The AOC Train Wreck is Coming, and It’s Going to Be Spectacular
From the New York Times Sunday article, “As the Left Looks to 2028, It Waits on Ocasio-Cortez’s Big Decision.”
As Democrats find… their party’s popularity at a generational low, progressives are also staring down the prospect of a post-Bernie future… The 83-year-old Mr. Sanders has signaled that he does not intend to run for president again. The question now is who will lead the network he built from scratch into the next presidential election…
Virtually everyone interviewed said there was one clear leader for the job: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
Hoo, boy. Making Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a.k.a. Vogue’s “Consummate Power Dresser”) the face of a left populist movement is the latest episode of the longest-running television show in history, How Will the American Left Screw Up This Time? It’s an instant entrant in the Hall of Fame of Bad Ideas, on par with a Hitler bobblehead day promotion or training orangutans to pack flatware. This will not end well.
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been drawing big crowds crisscrossing the country on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour that’s been billed as a pass-the-torch moment, with the Bronx congresswoman taking Bernie’s place as the avatar of what the Times calls “left-wing” populism.
Bernie is finally realizing he has no future in a party that’s been screwing him for a decade. Democrats infamously gamed the 2016 primary against him, labeled his supporters sexist and racist, and leaked “intelligence” suggesting he was a Putin favorite. He got the Diet Coke version of the Trump treatment, the difference being Bernie not only took the abuse, but campaigned to elect his abusers.
After taking years to do the math, the light bulb is finally flickering on, with Bernie telling the Times one of the reasons for his tour is to “try to rally people to get engaged in the political process and run as independents outside of the Democratic Party.” We know it’s a good idea because the nation’s most dependable anti-barometer, New York magazine, published an article called “Bernie’s Bad Idea: The Left Should Leave the Democratic Party.” As AOC put it in Greeley, Colorado Friday:
If you are willing to fight for working people regardless of who they are, how they identify, or where they come from, you are welcome here. But I’ll say this, those leaders on either side of the aisle who are willing to put their fellow Americans down so that they can get ahead or feel better about themselves, those folks may best find a home somewhere else, because in this house we stand together… I hope that you see this movement is not about partisan labels or purity tests, but about class solidarity.
This is a rare opportunity for whatever constitutes the “real left” in America. Traditional Democrats are in freefall, with just 29% favorability in polls that also show just 7% answering “very favorable,” a shocking number. As commentators have noted, the party’s net unfavorability rating is reminiscent of the Republican Party’s numbers before Donald Trump arrived. The door is wide open; Bolivian Hemorrhagic Fever might outpoll a generic Democrat. It all makes the idea of an insurgency headed by AOC, practically a police sketch of the exact person Americans don’t want to vote for, a major head-scratcher.
AOC as a choice to replace Bernie would make sense to a Democratic Party consultant, who’d see woman, woman of color, and 12 million Twitter followers and think all boxes were checked. The original idea of a Sanders run, though, was a substance-over-style rebuke of party orthodoxy. Now Bernie is DNC-izing his own movement. Legacy outlets are already boosting the notion of AOC as a 2028 contender, which itself should scare Sanders, but somehow doesn’t. Why would the same press goons who smeared him for years suddenly embrace his successor?
Answer: AOC sanitizes the Bernie movement for traditional Democrats by bringing what the New York Times calls “a contemporary flourish to their shared progressive politics.” In other words, she’s replaced whatever hard edge Sanders ever had with woke gibberish.
The AOC-Bernie rallies declared at least superficial independence from Democrats, and pledged to not take money from “lobbyists and corporations.” The logical next step would be abandoning the goofball aristocrat niche politics that’s pulling Democrats down the Marianas polling trench, that last year all but handed Republicans the presidential race by allowing Trump to hammer Kamala Harris with lines like, “Kamala supports they/them, Trump supports you.” But how can any “economic populism” led by AOC detach from that brand, when she’s the living symbol of it?
The Democrats’ move toward what we now think of as social justice politics started in the early nineties, when Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council began running on social issues like abortion and gay rights after opening their doors to Wall Street money, forcing a move away from hardcore labor and economic issues. The original Clintonian idea was a move to the middle (and specifically toward a “forgotten middle class” of white swing voters), but Hillary Clinton was forced to rebrand during the 2016 primary. The upstart Sanders was drawing blood via complaints about Hillary’s obscene fees for bank speeches; she fought back by picking at his lack of fluency with justice lingo, attacking “Bernie Bros” as angry white men, and asking “if I broke up the banks tomorrow… would that end racism?”
Clinton followed up by tweeting a chart showing that “We face complex, intersectional challenges” that put “investments in communities of color” at the center, along with goals like “investments in underserved communities.” In a flash Hillary’s banking-relationships problem became Bernie’s race problem, with interviewers spending much of the rest of the campaign pushing Sanders to recite required liturgical terms like “black lives matter.” As Ryan Grim later wrote in his excellent book The Squad, the jargon-bombs might have been effective at knocking Sanders out in the primary, but hurt Hillary overall:
To the extent that the campaign tactic moved the needle at all, it likely pushed moderate voters paying only marginal attention to the campaign toward Sanders, who spoke like a normal person, while Clinton began ascending into what her ally James Carville would later call “faculty lounge speak…” Former president Bill Clinton, surveying the landscape and the ham-handed efforts at identity politics, was bereft, lamenting to a longtime friend in the fall of 2016 that Hillary’s campaign “could not sell pussy on a troop train.”
Modern Democrats didn’t agree with once-sainted Carville and Bill, though, and spent eight years betting heavily on “faculty lounge speak.” No one exemplified the trend more than Ocasio-Cortez, who was elected in 2018 and along with three fellow congresswomen (Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tliab, and Ilhan Omar) soon made up a famed progressive quartet called “The Squad.” AOC’s rapid identification with social-justice gobbledygook was a bit of a stunner, because as Grim’s book explains, the Bernie-backed group Brand New Congress supported the first run of the former waitress precisely because she seemed like a “normal person” who “didn’t have the vibe of an activist who would turn off voters.” Initially she was best known for clashes with ancient party stalwarts like Joe Crowley and institutions like the DCCC, asking supporters to boycott the latter for its policy of “blacklisting” candidates who challenged established Dems in primaries.
When AOC first hit Congress she was often sympathetic, especially when the party’s Old Dogs hated on her for jumping the line, getting elected without party help, or having a big social media following (her “public whatever and their Twitter world,” as then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it). There was a humorously pointed component to comments made about “this girl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whatever she is” by men and women, with pols like Claire McCaskill wondering how the comely young congresswoman became “the thing” and the “bright shiny new object” when “I’m not sure what she’s done yet.”
AOC and the rest of the “Squad” fought back by pulling a Hillary and accusing basically everyone in the party of racism, telling the Washington Post Pelosi had been “outright disrespectful” in “the explicit singling out of newly elected women of color.” When Grim’s book came out, we learned AOC was even disappointed in “Bernie Bros,” saying the guilt-by-association factor was so strong, it made it hard for her:
Bernie’s supporters have been very, very damaging to him, and it’s really frustrating to see and experience. They don’t realize how influential they are. It’s frustrating to feel like they are hurting him. I feel like [Elizabeth] Warren is scooping up LGBT, progressives, women, and progressives of color because of how they isolate. And it makes agreeing with [Sanders] ideologically difficult. So it feels like they are forcing an unnecessary choice between class analysis and race analysis — again — through their behavior, not so much policy… it creates issues.
Before long AOC mostly became famous for her “tweetstorms,” which sometimes at night, thumb-typing seemingly randomized piles of jargon, at the end of which she’d usually endorse whatever the maximalist version of the SJW position on any issue was. She planted flags in Abolish ICE, Defund the Police, Trans Girls Are Girls, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, Censorship (“We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment”), and a long list of other once-fashionable positions. She even reamed fellow Democrats on Instagram for not using “Latinx”.
AOC’s reflexive embrace of Current Thing nonsense has made her an ultimate mockery target, probably above even Kamala Harris. Aiding here is the rare combination of slapstick hypocrisy (the video of her masking up for an outdoor photo shoot is hilarious) and socialist chic. I try not to laugh about this stuff, and to remember that a young JFK might have done the equivalent, but it’s hard not to chuckle at a leftist making a statement on abortion by posing for GQ in a Victor Glemaud dress on the steps of the Supreme Court. What’s the message here?
For all this, AOC’s goofy takes need not be fatal to an economic populist enterprise. What is fatal is economic populism that doesn’t know anything about economics. Unlike European counterparts, the American left doesn’t want to go full Lenin and call for seizing of the means of production. That’s a good thing, but it also means a person inheriting a Sanders-type movement needs to have some kind of plan for coexisting with the market. That’s tough to do when you don’t have a clue about it.
AOC was dinged badly once for saying “You just pay for it.” when asked about Medicare for All, and there are social media cottage industries devoted to clips of nitwittish things she says with alarming frequency, particularly around one of her favorite themes, magic future-math.
Previous generations of liberals would have said things like, “No one ever asks how we pay for missiles” or would have rattled off proposals for industry to shoulder costs or relied (as Bernie and others have) on studies from places like Yale that concluded a single-payer health system would pay for itself by eliminating administrative waste.
AOC has shown time and again she resents having to make the numbers work at all. Her stump address on this tour is full of lines like, “We deserve better than this,” and “You deserve better now” and “We just deserve so much better” and “Our lives deserve dignity” and “Our work deserves dignity” and “We have to commit to building the country we all deserve” and on and on. So, we deserve more. How? Stopping things and stuff:
Greeley, here’s another crazy radical idea for you. I believe that homes are not slot machines for investors and Wall Street to extort working families out of every last dollar that we have. Home is sacred. And when your landlord doubles your rent overnight or when housing prices skyrocket because Wall Street treats our housing market like a casino, your government and your public servants should fight to help you keep an affordable roof over your head. How’s that for crazy?
Is the “casino” she wants to close trading in mortgage-backed securities? That’s not inherently bad. A big market for securitized home loans and the use of innovations like the credit default swap that broke down in 2008 could have been (and for a time was) a win for working-class people, in that they made home loans cheaper and more available. If you’re not just going to give people homes you have to show some interest in ideas like this, and try to eliminate the fraud and bad incentives that caused the market to implode last time.
As for landlords doubling rent, AOC introduced a proposal to put 3% caps on rent increases, which will be nice for renters, until people stop bothering to be landlords. For all the thought she doesn’t put into actual economics, she puts an awful lot into making, modeling, and selling “tax the rich” clothing, which would be fine if we didn’t know higher taxes only paid for 5% of her platform. Also, it raises a major red flag to see the network that compared Bernie winning the Nevada caucus to France falling to the Nazis slobbering over AOC’s “beautiful butt.”
Meanwhile, speaking of an “affordable roof over your head,” a soon-to-be-excommunicated liberal, Bill Maher, went on a rant recently about why people are leaving Democratic states in droves for red states like Texas, Florida, Idaho, and Utah. He asked how it’s possible that it took three years to get a solar panel approved. “Why do you have to inspect my roof? It’s my fuckin’ roof!”
I’m no socialist, but I think working-class people need serious political representation and governments tend to run better when there’s at least one legitimate labor party with influence. But instead of putting forward someone who can express the common-sense frustrations Maher references, what remains of the left is putting its hopes in a politician whose three areas of expertise are intersectional bosh, regulations, and taxes, a chemical combination known as Voter Repellent. An AOC presidential run would obliterate progressive politics for a generation, making George McGovern seem like Kennedy. Every dipshit legacy pundit in the country is cheering the AOC rallies as the beginning of something special, which is how you know it will end in tears; when The New Yorker says the rallies are proof “the left still has a pulse,” you know it’s really on its deathbed. I guess it deserves to be, but man, how do they not see it?
