The Next Republic: The Rise of a New Radical Majority by D. D. Guttenplan

Author:D. D. Guttenplan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Campaigns & Elections, History, Political Process, Political Science, Politics & Government, United States
ISBN: 9781609808570
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2018-10-02T03:00:00+00:00

Nobody I’d met knew that better—or felt that obligation more keenly—than Waleed Shahid. Aware from the first of Hillary Clinton’s vulnerability—“when you have a candidate who is so clearly part of the establishment, it allows the Tea Party to claim to represent the people”—he had a young person’s eagerness for the future to begin right now. “The Bernie movement has planted hundreds of seeds into the American soil. People will experiment and learn things,” he told me several months before the election.

Arrested in September 2016 outside Paul Ryan’s office after calling on the House speaker to denounce Trump’s racism, Shahid led a group of young people who got arrested the week after the election—this time for protesting outside Chuck Schumer’s office. “The party of Clinton and Schumer is also the party of Wall Street,” he told reporters. “And now the party of Trump is the party of the KKK. So where is our party?”116 He’d left the Working Families Party to start a new group, #AllOfUs. Founded by and for millennials, #AllOfUs was supposed to serve as a model for a new generation of left organization, more reliant on social media than a membership base, determined to bridge the political narrative between “Obama’s compelling story about who ‘we’ are and Bernie’s much better version of who ‘they’ are.”

Like Brand New Congress, #AllOfUs offered a beguiling vision of political possibility. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, millennials had contributed a significant portion of every movement’s ground troops. Shahid himself had been going on demonstrations since his days as a student at Washington-Lee High School, when Wisconsin congressman James Sensenbrenner had proposed “a bill that would have made it a felony to aid and abet an undocumented immigrant.” He’d long felt that no one was speaking directly to or for his generation. #AllOfUs wanted to fill that gap—and to furnish the many protest campaigns based on racial justice or economic justice or migrant rights with a unifying narrative. “#AllOfUs comes from a direct action background,” Shahid said. “We’re good at that. We know how to organize protests. But if you just keep protesting, eventually you burn out.”

“We wanted to avoid foundation money,” which had them chasing the same small-dollar donor base the other ex-Sanders people were after. Shahid discovered that while young people were always welcomed to help make up the numbers, “when we started out talking about ourselves as millennials and a new generation, progressive allies, donors, the press, didn’t take us seriously.” Starting from scratch without funding or an institutional sponsor turned out to be harder than he’d expected. And then his mother had a stroke.

Returning to political work in the fall of 2017 Shahid and his friends wound up #AllOfUs. “We thought we could push the anti-Trump energy into reforming the Democratic Party. We did help create a change in the political weather. But the Women’s March and Indivisible—they out-organized us. Only they never gave their base a theory of political change.

“In an age of hard partisanship, with one the party of white resentment, the other the party of cosmopolitanism,” Shahid scaled back his ambition.

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