My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

 

We’re on the cusp of a new decade, and it feels more portentious than other dicennial thresholds in my lifetime.

In my fuzzy memories of 1979, I was wheeling around on my new red tricycle. I started the 1980s on a roll.

Soon, awareness of the larger world, including the Cold War, began to seep in. Old enough to grasp the concept of nuclear strikes, I was skeptical my church could double as a fallout shelter like the distinctive yellow and black signs on the walls promised.

But by late 1989, the Berlin Wall had recently fallen and the Soviet Union was teetering. The struggle to end apartheid was gaining ground and Nelson Mandela was six weeks from walking out of prison. I stopped worrying about nuclear war, and I wrote a research paper (with nary an inkling of the internet) for English class called “The Greenhouse Effect.”

In 1999, I was living up to Prince’s song of the same name, but the dire context of his lyrics had faded. The potential crisis of “Y2K” was averted through diligent work, and it was already difficult to imagine life before the internet. The information age had begun, and the economy was good.

By 2009, I was mostly just surviving the day-to-day as a tired working mom with a baby. I was frustrated that Democratic leadership dropped the public option from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation to get Sen. Lieberman to join a 60-vote filibuster-proof margin in the Senate.

That still felt like progress, though, in the midst of unequal fallout from the mortgage crisis and resulting recession. Too-big-to-fail banks and automakers were bailed out, while homeowners with underwater mortgages were not. Unemployment was high, with less educated workers taking the brunt of job loss, especially in rural areas like ours. Expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq dragged on, and the Tea Party built momentum on a wave of resentment.

In retrospect, we were ripping apart, and the Orwellian-sounding “Citizens United” decision in January 2010 gave it rocket fuel. The Supreme Court’s majority equated money with free speech, a laughably perverse conclusion. Politicians quickly warped further away from public opinion as “dark money” — undisclosed contributions on behalf of campaigns — was injected into our country’s political veins. “Primarying” entered our lexicon.

The ACA passed, and Republican majorities took over the House and Senate in 2011. The lack of a public option soon left self-employed people who didn’t qualify for subsidized health insurance in a desperate lurch as their policies shot up in price. Did Republicans determine that a public option was indeed necessary to fix this gap in the ACA’s market-based healthcare reform? No, Republicans instead used the pain of self-employed people as leverage to try to rip away health insurance from millions who had just gained it.

The House voted at least six times for full repeal of the ACA and more than 50 times for partial repeals. Most tellingly, “skinny repeal” failed in 2017 even after Republicans controlled the presidency and Congress.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is pursuing the ACA’s provisions through the courts. The legislation’s many advances are still in jeopardy, including: a ban on “pre-existing” conditions, a higher age limit for children on their parents’ insurance, cost-free preventive services and Medicaid expansion. 

The decade-long fight over the ACA makes this distinction as clear as ever: Democrats are most interested in using government for the purpose of helping people. Republicans want to place people at the mercy of the market in an economic system that is increasingly winner-take-all.

Looking to the start of 2020, the Cold War is back. A revanchist Russia is aggressively targeting western democracies with cybersecurity attacks and disinformation campaigns. Partly as a result, political arguments have taken on a new and strange dimension, like politicians and citizens aren’t arguing over the same reality anymore.

And far from bringing us together as promised, social media has been effectively used to both spread political propaganda and collect personal information on us, with less investigative reporting from collapsing newspapers to counter it. We can still find common ground over local political issues, but it’s almost fruitless to debate national politics in Freeborn County.

We must overcome this attack on democracy to confront exigencies like climate change. Our failure so far adds another defining feature as we enter 2020: Children are begging adult leaders to be grown-ups and face our physical reality.

Despite dire straits for democracy and climate, the 1st District has abundant potential power in our sun, our wind, our soil and our resourceful minds.

Frank Baum, who implored us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain 12 decades ago, said it well. “You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself.”

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.