Perspective
Is All American Politics Really National Now?
There’s much we gloss over when talking about the role of place in our politics.
Every election in American politics is now about a single national concern: Donald Trump. Voters who fueled the victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in June’s Democratic congressional primary, for instance, were supposedly fueled by antagonism towards the Trump Administration, so the conventional wisdom goes.
What has long been reported has now been verified and explained by a fantastic new book, The Increasingly United States: How and Why American Politics Nationalized. Author Daniel J. Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, has compiled and created the best empirical case yet that all politics is really national now, and the best explanations about how we got here.