It comes down to my core beliefs: that all people are people, from youth to the elderly. It appears to be obvious, even condescendingly so, yet it’s not something regarded often in society. Young people face extraordinary barriers to participating with respect and dignity in our public life. We’re systematically disenfranchised, written off as “Fortnite gamers” who haven’t earned a respectable voice — especially those of us from the working class — all while an ever-eroding social safety net limits our ability to stay afloat day-to-day.
Ultimately, age is a characteristic used to divide the working class, just like race, ethnicity, religion, and so on. If we believe that all people deserve inclusion in our democracy and nobody is disposable, then we must practice what we preach and support people without reinforcing divisions weaponized by the capitalist class.
As it pertains to this race specifically, it felt like the next step toward building permanent student power citywide and engaging a much larger base in our work. We had built our nascent student movement into something with multiple chapters across Austin, taken on school administrators through a student union drive, and were hungry to build out our membership with an electric campaign that could inspire a larger audience to get involved.
Electoral campaigns are how the vast majority of Americans view their involvement in politics, and we need to meet people where they’re at to build a mass movement. Electoral campaigns are about so much more than just winning or losing — they capture attention, which we can use to build buy-in to our political program among the working class and structure test our movement’s support. Bernie [Sanders]’s 2016 campaign may not have won, but it revitalized the American left.
Auteur: Reese Armstrong
