The Millennial Democracy

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...

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 ...