Is America worth saving?

America is in trouble. Around the world, and here at home, it is widely recognized that the America that led the western world for the past 80 years is no longer up to the challenge. In our nation’s capital, Congress can barely pass a budget without a federal shutdown and major legislative initiatives designed to address critical challenges are almost an anachronism.
The problems aren’t hard to name. Housing costs have outrun paychecks. Health care costs spiral endlessly while rural hospitals struggle to keep their doors open. Immigration reform, which presidents have promised for decades, seems an impossibility. Here in the North Country, young families still leave for opportunities elsewhere, and our main streets fight to hang on. Meanwhile, we have an economy that increasingly funnels virtually all new wealth to the very top.
While the current occupant of the White House has faced considerable and justifiable criticism for his wrecking ball approach to, well, everything, America’s troubles were brewing long before Donald Trump emerged onto the political scene.
The good news, if there is any, is that it is still within our power to fix what is broken in America and as we move past the mid-term elections in the days and weeks to come, every American of good faith should be willing to step beyond partisan divisions to support ideas and initiatives that bolster the democratic nature of the American experiment. Here are some of the ways we can begin to restore the America most of us grew up with— an America where we could disagree without demonizing the other side. Where we could lose an election and admit that it was the will of the voters.
Get serious about campaign finance reform. Fundamentally, the downfall of America’s ability to govern itself was fueled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision. This wasn’t based on law or on the Constitution. It was a conscious and ideological decision that the Roberts’ court enacted to supercharge the ability of corporations and the ultra-wealthy to sway our elections in favor of candidates willing to do their bidding. Its impact has been cataclysmic, as we now have a handful of the country’s wealthiest billionaires, and most particularly the world’s first trillionaire, literally buying elections for their selected candidates with spending unlike anything we’ve seen before. Here in Minnesota, we have seen millions in dollars spent in the governor’s race by a single Wisconsin billionaire to back Republican Lisa Demuth. Even closer to home, right here in the District Three legislative race, two dark money groups have poured nearly $2 million into an effort to defeat Sen. Grant Hauschild, who in his first term has proven to be a remarkably effective senator for our region. It’s the most ever spent on a legislative seat in Minnesota.
Across the country, Elon Musk, a South African immigrant, has already poured nearly half a billion dollars into the mid-terms, often supporting candidates with a history of corruption. Is this really how want our elections to operate?
The Supreme Court disingenuously framed its Citizens United decision around free speech, which means it will likely take a constitutional amendment to fix the situation. While that process is difficult and time-consuming, Americans of all political stripes recognize the dangers inherent in the current reality. If it takes an amendment, now is the time to start the process. It’s time that Americans tell the billionaires to butt out of our elections.
Restore fairness to our communications Our founders enshrined a free press in the First Amendment because they recognized the critical role that our communications media play in the creation of the informed electorate that is essential to the functioning of a viable democracy. Yet, sadly, the information environment that exists today is increasingly being purchased by the same billionaires who pour vast sums into our elections, and that clearly affects coverage. While regulations, like the equal time rule, can tame the worst excesses on media that utilize the public airwaves, those rules don’t apply to cable channels or the digital spaces that most Americans now rely on for news and information. This unregulated sphere has opened the floodgates for foreign bots, not to mention domestic purveyors of disinformation, to influence our elections. We shouldn’t stand for it.
Regulating all of this will be a challenge, but it’s time to hold social media accountable for the steady diet of disinformation they feed to the American electorate. People like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have made billions serving up falsehoods to Americans while vacuuming up their private data for sale to whoever has the cash to buy it. They are actively harming America for profit and it’s time we put a stop to it.
Recommit to democracy itself. This one shouldn’t be controversial. Candidates regardless of party should commit publicly and without qualification to the democratic underpinnings enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. That means support for free and fair elections, which entails ending voter suppression and the constant efforts to undermine elections with false claims of voter fraud. Every candidate should pledge to support the results of their election and not stand in the way of a peaceful transfer of power. Any candidate unwilling to make that pledge has no business seeking office and no American of good faith would vote for such a person.
None of this will be easy, but we need to ask ourselves the obvious question. Is America worth saving? If the answer is yes, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and get to work.