The Millennial Democracy

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 ...

In 1935, already a handful of years into the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Hiring millions of unemployed American workers to complete various infrastructure and public-good projects such as maintenance of roads, building dams and the construction of parks and schools, the WPA constituted one of the most ambitious components of FDR's New Deal programs. Between 1935 and 1943, the WPA created nearly 8 million jobs. At its peak in 1938, the WPA provided paid jobs for 3 million unemployed adults, with unemployed youth also given work through their own division, the National Youth Administration. The goal of the WPA was to provide one paid job for all families in which the breadwinner suffered long-term unemployment. The stated goal of public building programs was to end the depression, or at least alleviate its worst effects. Millions of people needed subsistence incomes. Work relief was pr...

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...

Education reform in the United States has followed similar trends over the last twenty years or so. Back in 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act, advocated for by the George W. Bush administration, was passed through both chambers of the legislature and signed by the President. Based on the claim he'd overseen a "Texas Miracle" as the namesake state's governor, Bush upheld if every student between the 3rd and 8th grades were annually tested, with high-performing schools rewarded and low-performing schools penalized, the nation would see test scores increase, teacher performance rebound and graduation rates soar. Under this new education regime, America would supposedly undergo a massive investment into underprivileged children by giving teachers and school districts the motivation they needed to perform. In 2009, President Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" initiative doubled down on the concepts implemented during the Bush years with a new round of $5 billi...

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 ...

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 ...

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...