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THE SUNRISE MOVEMENT’S CRITICS REALLY DON’T GET CLIMATE ACTIVISM
 
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Kate Aronoff
June 5, 2024
The New Republic
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_ Just because the youth group hasn’t endorsed Biden doesn’t mean
it’s handing the presidency to Trump. _

Chicago Sunrise Movement Rallies for a Green New Deal Chicago
Illinois 2-27-19, www.cemillerphotography.com

 

Axios dropped a “SCOOP
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Sunrise Movement is withholding
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endorsement of Joe Biden. The report noted that the youth climate
group is taking a “wait-and-see” approach, as gleaned from a call
with volunteer leaders in April debating the merits of an endorsement.
“Sunrise is still finalizing plans for the 2024 general election,”
Sunrise communications director Stevie O’Hanlon told Axios. “Like
in 2020, we are not planning to endorse Joe Biden.” The article went
on to elaborate that Sunrise, despite not endorsing Biden in 2020,
“helped mobilize its volunteers to contact other young voters to
vote against Trump.”

Online, pundits
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“deeply unserious
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and inadequately grateful
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Inflation Reduction Act that Democrats passed nearly two years ago.
Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson even accused the group
of backing Donald Trump
[[link removed]]. Left out of
Axios’s story was the fact that Sunrise will once again
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mobilize young voters against Trump in November. “Do we want to be
fighting for a Green New Deal under a Trump presidency or a Biden
presidency? To me, the answer is pretty clear,” O’Hanlon told me
earlier today. “Donald Trump winning a second term is an existential
threat to our climate and our democracy and will set back the fight
for a Green New Deal.”

Like many member-based progressive organizations, Sunrise has internal
processes for endorsing candidates at all levels of government. The
group held a membership vote during the 2020 Democratic primary
season, in which it decided to endorse Bernie Sanders. It opted not to
hold one for the general election that year, even after
then–executive director Varshini Prakasah joined a unity task force
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other Sanders surrogates to shape Biden’s climate agenda. Sunrise
reported that its youth voter mobilization that year resulted in 1.3
million phone calls, 2.4 million texts, and 778,000 postcards to
prospective voters in key swing states and battleground districts.
Sunrise also went on to play a major role in shaping the Inflation
Reduction Act, and has repeatedly—and recently
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the White House’s climate efforts while also being critical of its
support for fossil fuel projects like the Willow Project
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Alaska.

So let’s consider the alternative that Sunrise’s critics are
implicitly arguing for: that the group’s top leaders express their
gratitude for Biden’s climate record by unilaterally deciding to
endorse him in the lead-up to the Democratic National Convention,
sidestepping precedent from 2020 and its own endorsement procedure.
Some supermajority of the organization’s staff and
volunteers—harshly critical of Biden’s support for the war in Gaza
and continued support
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fuel expansion
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among other positions—would probably revolt, leaving many fewer
people around to engage in anti-Trump voter outreach. As O’Hanlon
noted, the amount of enthusiasm that Sunrise volunteers have to engage
in those efforts will be determined in large part by what Biden does
over the next several months.

This all raises the question of what purpose organizational
endorsements serve. In most cases, they allow candidates to slap a
group’s logo on their campaign literature. Top leaders might come
out to speak at campaign events or say nice things about the candidate
on social media, fostering a general attitude of goodwill among an
organization’s supporters. Groups with membership bases that are
routinely asked to mobilize—think unions or the Democratic
Socialists of America—might pour real resources into text- and
phone-banking or door-knocking operations to turn people out to the
polls. In Sunrise’s case, that’s what they’ve been doing this
primary season to support Squad members who’ve supported their
legislative priorities and are now facing AIPAC-backed challengers
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including Summer Lee and Jamaal Bowman.

Sunrise is, to reiterate, _already planning voter mobilization
efforts aimed at defeating Trump._ Opting to endorse
Biden—especially now—wouldn’t benefit Sunrise, and would carry
relatively few upsides for the candidate himself. The
campaign’s very early endorsements
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“the nation’s major climate groups,” after all—which it
trumpeted in response to Axios’s questions—haven’t done much to
buoy its support among progressives.

The odd thing about some liberal pundits’ ire
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Sunrise in particular
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be rooted in two contradictory arguments: that Sunrise is
an astroturfed [[link removed]],
perpetually irrelevant shell of an organization that also also holds
outsize power to deliver the presidency to Trump if it doesn’t
endorse Biden as quickly as possible. Both of these things cannot be
true at the same time. It’s easier, though, to yell at the left than
it is to grapple earnestly with the fact that Biden is continuing to
lend considerable material support
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an unpopular
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genocidal
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and is struggling in the polls
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a host of reasons; in the awful event he loses in November, it
certainly won’t be because
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left was inadequately enthusiastic about him.

Strange too is several commenters’ bewilderment
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climate group and its members would harbor concerns about the war in
Gaza or anything other than capital-_C_ climate policies. “If your
goal is action on climate, Biden is the only option,” Tré Easton,
Senator John Fetterman’s legislative director, wrote
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“Pretending otherwise is delusional.” But Biden’s foreign policy
is hardly unrelated to the climate crisis. Like his increasingly
draconian border policies
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it has a major influence on how the United States will continue to
shape a warming world. The U.S. military is a major contributor
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the climate crisis in its own right, and the government’s continued
support for Israel’s brutal war threatens to undermine the kinds of
international collaboration needed to rapidly reduce emissions
worldwide.

As people motivated largely by an objection to human suffering,
O’Hanlon elaborated, Sunrise’s members and staffers are also
predisposed to finding the Israeli government’s U.S.-backed
atrocities in Gaza intolerable. “Young people come to Sunrise
because they are deeply frustrated at seeing people lose their homes,
having their water poisoned, and losing their loved ones to climate
disasters,” she said. “The causes are different in Gaza, but
millions of people are being displaced and facing inhumane conditions.
For young people who want everyone to have clean air, clean water and
safe homes, it’s disgusting to see what the U.S. government is
funding.”

Kate Aronoff
[[link removed]] @KateAronoff
[[link removed]] is a staff writer at _The New
Republic._

_The New Republic was founded in 1914 to bring liberalism into the
modern era. The founders understood that the challenges facing a
nation transformed by the Industrial Revolution and mass immigration
required bold new thinking._

_Today’s New Republic is wrestling with the same fundamental
questions: how to build a more inclusive and democratic civil society,
and how to fight for a fairer political economy in an age of rampaging
inequality. We also face challenges that belong entirely to this age,
from the climate crisis to Republicans hell-bent on subverting
democratic governance._

_We’re determined to continue building on our founding mission._

_TNR Newsletters. Must reads. 7 days a week. Sign up.
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* Sunrise Movement
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* elections
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* Joe Biden
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* Donald Trump
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