It's Time for Young Progressives to Run For Office
We need a balance with more youthful vigor, progressive ideas, and a perspective on what it means to subsist in America today.
Earlier this school year, I overheard a couple of my 12th-grade students complaining about how old our politicians are.
They were supposed to be discussing in small groups a story or poem we were studying, but I frequently encourage “off-task” dialog if it can be turned into a teachable moment.
So I casually stepped closer and listened to them a few moments before nodding, acknowledging the valid points they were making, and mentioning the shift occurring towards younger, more energetic and energizing politicians, like NY Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Missouri Rep. Cory Bush, Minn. Rep. Ilhan Omar, my current state senator James Skoufis, and soon-to-be state senator Michelle Hinchey.
I didn’t think of it at the time, but a member of my students’ own school board is in his twenties and sat just a few years before in the seats they occupied.
19-year-old Sam Lawrence is currently running for a seat in the Ohio state legislature.
40-year-old Pat Ryan, the current Ulster County, NY Executive, is running for a U.S. House seat in a high-profile special congressional election.
I’m in my late forties.
In two months I will begin my twenty-second year as a public school teacher. I’m balding, married, and have two kids, one of whom will be starting high school in the fall.
In my students’ eyes, I’m old.
My politics, though, are not.
While I steer clear of overtly discussing them and sharing my political views with my students, English being a humanities subject, like art, philosophy, history, music, and naturally, political science, are imbued with political fervor and implications. So it’s normal through their comments and writing to get a sense of where students’ political sentiments lie.
What I have surmised the past few years, certainly since 2016, is that the majority of students are fed up with environmental precarity. They want to inherit a habitable environment.
They want to attend school free of fear of being gunned down in a mass shooting.
For that matter, they want to be able to go anywhere free of fear of being gunned down in a mass shooting.
They are sick and tired of the buildings they report to every day crumbling around them while being told “there is no money” (except for the football turf).
They are embarrassed some ideologically damaged adults want to ban what they read, particularly if it’s about LGBTQ+ identities or uncomfortable history.
They definitely worry about how to pay for college and how they’re going to financially survive after it.
They’re more comfortable confronting their sexuality and that of their peers than any previous generation.
They’re more accepting of racial and cultural differences than their predecessors.
They want to control their future reproductive choices, not leave them up to six compromised right-wingers on the Supreme Court or so-called “Christian” ideologues.
Ironically, they entered high school at a time when a septuagenarian self-described Democratic Socialist was challenging the neo-liberal status quo with an older progressive policy platform reminiscent more of their grandparents’ generation than their own.
They’re over all the dithering.
In the 1990s, when I was graduating high school and entering college, my parents’ “boomer” generation held 21.3% of the nation’s wealth.
There was still a shot at the “American dream,” albeit fleeting thanks to the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s.
Today’s millennial generation, though, holds only 4.6% of the nation’s wealth.
Thirty years ago, 56% of workers who applied for union representation got it.
That’s not as good as it was half a century earlier, but better than today’s pathetic 10.3 percent union membership thanks in part to “right to work” (for less) laws the United States Supreme Court upheld in the 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision.
That means more millenials and those behind them can expect to enter a workforce unlikely to guarantee hospitable working conditions or living wages.
Then there’s the conundrum of college affordability.
Student loan debt in America is a whopping $1.5 trillion dollars, the same amount as the republican Congress cut in taxes for corporations and the super wealthy in the Trump-era Tax Cuts & Jobs Act.
Ask most people why college tuition is so high, they might mutter something about “overpaid professors,” or shrug and say, “It’s always been that way.”
Neither of those statements is correct.
Up until the 1980s, state governments subsidized 65 percent of college costs; the federal government, approximately 15 percent; leaving students with the remaining 20 percent that could be reasonably saved stocking grocery shelves, serving fast food, or pumping gas.
Today, though, it’s reversed—only 20 percent is subsidized now, leaving students and parents on the hook for 80 percent of costs no one can afford stocking shelves, serving fast food, or pumping gas.
This all started when former president Ronald Reagan—who, as California governor, ended free tuition—stated he wasn’t willing to “sponsor the intellectual curiosity” of “brats” who “protest my policies,” ushering in the era of “Let the kids pay for their own damn ‘liberal’ educations”.
Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), David Stockman, told a reporter in 1981:
“I don’t accept the notion that the federal government has an obligation to fund generous grants to anybody that wants to go to college. It seems to me that if people want to go to college bad enough then there is opportunity and responsibility on their part to finance their way through the best way they can…I would suggest that we could probably cut it a lot more.”
The high school seniors I alluded to at the beginning were in a college-level composition/literature course offered through a local community college, for which students are eligible for six credits—three semester one, three semester two—tuition free.
It would not be free if taken at the college itself.
It is typical for students to load their schedules up with similar college and Advanced Placement (AP) courses in addition to participating in extra-curricular activities and working part-time jobs.
They are not doing this primarily for the intellectual challenge.
They’re doing it so they can cushion the financial body blow they’ll receive when they walk onto college campuses the following year.
This generation also knows what it’s like to attend school remotely due to a preventable once-in-a-century pandemic.
That means they had to experience what it’s like to see friends, family members, and teachers get sick with a highly contagious novel virus responsible for over six million deaths worldwide.
That means they had a front-row seat in a dysfunctional healthcare system saddling millions with new preexisting conditions and healthcare debt.
The New York Times noted in an article titled Medical Mystery: Something Happened to U.S. Health Spending After 1980:
“America was in the realm of other countries in per-capita health spending through about 1980. Then it diverged.
“It’s the same story with health spending as a fraction of gross domestic product. Likewise, life expectancy. In 1980, the U.S. was right in the middle of the pack of peer nations in life expectancy at birth. But by the mid-2000s, we were at the bottom of the pack.”
The Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) reports:
“We find that 23 million people (nearly 1 in 10 adults) owe significant medical debt. The SIPP survey suggests people in the United States owe at least $195 billion in medical debt.”
And the prospect of owning a home?
How about even the prospect of being able to rent?
In the 1950s, the median single-family home price was about 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, according to the Fed, the median house goes for $374,900.
With a median American income of $35,805, that’s a more than ten-to-one ratio between housing costs and annual income.
Nashville, Tenn. vice-mayor Bruce Hull told the Wall Street Journal that in the suburb of Spring Hill, people used to be able to rent “a three-bedroom, two-bath house for $1,000 a month.”
Today, though, the Journal notes, “The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month.”
And taxes?
Everyone complains about them, and far too many assume the wealthiest pay an appropriate share of them.
They don’t, and once again, we can blame it on Reagan.
The top tax rate from the 1930s to the 1960s was 90% until President Lyndon Johnson dropped it down to 74% .
Reagan, though, took a meat axe to the tax code and slashed the rate to an insulting 27%, and cut corporate tax rates from 50% to nearly zero.
With exemptions and loopholes corporations bribe (mostly republican) politicians to carve out of the tax codes, the economic royalists today pay on average 3.4%.
According to a recent ProPublica investigation, the 25 wealthiest Americans collectively made $401 billion between 2014 and 2018.
The past 20 years, CEOs have boasted an average increase 350 times more than their employees.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies’ Sarah Anderson’s testimony to the Senate budget committee, in 2018, almost 80 percent of S&P 500 companies paid their CEOs more than 100 times the median salary of their average worker; nearly 10 percent had median pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four.
At the 50 publicly traded American corporations with the widest pay disparities, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years to earn the CEO’s annual salary.
Combined with Reagan’s original tax cuts and the trillions more eliminated during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations, we have seen a $50 trillion transfer of real wealth from the middle class to the top 1%.
There were no billionaires in American 40 years ago.
Now there are over 900.
The square root of all this disaster is the presence of money in politics and privately funded elections, brought to us by a series of Supreme Court decisions over the past fifty years that have legalized political bribery, which now seems to have metastasized out of Congress into the Court itself.
Money, particularly dark money, in politics has created the conditions for the rot to set in, and all that's left is for it to spread until the house collapses.
And the youth of America are over it.
This is the most progressive generation in decades, and the country it hopes to contribute to is giving it a raw deal.
While we need experienced lawmakers at all levels to provide the necessary institutional memory, and advanced age should not automatically disqualify one from running or holding office, we need more young progressives in politics.
Elections are term limits; we don’t need to impose artificial term limits to force people out, especially when they’re doing a good job.
What we need is a balance with more youthful vigor, progressive ideas, and a perspective on what it means to subsist in America today.