The Sunrise Movement - a new wave of activism?

[lpetrich]

The Sunrise Movement Actually Changed the Democratic Conversation. So What Do You Do For a Sequel? - POLITICO Magazine - "My weekend at the activist bootcamp trying to reshape the Democratic race."

Its home page: Sunrise Movement

“When we were taught about the civil rights movement as kids, it was told to us as if a few big marches just happened and then the laws changed,” Emily LaShelle told me last weekend as she smoked a cigarette. Behind her, a group of her peers played Frisbee in a field while the sun set behind them. “But there was so much more work and effort by activists behind the scenes,” she said. “And that’s the kind of work we’re teaching people to be involved in for this movement.”

Yes, a lot of marches and demonstrations and sit-ins and the Freedom Riders. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't just describe how he had a great dream. He was arrested for participating in one of the marches, and he wrote a famous criticism of cowardly moderates in a Birmingham AL jail.

How do a bunch of twenty-somethings, somewhat blindsided by their own success, come up with a next act?

The Sunrise Movement is part of a crop of progressive groups that have sprung up outside the mainstream Democratic Party and have helped to dramatically reshape the left’s agenda, often with minimal infrastructure. At its founding, Sunrise saw itself as solely focused on changing public opinion as an indirect means of pressuring the party’s establishment. But after the election of President Donald Trump, the group and its leaders underwent a change in philosophy: They needed to convert their idealism into power by engaging in hard politics.

In less than five years, Sunrise has grown from a small and quixotic project to a full-fledged advocacy organization that draws thousands of volunteers across the country and tens of thousands of participants to its events, including a large protest that’s being planned around the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit later this summer.

Many of them consider climate problems something that their elders had saddled them with.

“And then when Trump got elected, and we realized there was just no credible path to passing any type of federal legislation on climate in four years, we realized that we also had to contend with how to win political power pretty seriously.”

... “We were saying all the same shit on November 12 as we were on November 13,” Blazevic said, “but having Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez saying it with us really did change everything.”

... The boot camp itself sometimes seemed like a cross between a summer camp for hippies and a high school pep rally.

... But when they got down to work, the boot camp felt more like a corporate retreat designed to foster team-building and to inculcate new recruits on the values of the organization.

... The Green New Deal is Sunrise’s policy vision, now taken up by its allies in Congress. It ties together the group’s twin goals of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and a federal jobs program, one that would employ millions to expand renewable energy generation and improve infrastructure.

... “For our entire lives, we’ve seen politicians and the political establishment totally fail our generation,” O’Hanlon said. “I wish that the adults in the room were solving this crisis, but the reality is they aren’t. So now it’s on our generation to do it.”

 

[lpetrich]

I'm reminded of the  Port Huron Statement Its complete text: Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, 1962 "Introduction: Agenda for a Generation" It starts off with "We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit." A world with problems like racial discrimination and the Cold War.

The Wikipedia article on it quoted from it: "Universal controlled disarmament must replace deterrence and arms control as the national defense goals." -- a commendable goal, but it was rather hard to do with the Soviet Union at the time.

Also:

An imperative task for these publicly disinherited groups, then, is to demand a Democratic Party responsible to their interests. They must support Southern voter registration and Negro political candidates and demand that Democratic Party liberals do the same (in the last Congress, Dixiecrats split with Northern Democrats on 119 of 300 roll-calls, mostly on civil rights, area redevelopment and foreign aid bills; and breach was much larger than in the previous several sessions). Labor should begin a major drive in the South. In the North, reform clubs (either independent or Democratic) should be formed to run against big city regimes on such issues as peace, civil rights, and urban needs. Demonstrations should be held at every Congressional or convention seating of Dixiecrats. A massive research and publicity campaign should be initiated, showing to every housewife, doctor, professor, and worker the damage done to their interests every day a racist occupies a place in the Democratic Party. Where possible, the peace movement should challenge the "peace credentials" of the otherwise-liberals by threatening or actually running candidates against them.

The Dixiecrats were mostly Southern Democrats, and they were the right wing of the Democratic Party at the time. The document noted in several places a Dixiecrat-Republican coalition, something that turned out to be very prophetic. The Dixiecrats later joined the Republican Party, making it the party of Jefferson Davis.

Also proposes universities as activist centers. From Wikipedia:

The Port Huron Statement argued that because "the civil rights and peace and student movements are too poor and socially slighted, and the labor movement too quiescent", it should rally support and strengthen itself by looking to universities, which benefit from their "permanent position of social influence" and being "the only mainstream institution that is open to participation by individuals of nearly any viewpoint". However, it stated that this "will involve national efforts at university reform by an alliance of students and faculty" who "must wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy", ally with groups outside the university, integrate "major public issues into the curriculum", "make debate and controversy". In short, "They must consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power.

Also, "The awe inspired by the pervasiveness of racism in American life is only matched by the marvel of its historical span in American traditions. The national heritage of racial discrimination via slavery has been a part of America since Christopher Columbus's advent on the new continent. As such, racism not only antedates the Republic and the thirteen Colonies, but even the use of the English language in this hemisphere." -- right-wingers go into hysterics at any suggestion that the Good Old Days were anything but good.

 

[Treedbear]

...

... “For our entire lives, we’ve seen politicians and the political establishment totally fail our generation,” O’Hanlon said. “I wish that the adults in the room were solving this crisis, but the reality is they aren’t. So now it’s on our generation to do it.”

Reminded me of some youthful dreams -

 

[lpetrich]

I've also found Port Huron Statement at The Sixties Project a project for documenting that tumultuous era.

The Port Huron Statement at 50 - The New York Times is a nice retrospective.

“While most people haven’t read it, it’s still extremely relevant” for its guiding principles, said David Graeber, an anthropologist and anarchist who has been active in the Occupy movement.

“For a long while I thought the Port Huron Statement was a relic of a hopeful past,” Mr. Hayden recalled last week. “But frequently students would read it and say how surprised they were at its sounding like the present.”

Author Sam Roberts compared it to the Occupy movement, but despite that movement's promise, it flopped after a few months of camping in city parks. After its participants were evicted from their city-park campsites, they dispersed. Their organizers did not even try to find new meeting places for them, as far as I can tell.

“We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity,” the statement said. Those sentiments were echoed in Occupy’s founding principles — “constituting ourselves as autonomous political beings engaged in non-violent civil disobedience and building solidarity based on mutual respect, acceptance, and love.”

“Sure, there were important things we missed,” Mr. Hayden recalled. “The environmental crisis, but Rachel Carson’s book hadn’t come out. Feminism, but Betty Friedan’s book wasn’t out. The escalation of Vietnam, which none of us expected, though we opposed. The assassination of J.F.K. and other killings to follow. The subsequent radicalization and polarization that characterized the late ’60s through Watergate.”

But, he continued, “the core of the Port Huron Statement rings true, and the theme of participatory democracy is relevant today from Cairo to Occupy Wall Street to Wisconsin to student-led democracy movements.”

The Wisconsin Revolt also failed, sad to say.

Before all this activism was the black civil-rights movement, and that was a story in itself.

 

[lpetrich]

Civil Rights Movement: Timeline, Key Events & Leaders - HISTORY, Timeline of the American Civil Rights Movement | Britannica,  Timeline of the civil rights movement

It was more than MLK describing his dreams. A LOT more. It had demonstrations, marches, sit-ins, schools being made integrated, legislation, and it must be noted, riots. It may roughly be bookended by Rosa Parks's 1955 bus sit-in and the 1968 Civil Rights Act.

The Port Huron Statement was published in 1962, during the later part of that movement, but before other Sixties movements started.

Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" was published that year, a book about the deleterious effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides. It helped start the environmentalist movement. Rachel Carson, The Life and Legacy

Betty Friedan's book "The Feminine Mystique" was published the next year, and it was about how unfulfilled many middle-class housewives felt. A first-world problem? Maybe, but a lot of women found it their problem also, and they became feminist activists.

The antiwar movement was provoked by LBJ increasing the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1965. Lots of young men refused to fight in a war that seemed pointless to them.

The New Left was also later, though the Port Huron statement could almost be a manifesto for it.