Lots more at link below the quote.
When the Unstoppable Activists Met Their Match
Six months ago, the Sunrise Movement was feeling bullish. The four-year-old youth climate organization had catapulted a massive legislative blueprint, the Green New Deal, to the forefront of Democratic politics. It helped elect progressives in the House and Senate in 2018 and 2020. It even successfully nudged President Joe Biden to put one of its allies in his Cabinet. Its leaders were starting to talk about how 2021 could be “Year 1” of a transformational decade of climate-driven politics in America.
They had reasons for optimism. The Democratic Party had just gained control of both Congress and the White House, and the once-controversial Green New Deal was polling well among voters. In the four years since Sunrise publicly launched in mid-2017, it had grown from a handful of former student activists to a full-fledged advocacy organization with a paid staff of more than 100 people, millions of dollars between its 501(c)3, 501(c)4 and PAC, and thousands of regular volunteers across the country.
“We’re kind of at the strongest that we have ever been,” Sunrise co-founder and executive director Varshini Prakash, who is 28, told Politico Magazine in May. “We’re doing more rallies and demonstrations and actions.”
Six months later, however, “more rallies and demonstrations and actions” doesn’t have quite the same shine as it used to. As Congress started negotiating a big infrastructure spending bill this summer and fall, set against a backdrop of record-level heat waves and deadly floods, Sunrise increasingly turned up the dial on its activism — hoping to push for multitrillion-dollar green investments. Over the past two weeks, for example, five Sunrise members went on hunger strike outside the White House, hoping to force Biden to fight for them at the negotiating table. Yet it’s becoming clearer that the organization’s core political promise — that it could harness youthful energy and idealism to deliver true big-ticket change — will remain unrealized. The more than $500 billion in climate investment Congress is currently considering is only a fraction of what Sunrise was calling for. More broadly, the prospects of the U.S. adopting any truly radical policies to cut carbon emissions — the kind of thing many scientists say is necessary to avert climate catastrophe — have never looked slimmer.
“I’m feeling pretty enraged. We worked really hard as a movement, as a generation, as working people, to elect Biden and flip the Senate,” Sunrise’s advocacy director Lauren Maunus, who is 23, told Politico Magazine this week. “I’m really enraged that we have a Democratic trifecta and they haven’t delivered for us yet.”
What’s happening to Sunrise, right now, is a real-time test of the limits of the progressive wave of the past few years — that heady time for leftists in 2018 when the “Squad” was primarying establishment Democrats, when momentum from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign was creating new horizons of possibility. The thesis driving the movement was pretty simple: If you push enough Democrats — in the public and the halls of power — to the left on an issue, the party will follow, much the same way the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus leveraged an obstinate minority to push the Republican Party to the right.
Sunrise, in particular, has promoted itself as the most effective vehicle for young people who want to push the government to go big on climate — more engaging and populist than traditional environmental organizations like Friends of the Earth, and more focused on real-world political results than theatrical new groups like Extinction Rebellion. The movement has been profiled by the likes of Vox and Vogue. “Sunrise has established itself as the dominant influence on the environmental policy of the Democratic Party’s young, progressive wing,” the New Yorker wrote at the end of 2018.
But this year, Sunrise’s strategy has run up against a roadblock all the enthusiasm in the world can’t budge: In a 50-50 Senate, with no margin for error, climate policy is subject to the veto of whoever the most conservative, most cautious Democratic senator happens to be. In this case, that person is West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a canny coal-state power broker who sees green policy as bad for both his constituents and his electoral chances. He’s made clear he won’t vote for any spending bill that, in his view, will hurt the economy — while the Democrats require his vote for anything they do. And for that, Sunrise has had no answer.
Increasingly, the movement that seemed like the future of progressive politics has found itself at an impasse: attacked by pundits for impeding its own cause, wading into diffuse non-climate causes of the activist left, racked by internal conflict and out of options to deal with Manchin.
Now, Sunrise is faced with a question about how to move forward: embrace the idealistic side of its mission and keep hammering Biden — the president who’s on the verge of making more progress toward the climate agenda than any of his predecessors — for not going far enough, or embrace its pragmatic side and declare a partial victory whenever Congress passes its spending compromise?
By all indications, Sunrise is prepared to take the latter route. The White House hunger strike ended this week as Sunrise shifted gears to urge quick passage of the compromise bill. Sunrise’s leaders seem to recognize that an at least somewhat positive outlook may be necessary to keep youthful energy alive in a political world that seems to specialize in killing it.
In the wake of Biden releasing his framework for the spending bill last Thursday, the movement held a mass Zoom call, on which Prakash said: “I am sad that the pieces on climate, even though they are really significant, are not enough to put us on a path toward a livable future.” At the same time, she didn’t want to say that Sunrise’s efforts amounted to failure: “Everything that is good in this bill,” she added, “is because of movements like ours.”
“I’ll be honest,” Sunrise’s communications director Ellen Sciales said on the same call, “this was our best shot in a long time of passing federal policy at the scale of the crisis, and this past year has been really freaking hard.”
“Three-word chant! Three-word chant! Three-word chant!”
On a Sunday in late June, dozens of teenagers and twenty-somethings stood in church pews and repeated in unison an empty placeholder phrase — literally, “Three-word chant!” — as they pretended to hold signs in their hands and got coached on the best posture to be taken seriously (neither “slouched” nor “robotic”). The next day would be Sunrise’s first major protest against the Biden administration — an administration that Sunrise helped put in power and which it wanted to keep on its toes. The group had convened hundreds of activists from around the country to St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Washington to prepare.
Sunrise leaders don’t think of their movement as just another Extinction Rebellion, the youth environmental activist organization that, for example, in April dumped wheelbarrows full of cow poop outside the White House to protest Biden’s “bullshit” climate plan. Sunrise frames its protests as more than just noisemaking. “This is not a symbolic action,” Sunrise staffer Benjamin Finegan, who is 24, emphasized to the people gathered inside the church ahead of the planned protest in D.C. They should be prepared, Finegan warned, to remain outside the White House, where they would be divided into groups blocking each official entrance, “until our demands are met.”
The next evening, however, Sunrise leaders explained that they planned to end the protest as soon as some of their members got arrested, which they expected to happen. Before 5 p.m., about an hour after chickpea burgers were passed out, word spread that at one entrance, several Sunrisers had been removed by Secret Service. The hundreds at the various other entrances then picked themselves up and gathered at Lafayette Square to celebrate, where they were soon joined by the “arrested” group, who had been quickly released. “What we just did is f---ing amazing,” one Sunrise staffer shouted into a microphone. “We just shut down the White House!” It wasn’t clear that any of their demands had been met.
The political demands were supposed to be the whole point. In a book released last year, Prakash, Sunrise’s leader, wrote that Sunrise didn’t come up with the idea or phrase of a Green New Deal (versions of it have been batted around since as early as 2007), nor did they inspire “the largest numbers of people to take to the streets in recent years — Greta Thunberg and the Friday school strikers did that.” Instead, she wrote: “Sunrise’s unique contribution, where we have excelled, has been in taking the fight to the political arena, bringing some of these ideas to greater prominence in the mainstream. We’ve done this by combining a political savvy with a disciplined and fast-growing movement set on a clear goal.”
But a political strategy based almost entirely around electing and working with close political allies, or at least those deemed convincible, may not be so savvy when it finally comes down to governing...
