By Andrew Marantz, Photo: Evan Jenkins/The New Yorker, The New Yorker, February 28, 2022
On the evening of November 12, 2018, six days after being elected to Congress and six weeks before being sworn in, the socialist Democrats Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walked into an Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. Inside, more than a hundred activists in their teens and twenties milled around a font of holy water, wearing nametags on their flannel and fleece, eating pizza from paper plates. They were organizers with Sunrise, a youth-led climate-justice group that was then about a year and a half old and almost universally unknown. Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez had come from a congressional orientation—their first day of work on Capitol Hill—and they were in business attire, making them the most overdressed people in the room. Ocasio-Cortez, trying to close the sartorial gap, dropped her handbag and blazer to the floor; Tlaib picked them up and, with the silent grin of a forbearing elder sibling, placed them on a nearby folding table.
The Sunrise organizers had gathered in D.C. for a long weekend, spending their days exchanging PowerPoints and, for many, their nights curled up on the church floor in sleeping bags. The trip would culminate, the following morning, in a sit-in at the office of Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Democratic Speaker of the House. Organizers had cased Pelosi’s office at the Capitol, posing as tourists, then returned to the church and rehearsed their blocking, using plastic chairs and recycling bins to approximate the layout. The Democrats had just won their first House majority in eight years, but, when Pelosi was asked about her legislative priorities, addressing climate change did not make the list.
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