The Millennial Democracy

In 1949, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the United States implemented a policy regarding broadcast media known as the Fairness Doctrine. This policy required companies and individuals with broadcast licenses for radio or television to present controversial issues of public importance, and to do so in a manner which fairly showed differing viewpoints and opinions. All news stations and radio shows across the country were required to discuss current affairs deemed important to the American public, and they needed to present their coverage in a non-partisan, level-headed way. This policy tended to keep news reporting around the nation rather 'boring', notably steering coverage away from opinion or talk shows and towards news segments, public affairs shows or editorials. Yet, this was perhaps the greatest era of journalism in American history. News outlets under the Fairness Doctrine eventually gave us an industry which was likely the closest we've ever come to ...

Back in the 1930s, the United States was weathering one of the worst economic downturns we as a nation have ever seen. This much-discussed Great Depression led to one of the most substantial and impactful realignments of politics and economics in our country's history. Elected as President in 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw the nation embark on one of the largest working-and-middle-class-building projects in human history. The New Deal Coalition, as it came to be called, dominated political thought through to the 1970s, and still has a major pull on the Democratic Party today. Social Security for the elderly, banning of child-labor, setting a national minimum wage, empowering labor unions, setting a 40-hour standard workweek, requiring overtime pay and more were all accomplishments achieved during this halcyon era. In these heavy-industrial days when the United States was truly making itself great, labor unions and worker protections allowed for the creation of one of the ...

It has become an increasingly common cry on the far-right of American politics: 'We are a Republic! Not a Democracy...' And, strictly speaking, this is true. America is a republic. The thing is, China is also a republic. Russia is a republic, and so is Iran.  According to Merriam-Webster, a republic is defined as, " a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law".   In short, all which is needed to join this group of modern nation-states is to host a loosely representative form of government. Yet, America has over the years decided it wished to be much more than this broad, vague definition of a representative state. While at the founding of our nation only land-owning adult, white, Christian males were permitted to vote in many states, by 1848 all adult white men were allowed to vote. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the C...