by Sydney Wiser ’23

We all saw the videos of victorious voters dancing in the streets following the announcement by the major networks that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. Many of us young progressives and activists rejoiced at the beginning of the end of the Donald Trump presidency, but remain only cautiously hopeful about Trump’s replacement. 

Biden is an establishment politician, who has held public offices for decades as a U.S. Senator and then Obama’s vice president for eight years. Many Biden voters seem to find comfort with settling back to ‘normalcy,’ the way it was four years ago before Trump was president. While this is understandable after the turmoil of the past four years, it’s frustrating for many teens to see a ‘return to normalcy’ be celebrated instead of turning our sights toward the future. To revert back to ‘normal’ would be to slow down all the recent work that advocates have demanded on pressing issues like gun control, climate change, and police reform. 

These past four years, a fire has been lit under young progressives and with it, a new wave of passion and vigor toward causes that were beginning to lose traction. In 2017, high school students from Parkland, Florida organized the March for our Lives demonstration in Washington DC with over 200,000 protestors. The Climate Strike in 2019 had six million participants worldwide. Around 15 million to 26 million Americans protested in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death this year. A return to the status quo after all of this momentum for change would allow the fire that’s been reignited around progressive movements to fizzle out.

The candidates that progressives helped elect, though not necessarily the candidates who were our first choices, aren’t people to lose hope in. Kamala Harris fills a historic position in becoming the first African-American, South Asian-American female vice president. She and Biden set lofty progressive goals for their first hundred days in office such as creating a national police oversight commission to tackle police brutality. Biden also created the first special envoy on climate change in the National Security Council, which will make climate change a matter of national priority. These actions are positive first steps. 

However, the issues that progressives really care about because they signal real change are massive, systematic, and hard to tackle. Congress has been locked in policy gridlock with them for years. In these coming years, the Biden-Harris administration will have to work with the likely Republican-majority Senate and the element of their own Democratic party that is worried about losing moderate voters. 

It’s certainly possible to fix these systemic problems, but it requires time, energy, and sometimes, frustrating compromise. Progressives are united in wanting social change, but the way they go about doing it varies. For some, making alterations within existing systems isn’t enough and they prefer more radical changes. Others are more willing to compromise and take small victories. Advocating for solutions to complex problems, regardless of how it’s gone about, requires patience and stamina. With the most recent wave of young progressives, there’s potential for real change, as long as we sustain our energy and resist discouragement from politicians who aren’t listening.