Represented by our Chief Operating Officer Layla Zaidane and Communications Fellow Lani Bohm, on October 30th, Millennial Action Project led a meeting with ten young leaders from Indonesia visiting through the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program. 

The meeting began with  an overview of MAP’s work and theory of change. Zaidane emphasized the opportunity for Millennial leaders to lead the way in overcoming the hyperpartisanship, polarization, and gridlock seen in Congress today. She shared that younger generations, in comparison to the older generations, do not feel compelled to identify with one of the two major parties in the United States. Instead, Millennials adopt an “a la carte” approach toward politics, espousing views on specific topics that, together, match neither the Republican nor the Democratic ideological package. Zaidane cited the phenomenon that the fastest-growing party affiliation for younger generations in the US is in fact no party affiliation at all, or independent. This puts Millennials in a unique, advantageous position for finding common ground across parties and efficiently passing legislation with bipartisan support. 

From here, the meeting dove into a Q&A session. One important question addressed how MAP deals with opposing views of its Future Caucus members, given that the ideological makeup of each Future Caucus is bipartisan in nature. Zaidane responded, sharing that having differing views in the room is not a setback but rather at the crux of empowering a diverse caucus. It is the case that when legislators share their views as a part of a marketplace of ideas — rather than an attempt to win an argument — they are able to find areas of common ground among the most controversial issues. This common ground then becomes the foundation of innovative legislation that contributes to more than one party’s political agenda.

Zaidane cited one piece of legislation as a perfect example of this. In 2018, the House passed a Future Caucus-led bill which authorizes research on gun violence research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although gun control is one of the most controversial, divisive, partisan issues in the US today, this bill was passed in the House with bipartisan support and signed into law. 

Finally, the Indonesian leaders raised the topic of climate change to understand its political  salience in the U.S. as compared to that in Indonesia: one of Indonesian Millennials’ largest concerns is air pollution. To demonstrate MAP’s work on this topic, Bohm introduced MAP’s Wisconsin-based Red & Blue Dialogue series, highlighting that the upcoming dialogue would focus on bipartisan solutions for energy, the grid, and the environment in local communities. In particular, she highlighted the model that the bipartisan panel of local elected officials — a key feature of each dialogue — creates: when local community members witness their representatives working across the political aisle to pass sustainable legislation, the constituents can model this behavior in their everyday conversations in order to create a political environment that is less hostile and more productive.