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...

In June of 1971, President Richard Nixon declared what would become the longest-lasting and most expensive conflict thus far in American history, that of the War On Drugs. Dramatically increasing the size and role of federal drug control agencies while pushing through policies like mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants, the administration introduced one of the worst aspects of the Neoliberal era into the American mainstream, a legacy which lingers with us to this day. According to drugpolicy.org, a top Nixon aide by the name of  John Ehrlichman later admitted: "You want to know what this was really all about. The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt thos...

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...

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...

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 ...