The Millennial Democracy

For more than half a century, the term 'American Dream' has been indelibly associated with home ownership; typically of the suburban, white-picket-fence variety. While the early years of this 'Dream' were historically reserved for white, heterosexual, married Americans with a college-educated male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mother tending to their two or three children in a single-family dwelling with a car parked in the driveway, in the decades since this rigid picture of American life has thankfully loosened and become more inclusive in both reality and the popular imagination. That said, not only is the goal of homeownership and generational wealth-creation within middle and working-class families still woefully underserving people of color, particularly the black community, but the ability to buy into the housing market at all is increasingly out of reach for current and upcoming would-be homeowners of all backgrounds.  If this reality is to change, we need to t...

From the end of the second World War in 1945 until roughly the late 1970s, the average American worker and family, alongside the national economy as a whole, enjoyed an unprecedented stretch of growth and improvement. Manufacturing remained strong, union membership was at or near historic highs, service sector jobs were booming, home ownership saw a consistent rise, university education became accessible to millions, real wages rose alongside life expectancy and the average American's quality of live consistently improved decade over decade. Due to a variety of factors, however, this growth began to slow and even sputtered during the Oil Shock and stagflation years of the late 70s. This led to large-scale deregulation beginning under President Carter, carrying on into and well past the Reagan administration. Instead of simply updating regulations and retooling the economic levers available to state and federal governments, America ushered in the Neoliberal era of trickle-down econo...

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...

The United States of America has long been a nation of free enterprise and personal freedoms, the land of opportunity and protector of huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Yet, America is also a nation founded largely upon stolen land, much of it built by enslaved peoples and exploited immigrant laborers, where industrialists, tech tycoons and wealthy folks of all shapes and sizes have wielded huge and corrupting levels of power and influence for most of our history. Greed and exploitation has defined America just as much as freedom and prosperity has, yet the powers-that-be overwhelmingly push to remind us of the latter traits over the former. In fact, if one points out the rampant corruption and greed inherent in our current system, or makes an effort to discuss our history in its truer form, they are often labeled 'un-American', 'unpatriotic', 'socialist', 'woke' and any number of other politicized slurs used over the years to dampen dissent and p...

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...

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 ...