The Millennial Democracy

In the recent 2022 midterm elections, political contributions from billionaires topped the previous all-time highs reached during the 2018 midterms, clocking in at over $881 million. Looking at the graph of billionaire contributions since the Citizen's United  Supreme Court decision in 2010, each election cycle looks like a stair step to the next, with each seeing notable increases over the previous election cycle. With the majority of American media owned by billionaires or groups of them, politics increasingly becoming inundated with their money, and industry-dominating companies owned by the wealthy often seeing record profits while the American people struggle with inflation and supply-chain disruptions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the thoughts, opinions and will of the billionaire class in this country surrounds and permeates our public discourse as never before. If the United States wants any chance of creating and maintaining a more equal and fair democracy and economy, the...

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...

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...

The American Constitution; by extension the structure of our government and much of our economic and social policy, is broken and deeply flawed. The grand experiment that is the United States of America has never been perfect, it has always been imperfect to one degree or another, and it will likely always have its flaws. That said, America's story is one of constantly trying to be better, to become more free and inclusive, of being more fair and just, of acknowledging the faults in our past and striving to correct them in our future. America is a beautiful mess, and we find ourselves at another inflection point in the history of our nation, one which will determine the direction we travel in for the next several generations to come. Since 1789, when the Constitution of the US took effect, it's been amended twenty-seven times. At the time of its ratification, the now nearly-sacred document denied women, ethnic minorities and even a large swath of adult white males the ability ...

Since the results of the 2020 presidential election were announced, declaring Joe Biden the winner of the contest, there has been a considerable and concerning percentage of the American population willing to believe that our nation and many of its institutions are irreparably damaged. Many right-leaning Americans now buy into various conspiracy theories, ones often decades old, alongside claims our national elections are so lax one party can control the results. The open discussion of secession, civil war, threats of political violence and other destabilizing topics once reserved for the far margins of society are now commonplace, even if almost exclusively peddled by partisan hacks in the right-wing media sphere. Fascist-leaning ideas and the lies used to fuel them are growing rapidly in popularity in the US, and this trend is unlikely to end anytime soon. This authoritarian-primed society is our new reality, and we more rational Americans need to attack it head-on if we intend t...

News of President Biden's Student Loan Forgiveness Program, in the amount of $10,000-$20,000 per borrower, is a welcome fulfillment of one of the President's most well known and oft-cited campaign promises. With over $1.7 trillion dollars collectively owed in student loan debt across the nation, our higher education system has produced an unstable debt bubble slowly eating away at the economic progress and upward mobility of the American people. From holding off on having children to being unable to afford mortgages on their first home, student loan debt is saddling entire generations with a burden that's only getting worse. While the positive personal and economic effects of this debt forgiveness program will likely be felt for years to come, the program's very existence reveals a much deeper and wider problem with how higher education is structured in the modern United States. Back in the early 1960's, one could attend a community college full-time for an average ...

For over 100 years, the United States has had various grass-roots movements attempting to implement and expand universal health insurance coverage. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, campaigns backed by progressives and socialists to pass universal healthcare legislation were opposed and blocked not only by conservatives, but eventually their own allies in labor unions due to the union's collective fear of losing power over paid-benefits (and thus their usefulness) in an era before there were legal protections for organized labor. While many European nations were beginning to provide 'sickness insurance' and subsidizing mutual benefit societies which helped workers cover medical costs, America's struggle for any forward momentum on the subject led to the issue being handed over to individual states. The states in turn mostly handed the responsibility over to private insurance companies and non-profits, a practice they've perfected through the decades. Throughout...