The Millennial Democracy

Prior to the presidential election of 2016, a majority of Americans reasonably presumed politics would continue more-or-less as usual. After decades of frustrating yet rather consistent Neoliberal politics stretching back to the Reagan Administration of the 80s, wherein both major political parties seemed more like different sides of the same policy coin rather than ideological opposites, discontented populist wings within both parties were clearly growing in prominence. Yet, left-leaning progressives and rightwing nationalists alike remained unable to capture the majority of the vote from their respective sides, let alone coax enough moderates and independents in the ideological middle to win the White House. That all changed, however, with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States. Since his ascension to the Oval Office, America's political discourse has been treading dangerously close to the edge of losing the democratic republic we hold dear. Sadly...

Over the last fifty years or so, America has been living under a federal-level regime of thought and policy known as Neoliberalism. While the movement towards deregulation, 'trickle-down-economics' and a general "government is bad" philosophy began emerging throughout the 1970s, these trends entered American reality in-force during the 1980s and 90s. In his inaugural address in 1981, President Ronald Reagan stated unequivocally, "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." The president was speaking to the supposed ills of deficit spending, allegedly high taxation and the rampant stagflation and oil shock which had impacted Americans during the back half of the 70s. This line from President Reagan, more than possibly any other sentence from any other speech during his time in the White House, has guided the trends and policies advocated for by both major parties in the United States, yet particularly the...

Something rather unprecedented in American history has occurred since the Presidential election of 2020. While the majority of Americans readily accepted the reality of President Joe Biden's electoral victory over former President Donald Trump, a sizable and consistent percentage of the population has fully bought into the so-called "Big Lie" which states Trump was the true winner and the election was stolen from him. This has resulted in one of the most stilted public reactions to an exchange of power from one President to another both in modern memory and all of American history. Due to this infamous and disturbing lie, and many other falsehoods which surround it (such as the claim Donald Trump is secretly still leading the country from his home in Mar-a-Lago), there has been a momentous and terrible attack on voting rights in many Republican-leaning states around the nation. The impact of many of these blatant attacks on democracy will begin to be felt starting with th...

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...