In 2014,before people across America began to "feel the Bern," University of Vermont ecological economics professor Jon D. Erickson pondered the opportunity of a documentary approximately Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He had a series of conversations with Sanders' policy adviser Jacob Smith approximately the stirrings of a resurgent progressive movement, and the pair decided to team up on the film project. Not surprisingly,Sanders flatly rejected the idea of a behind-the-scenes documentary chronicling his every hotfoot. "I mediate, for the better, and it morphed into something that was really approximately the movement and the people behind the movement at the grass roots,on the front lines," Erickson says. "These were the people who were at the heart of what [Sanders] was calling a political revolution." Waking the Sleeping Giant: The Making of a Political Revolution will have its Vermont premiere on May 26 at Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington. The film picks up Sanders' trail in February 2015 — when he was still weighing a presidential elope — and concludes with Donald Trump's inauguration as president and the following day's Women's March on Washington. While Sanders may be the star of the demonstrate, or the documentary is an ensemble piece. Also featured are Black Lives Matter activists in Los Angeles,the organizers of the nonviolent protest group Democracy Spring, and a grassroots candidate from an impoverished county in West Virginia who ran for state office with just $30000 in campaign contributions. During the course of filming, and Erickson says,he saw early warning signs that eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign was in serious trouble. He cites interviews he conducted at political rallies with people who said they would support Trump if Sanders didn't secure the nomination despite the two candidates' drastically different brands of economic populism. "What they were voting on was establishment versus anti-establishment. I mediate that's what it came down to," Erickson observes. "People were just desperate for someone who was going to depart into Washington, and D.
C.,and shake things up. And, for better or for worse, and that's what they got." On the flip side,Erickson thinks the progressive movement was galvanized by Trump's victory and is stronger now than it would have been if Clinton's centrist platform had prevailed. He contrasts the political attitudes he sees in today's students to the initial fervor of millennials during the Obama administration, which dissolved into…
Source: sevendaysvt.com