party members elsewhere. The politicians we defend on party lines in some far off suburb may be farther from our beliefs than our opposing party member next door. Thinking this disparity goes unnoticed, I wanted to see what people assumed Democrats and Republicans to stand for based on their home state.
I built a survey. I asked my voluntary and anonymous respondents to identify their home state, and then rank from one to five how they believed Democrats and Republicans to stand on a variety of current issues, one being ‘very against’ and five being ‘very in favor’. A second section asked respondents how concerned Democrats and Republicans in their home state were about general policy areas such as education, climate change, and immigration, one being ‘least concern’ and five being ‘greatest concern’. A final, open-ended section encouraged respondents to explain any policy perspectives they believed to be unique to their state. Not a scientific endeavor, my open survey was meant to let different individual voices demonstrate the spectrum of political opinion even within a political party. Together, my seventy-five respondents showed that there is no single definition of what a Democrat or Republican stands for. In particular, when survey respondents were gathered by home state and their responses averaged, the perspective of Democrats and Republicans on gun control and their level of concern about police brutality and unemployment varied greatly by state even within a party. The media’s focus on federal bipartisanship simplifies the compromising reason of the American individual to one-dimensional punchlines. There is nuance and compromise in the philosophy of our citizenry, just as there must be in our policy. Several survey respondents gave examples of the bipartisan state and local politics the media overlooks. A student from Maryland reported bipartisan support for a generous education budget and environmental legislation to protect the economic and cultural value of Chesapeake Bay. Perhaps bipartisan compromise is best built at the local level up, where your neighbor is too close to demonize. If so, participating in state and local politics could go a long way toward healing America’s political divide.
The state is the long-forgotten original unit of government. Still, returning to politics at the state and local rather than the federal level is not about shutting down federal agencies or waiting for an act of Congress. The South fought every stage of the civil rights movement, and progress came in fits of federal intervention. Intervention has always been necessary, because state and local governments have not accurately represented their constituent populations. They have not acted in the best interest of their people, because they were not elected by their people. If state and township politicians are going to act the will of their constituents without a top down order, their constituents are going to have to choose them carefully. For the majority of American history, over half of the population could not vote. Lack of representation was legislated. This is the century where lack of representation can be blamed on constituent apathy. We vote in the presidential election of course; this is the one ballot we are pressured to cast. We may also cast straight tickets for the congressmen on that presidential ballot, maybe even the lucky few state and local politicians further down that list. But when we only consistently try to be informed and participatory for the presidential election, we make the federal government the only level of government that even gets close to representing us. Naturally, we want the body that represents us to be the body with all of the power, and we call on the federal government to exercise powers it was never intended to have.
The nation is too populous, diverse, and physically spacious for this one body to comprehend its small scale issues and solve them efficiently. How many states have the presidential candidates lived in? How many have they even visited? They can not and do not understand the perspective of every state. We spend so much time on the presidential election that we only think of our parties on the national level. We do not even show the same involvement we show at the presidential election for our states’ most important federal representatives, our congressmen. In reality, the two parties’ policy goals at the state and local levels are what determine the reality of our immediate communities. Regardless of party, our neighbors have greater personal investment in resolving our local issues anyway, because they see and share our troubles firsthand. We need state and local government. Let’s make state and local government do its job; let’s make state and local government represent us; let’s get out and vote in our state and local elections. Once the federal government stops getting called on to intervene, it can finally focus on the issues it is meant to address. If each of us considers our mayor, school board, city council, state legislators, Governor, Senators, Representatives, and every official in between, the sum of our representation’s power is much greater than even the President’s. Yet, we do not vote for the people that most closely regulate our everyday lives.
Freshmen, at no point in your life will it be easier to start a good habit. Our generation is inheriting responsibility for choosing all 513,200 of the United States’ public officials. The Missouri state and St. Louis County local election schedules are only a Google search away. In 2016 alone, Missouri residents are responsible for a bond election, municipal election, and state government primary, on top of the presidential primary and election. And if you too are disgusted by the way presidential elections disseminate into name-calling and banner-waving, a populace that votes every couple of months would be a lot less zealous and petty. We would stay more informed and predict doomsday less often. We would link our votes to outcomes and test ideological policies on a small scale before we choose the next Commander in Chief. But we would see the most crucial growth in the diversity of our politicians. Make sure the next Liquor Control Board, the next County Executive, the next Election Board – or any of the other under-the-radar officials controlling you – represents your interests. Though I have often said this begrudgingly, I am an Alabamian. I am responsible for making it the Alabama I want it to be. Participating in state and local elections makes these politicians more representative of their constituency and therefore more effective, which is better for the truly heterogeneous America. Ask what you can do for your state, and you’ll see what your country can do for you.