My best friend’s 13-year-old son recently asked me to friend him on the social media app BeReal.

She had decided to let him download BeReal partially because it lets users post just once per day and has very limited chat features, and only under the condition that they had to be friends. But he was free to choose what and when to post, what to comment, and whom to befriend (including, to my amusement, me). My friend was treating it like a learner’s-permit version of Instagram or Facebook. Her son could drive his social media car, but only with an adult present in the front seat.

Like many parents and caregivers, her aim was to develop a way for her son to safely learn about and prepare for our increasingly virtually connected world, while still respecting his right to speech and self-expression in an age-appropriate manner. This vision of adolescence as a driver’s permit to adult-sized rights regularly emerges in my work as a historian of law and childhood. Throughout histories of childhood and youth, my profession is examining the boundaries of young people’s rights in various contexts, from medical consent to due process rights that have contemporary political implications.

But in some states, the law may soon criminalize these very actions.

In the wake of remote learning’s increased screen time and the rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation, predominately conservative lawmakers have been raising a new round of moral panic over young people’s mental health and their exposure to adult content. Their push for a radical new vision of internet access is rooted in political fears about youth and social media, and threatens decades of free speech protections.

There is a long history of moral panics around youth and the popular technology of their eras. The Victorians worried that bicycles enabled teens and unmarried adults to avoid chaperones, and that they contributed to a growing popularity of bloomers over dresses or skirts. For Cold War parents, comic books symbolized the rise of the violent and crazed juvenile delinquent and sparked a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigation. These panics were less a reaction to reality, but rather, they represented cyclical anxieties of generational segregation and control over young people.

Foundational child protection law is already in place in the United States. In 1998, the Federal Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibited the collection of online data from online users under the age of 12. In 2013, it was amended to expand its reach. But now, state lawmakers want legislation that would criminalize internet access for millions of Americans.

For adults, this legislation has focused on limiting access to pornography. But more changes in process are targeting young people’s social media usage. In Texas, state representative Jared Patterson filed H.B. No. 896 last December, which would have banned any person under the age of 18 from using social media apps, and allowed parents to request the removal of their children’s social media accounts. Though the bill failed to pass, undeterred conservatives in Utah pushed forward a similar bill, quickly passed and signed into law this March, which prohibits minors from having any social media accounts. It also has created a nearly unenforceable “internet curfew.”

While the Utah and Texas cases represent the most extreme measures in the new efforts to control youth internet access, a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers has also introduced the more seemingly palatable Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, a revamped version of the previously rejected Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which aims to censor material considered potentially “harmful.” Yet, as law and technology expert Mike Masnick has written, with no clear definition of “harmful content,” state attorney generals can define the term as it suits them, and use it to target websites they want blocked for ideological reasons. Last year, over 90 LGBTQ+ and human rights groups signed a letter in protest of KOSA.

It’s true that there is content on the internet that poses dangers to minors. The media has featured heartbreaking stories of cyberbullying and online predators. But it’s because of those dangers that nuance in lawmaking is so critical. Blanket bans replicate the very dangers they are designed to prevent: Strict parental controls create a ring of invisibility around domestic abuse, while increasing data collection from all Americans, child or adult.

Likewise, while studies have pointed to social media’s impact on mental health, banning it won’t solve the youth mental health crisis, as the legislation suggests. Social media is just one part of American childhood today, alongside rampant gun violence, anti-LGBTQ+ fascism, and endemic economic inequality.

And then there’s the First Amendment. By seeking to purge children from the internet, conservative lawmakers are denying young people the right to expression, speech, and creativity. Stripping them of their right to speak out on platforms, often about issues that impact them directly, runs counter to decades of precedent for young people.

Young people had their earliest First Amendment victory in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), when siblings Mary Beth and John Tinker, who had been expelled for their silent protest of the Vietnam War, argued that their rights to free speech did not end at the entrance of their public school. The Supreme Court agreed. Subsequent decisions, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier (1988) and Morse v. Frederick (2007), upheld Tinker’s basic ruling, while carving out caveats in favor of school administrators. But until 2021, the Supreme Court had yet to deal with a case regarding youth free speech and the internet.

Then came the memorably named “Cursing Cheerleader” case, Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L. After a student recorded and uploaded a Snapchat story featuring a caption cursing and criticizing her high school, school administrators suspended her from the junior varsity cheerleading team. The case asked the Court if Tinker applied to a student’s social media post. With an 8-1 decision, the Court found that it did. (Justice Clarence Thomas, the sole dissent, argued for a chipping away of Tinker in favor of schools and parents.)

When Utah’s latest social media ban is inevitably challenged in court, the state will need to argue against these Supreme Court rulings that uphold youth First Amendment protections. But it takes time for a case to make its way through the courts. Until then, this law and others like it will deny young people their right to be online, while creating a much more dangerous digital landscape for the very children they allege to protect.

Though the internet isn’t perfect, it can be a space of creativity and intellectual engagement for youth. Ranging from budding craftspeople learning to operate a business, to youth activists working on climate change and LGBTQ rights, young people wield their digital literacy for positive efforts, often using social media in the process. Banning their social media use will merely push them to further hide their online activity, and to speak less freely about the issues they face in digital spaces. It criminalizes their attempts to learn to live in a virtual world and ignores the necessity of the internet for modern life.

It’s better to arm the young people in our lives with digital literacy and open dialogue. Take a page from my friend’s parenting book, give them space to learn, post silly pictures, and teach you a thing or two. And, while we’re at it, encourage them to get outside and ride a bike—no matter the legwear they choose.

The post Let the Kids “BeReal” on Social Media appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

For them, just going to the hospital could result in bills that would take a decade to pay off. The old then squeaked by on getting special rates from doctors and hospitals who knew they had limited resources. Many relied upon their families to help them pay. There was no safety net whatsoever: One 1963 survey found that nine out of 10 couples, and eight out of 10 elderly individuals, paid for their own care without help from government or private sources.

Since 1946 through 1952, when Harry Truman was president, liberals had argued that the United States lagged behind other countries by failing to guarantee health care to all of its citizens. But in the ensuing decades, health care reform had been a losing issue for Democrats. Taking on the health care issue was a top liberal issue, but it wasn’t easy. The U.S. had a well-developed system of private health care, which meant that when liberals pushed for their policy, those with a vested interest in the existing system—including doctors—would have reason to say no. The process of crafting Medicare and Medicaid, building a federal program on top of a well established private system, left scars on the legislation itself so that these unresolved arguments from half a century ago still haunt American health care today.

In 1949, the American Medical Association and congressional conservatives had defeated President Truman’s plan to provide national health insurance for all Americans by branding the proposal as “socialized medicine” and warning that patients would lose their relationship to their doctors. During the mid-1950s, liberals narrowed their focus by proposing a federal health care program for the elderly, paying for the cost of hospital insurance through Social Security taxes. President Kennedy picked up on the idea and pushed for “Medicare” in 1962 and 1963.

But congressional conservatives and the AMA blocked the proposal. California Governor Ronald Reagan produced a record that the wives of doctors in the AMA played during coffee klatches in which he warned: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine.” The AMA distributed posters that doctors hung in their offices, warning patients that should Congress pass Medicare, bureaucrats would make their next medical decisions. “The doctors in Florida agreed that the first three minutes of every consultation with every patient,” said Florida Senator Claude Pepper, “would be devoted to attacking socialized medicine. …”

But the politics changed in the spring of 1965. Lyndon Johnson won a landslide reelection against Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, a right-wing Republican who spent much of his campaign blasting Medicare proposals. With Goldwater’s defeat, many Republicans believed that they would have to move to the center and work with the administration to survive. The election produced huge Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, with many of the new members having entered into Congress determined to pass the languishing health care proposal.

Johnson, sensing that he might be victorious, told one of his top advisors, Wilbur Cohen, to find a bill that would please Wilbur Mills, the conservative chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “You get him something, though … if labor will buy, that he can call a Mills bill, that’s what it amounts to …” Johnson understood that his time was limited, and urged everyone to move as fast as possible. “For God sakes, don’t let dead cats stand on your porch,” he said about the Medicare bill—explaining that if a bill sat around to long, like a carcass, it would begin to “stink.”

Republicans, eager to distinguish themselves from Goldwater, proposed their own alternatives to Medicare. One proposal provided insurance to cover the cost of physicians, paid for through general tax revenue and a contribution from participants. Another program would provide health care to the poor, those who were “medically indigent” and couldn’t afford care on their own.

When the House Ways and Means Committee met to discuss the three plans in early March, administration officials were worried that their plan would not be able to garner enough support to pass the committee. But Chairman Mills, who decided that it was no longer possible to hold back the tide on the legislation, given that so many of the new members elected in 1964 had promised to deliver on Medicare, shocked everyone in a closed committee hearing. He turned to Wilbur Cohen and said, “Maybe it would be a good idea if we put all three of these bills together. You go back and work this out overnight and see what there is to this.”

In that moment Mills transformed himself from the top opponent to the main architect of the new program. The rest was history. The bill moved through the Ways and Means Committee, the House, and finally the Senate. Johnson was happy to give Mills all the credit in exchange for a bill, though the president was taken aback at just how expansive the revised program would be.

Johnson traveled to Independence, Missouri to sign the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law on July 30, 1965 with Harry Truman standing by his side. The final legislation, officially called the Social Security Amendments of 1965, contained three parts. The first, Part A, provided hospital insurance to elderly Americans covered by Social Security paid for through the payroll tax. Part B was a voluntary program that covered doctor’s bills, paid for through a combination of general tax revenue and premium contributions from recipients. Finally, Part C, which we now call Medicaid, provided health care coverage for poor Americans who were “medically indigent.” The final part was much more like a welfare program, administered by the states and paid for through a combination of federal and state money.

Yet even at a moment when liberalism was strong, Medicare proponents still had to make a number of consequential compromises because of America’s resistance toward strong government. The most important was that Medicare and Medicaid provided this insurance within the existing health care system. As the sociologist Paul Starr has argued, the system layered the federal insurance on top of the existing system, thereby leaving many of the dysfunctional elements of American health care fully in place.

Medicare and Medicaid also stuck to the American political tradition of distinguishing between “deserving” and “undeserving” recipients of government help. This was a central feature of political discourse about government assistance since the start of the Republic, as the historian Michael Katz has written. In this case, the government provided benefits based on status rather than as a right.

With Medicare and Medicaid, you had to be old or you had to be poor to receive this help. You couldn’t just be an American.

The result was that even in a moment of victory, liberals legitimated a narrower vision of public policy than existed in other comparable systems in Europe. The fact that Medicare depended on a Social Security tax, which was sold as a way of showing this was an “earned benefit” likewise confirmed a limited vision of the obligations of government.

And then there was the problem of cost control. During the final weeks of negotiation over the bill, Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills pushed back against efforts to include stronger regulatory mechanisms to control health care costs in the legislation. The final law allowed hospitals to determine what a “reasonable fee” would be, with a guarantee that the government would pay it. The result was skyrocketing costs over the next few decades. Although Congress did impose tighter cost controls during the 1980s, the overall strength of the federal government remained limited and health care providers came to rely on high charges.

All of these compromises, which made Medicare and Medicaid possible in 1965, would have long-lasting effects. By providing health insurance to the elderly the program made a huge difference. In 1963, one of every five Americans who lived below the poverty line never had been examined by a doctor, and poor people used medical facilities less than others. By 1970 that proportion had fallen to about 8 percent. Most elderly Americans had access to hospitals and doctors. Medicaid vastly expanded over the next few decades to include pregnant women, kids, and other categories of Americans who have limited access to care. By 2011, close to one-third of all Americans, not just the elderly, were covered by Medicare and Medicaid.

Hospital administrators, doctors and other people in the health care system now depended on these federal dollars. State governments counted on Medicaid dollars in their health care budgets. The programs became so ingrained in the national political consciousness that when conservatives rallied to oppose President Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2009—which achieved some cost savings through cuts in Medicare—they held up signs saying “Get Your Government Hands Off My Medicare.” The signs were ironic and funny, but also the best evidence of success, namely that even the right wing accepted these plans as part of the status quo.

The post How Medicare Both Salved and Scarred American Health Care appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

And together they epitomize big changes within the world-renowned California movement to fight climate change.

She is Fran Pavley, 67, a state senator from the San Fernando Valley who is in the final months of a distinguished legislative career that established her as the mother of California climate change policy. He is Eduardo Garcia, 39, a first-time assemblyman from a working-class Coachella Valley family known for a relentless focus on the needs of his constituents, not environmental causes.

Their fledgling alliance—over the last year they have been co-authoring each other’s legislation—embodies two tricky transitions in the building. One involves a shift in personnel, as older environmentalists and legislative champions age out of leadership and are replaced by younger leaders. The other, related transition involves a shift in focus, from greenhouse gases to the impact of climate change—and measures to combat it—on people and specific places.

California is now halfway through its second decade of pursuing path-breaking climate legislation. And since this struggle is long-term—and far longer than term limits or the attention spans of Californians—those who worry about climate change also must reckon with the state’s political, demographic, and other kinds of change.

It’s been a decade now since Pavley authored AB 32, the nation’s first cap on greenhouse gas pollution, and 15 years since she authored AB 1493, which became the model for national vehicle emissions standards. So the coalition she helped build for those landmarks—a coalition that went beyond environmentalists to include scientists, water agencies, local governments, labor unions, religious institutions, and Hollywood celebrities—has needed updating to better represent the California of 2016—more working-class, more Latino, and more inland.

But the sprawl and diversity of the state, in combination with the success of climate change legislation in creating new businesses and industries in California, have made coalition-building harder. There are more constituents for climate change legislation, and thus higher expectations. And that has forced climate legislation to do more than mandate reductions in greenhouse gases; representatives of the state’s poorer, inland places are demanding that regulations and programs improve public health and create job opportunities in their communities.

Garcia has been particularly insistent on bringing the benefits of climate investments to his massive desert district in California’s southeast corner, bordering both Mexico and Arizona. So, after consulting with Democratic leaders, Pavley forged a close partnership with the assemblyman, who quickly became her co-author on major bills, including SB 32, the highest-profile legislation of the session that concludes August 31.

His own story supports the narrative of the broader coalition. He is a lifelong resident of the Coachella Valley, a product of a family that includes farmworkers, and a graduate of Coachella Valley High with degrees from UC Riverside and USC. But the partnership is also based on what Garcia and Pavley have in common.

While Bay Area environmentalists often have the loudest voices and biggest ideas on climate, the climate cause has made progress because of the work of people whose feet actually touch the ground. And Pavley and Garcia are both unfussy, practical Southern Californians who are good at listening and at legislative details. Garcia broke unofficial records by getting 16 bills and resolutions signed in his first year, many of them complicated technical fixes of existing laws.

Garcia and Pavley also have taken similar paths to politics, albeit a quarter-century apart. Both grew up in the places they represent, both worked as teachers (Pavley jokes that her transition from middle school to the Capitol was seamless), and both rose through local government. Pavley was elected mayor of Agoura Hills at age 32, in 1982. Garcia became mayor of the city of Coachella at age 29, in 2006.

“Eduardo and Fran are the perfect transition,” says State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, who suggested Pavley work with Garcia. The speaker describes visiting Garcia twice in the desert and being driven around the district, as the assemblyman offered detailed descriptions of the history and needs of even the smallest parks.

Rendon recalls the partnership coming together at the Paris climate talks in December, when Garcia was added to a California delegation that included Gov. Jerry Brown, legislative leaders, and Pavley. Garcia brought his wife and very young daughter and impressed the older delegates by eschewing sightseeing for intensive work. Garcia later said he was impressed by how other countries, particularly in Europe, are focusing climate change investments on poorer communities and he returned determined to shift California policy in a similar direction.

On a recent Friday, I shuttled between the two halves of the alliance. At her district office in Calabasas, Pavley walked me through the evolution of the climate movement in the state. She is termed out of the legislature at the end of the year, and made clear that she sees Garcia as a promising successor on climate change.

“We work very well together,” she says. “And we’re looking for the next generation to carry this work forward.”

I met Garcia—the rumpled, stocky picture of the multitasking Gen X professional/father—in a restaurant near the Burbank airport. He was traveling without aides, and mixed a casual bearing with an intense intelligence. We shifted between looking at smartphone video of his preteen son shooting basketballs and his detailed description of the solar potential of Blythe and how brine from the Salton Sea can be turned into lithium for electric vehicle batteries.

“I don’t consider myself a climate change activist,” he says. “I do consider myself someone who is interested in building consensus on policies that are focused on people, especially the people in my district.”

In these closing days of the legislative session, Pavley and Garcia say they are focused on keeping lines of communication open within their broader coalition—and between members of the Assembly and Senate, whose leaders, Rendon and the Senate pro tem Kevin De Leon, both are considered leaders on the issue. They are pushing hard for SB 32, which extends the greenhouse gas reduction targets to 2030, and AB 197, which creates oversight of state climate programs to make sure their benefits help the economies and public health of poorer and more polluted communities.

If these bills become law, give credit not just to the governor and legislative leaders, but also to Eduardo and Mrs. Pavley.

The post The Next Big Shift in California’s Climate Change Movement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.