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Genevieve Van Cleve's avatar

Any words on ageism? For example, has anyone speaking at your event actually been replaced by “fresh faces” and worked their way back in? Any of your employment listings or hiring practices even address ageism? The only place to go at a certain age is toward consulting- unless you just don’t want to own a house or have children. The movement loses wisdom all the time for shiny tech or popularity among donors or social media prowess. This is not the recipe for change or unity of purpose that topples dictators. I wish our movement work was a lifetime long and not just until you can’t afford it anymore or desire to live outside the bubble of purple states and DC.

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Tony Loiseleur's avatar

One of the things that puzzled me was how quickly campaign staff were cut loose after Election Day with basically no post-campaign debrief or support. In the months since, I was left thinking, "you're deliberately going to lose all that institutional knowledge and enthusiasm for the cause? Just like that?" Like, you just had six months of people putting themselves in a pressure cooker learning and doing the work of electoral politics and after? Literal silence.

It struck me as a kind of hubris, like, "you'll be back; you always come back when we need you, but in the meantime, you're on your own." I dunno', this was my first campaign, so maybe it's natural to just drop folks who, at great personal sacrifice (career, family, etc.) and expense in order to relocate to another state, uproot their lives to do the work with no promises for what comes after.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to do the important work of protecting democracy (especially this last cycle) and for meeting and making all the new friends I now have in my life, but with nary a peep from the party after the election and what appears to be a lack of moral leadership from the party (I guess Bernie, AOC, and Booker notwithstanding) after the fact, it does make me wonder whether it was all worth it? Probably not, if the few I know who were lucky enough to find post-campaign work in the private sector is any indicator. It's almost like those folks are saying, "never again," and *I totally get that now.*

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