Suggestions for A Post-Trump America: The Notorious AOC
The Circumstances of Her Rise and Career Are More of a Cautionary Tale Then A Prospect for Electoral Success
Ever since she burst on to the political scene in 2018 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been arguably the most polarizing figure in politics, perhaps even more with the Democratic Party then the Republicans.
To her followers (and that is a deliberate choice of words considering how much of what she does is for social media more than anything else) she represents the future of America and is a bastion of what every elected official in the country should be. To many in the establishment, she is a figure who could well represent the salvation of the Democratic Party but just as easily bring it to electoral destruction.
For that reason leading Democrats have done everything in their power to handle her carefully. She is a Schrodinger’s Cat of Democratic politics and many are very reluctant to let her out of the proverbial box to see what she will do if she becomes the national figure she will very likely do, perhaps as recently as the next election cycle.
The bigger problem with AOC I have is because unlike the millions of neophytes who cheer her online and on college campuses I have a greater awareness of how she managed to come to power and what the ramifications have been in the six years she has been in Congress. Part of this is due to my residence in New York but much of it is due to my knowledge of both recent and more long-term American political history. And as its very likely a Post-Trump America is going to feature her as a major representative of the Democrats in some form, I think we need to take a closer look at her career so far: both the circumstances of her rise, why it represents far less than it actually seems and the prospective problems that are already obvious even at this point.
So much of the left’s ideology when it comes to electoral politics is based on their own belief system which can be just as delusional and ridiculous as the far right’s. It has become even more absurd in the last decade in particular but the basic theme hasn’t changed that much.
In their belief system America has always wanted candidates with pure leftist leanings. This is not based on the success of left-wing politicians in America rather than the idea of their absence. In their mind the reason a significant part of the population does not vote is because there is no true candidate running in either party that represents progressive values. This is in direct contradiction with their argument that Republicanism is essentially fascism (the narrative for that takes a form I will litigate in a later article) but the left is just as good at cherry-picking their arguments as conservatives are. In their mind, the reason that they do something is the reason everyone else does something, even if that’s in contradiction with such things as the historical record and election results.
The first direct factor that led to AOC coming into politics was based in what was in part the Big Lie of left-wing politics of the past decade. That lie is that Bernie Sanders would have been able to not only win the Democratic nomination in 2016 had the race not been ‘rigged’ but defeat Trump in the general.
I’ve always believed that Sanders’s surprising success in the 2016 primaries was far more to due to the lack of concrete opposition to Hilary Clinton in it than Sanders’ appeal to the primary voters. More to the point the success that Sanders had during the Democratic primaries at the time did have a ceiling. Sanders overall did better in caucus states then primaries, did poorly among states where the majority of Democratic voters were part of the traditional bases and only one won of the states that was among the biggest electoral prizes in the general: Michigan. Even the idea that the DNC was working to undermine Sanders’ campaign — something that became gospel after Wikileaks published a series of emails before the convention — can’t disguise the fact that Sanders’ appeals was essentially limited to the kind of college age, white voters that tend to be more leftwing than so much of the traditional base.
In the aftermath of Trump’s first upset electoral victory there was a lot of soul searching through the nation. The progressive wing reached the conclusion they do after every election, regardless of who wins: it was about them. If a Democrats wins, it was because the voters agreed in leftist principles; if a Republican does, it’s because the Democrat wasn’t sufficient enough to the left. Ignored in this of course were the 11 percent of Sanders voters who would admit to voting for Trump or the roughly 2 percent who voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein.
The Sanders’ campaign was the first failed strategy that led to AOC’s rise. The second one started three days after Trump was sworn in. Two leaders of Sanders failed campaign as well as two relatively left-wing commentators formed the Justice Democrats. It was based on the idea to ‘elect a new type of Democratic majority in Congress’ that will ‘create a thriving economy and democracy that works for the people, not big money interests.” The Justice Democrats said that they would only candidates who pledged to refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists.
From the start the Justice Democrats were operating with both hands and both feet tied behind their back with their determination to stay loyal to this principle. Wanting to not take money from corporate donors is noble but like so many other leftwing principles it only works if your opponents choose to play by the same rules. That was before they announced a platform that was so left wing that it wasn’t going to play with a lot of people, including ending the practice of unilaterally waging war except as a last resort to defend American soil, pardoning Edward Snowden and prosecuting CIA torturers, abolishing Ice and reforming police. These are principles that were only going to play with a very limited part of the population and most are far beyond the left of the Democratic party.
So in 2018 when the Justice Democrats had their biggest group of candidates: they were able to endorse 76 new candidates to run in primaries: five gubernatorial candidates, three Senate Candidates, one lieutenant governor and the rest were in the House. The results were a fiasco by any logical standard. Only two gubernatorial candidates and 22 congressional candidates were able to win their primaries at all. The only ones to win their generals who weren’t grandfathered in were Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib. Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign was considered the most notable for two reasons. She had defeated Dan Howley, one of the major figures in Democratic leadership and just as importantly she was one of four female Democrats featured in a 2019 documentary Knock Down The House.
This was done by Rachel Lears, who went out of her way to search for ‘charismatic female candidates who weren’t career politicians but had become newly galvanized to represent their community.” That AOC was the only one to win made her seem even more significant then she was and more cinematic. The fact that the movement that had launched her had been a disaster was left on the cutting room floor. AOC had in a sense failed upward but the legend was on the silver screen.
Ever since ‘The Squad’ took office in 2019 there has been a remarkable dissonance between Democratic leadership and the movement that ‘swept’ her into office. The original founders had all since left the group by that point, in large part because they believed it had failed in its principle goal of cultivating a unified cohort of legislators who could champion its bills. Cenk Uygur would run for the House in 2020 but made it clear he wasn’t going to run as a member of the organization he founded. In 2020 Bernie Sanders, whose campaign ideals had been the inspiration for the movement, made it clear he would not accept their endorsement when running for the Presidency again. And the writing was clearly on the wall for how much faith people had in going down the same road with no results: in 2020 only eight new faces were willing to follow their standard, all but one of them in the House. For that matter four of them had been down this road before with the Justice Democrats and Kara Eastman did no better running as Justice Democrat in 2020 than she had in 2018. There was some improvement to be sure: three new Representatives were elected, Marie Newman of Illinois, Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York.
But the general results for the Democrats at a Congressional level in 2020 was dismal as they lost thirteen seats in the House. Furthermore it was clear where the weakness for Joe Biden had been: he’d only carried 37 percent of the white working class vote. By that point the self-division within the Justice Democrats was clear in the California 53rd. Georgette Gomez lost when she chose to accept an endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel. Sara Jacobs, another Democrat beat her. It helped that Jacobs received most of her money from her own grandparents and didn’t play by Justice Democrat rules.
At this point it was becoming clear to any impartial observer the limitations of the movement AOC ‘inspired’. It could only play in the bluest districts in America and not even the bluest states were willing to go along with them. This trend continued when Marie Newman lost her primary in the Illinois sixth and Kina Collins lost her in the Illinois 7th. Odessa Kelly ran unopposed in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District and could only get 38 percent in the general. Summer Lee and Greg Casar managed to win.
For the first time since their inception the Justice Democrats only endorsed incumbents in 2024. And it was here we saw yet again the limits of ‘the AOC impact’. Jamaal Bowman had won election to the New York 16th in 2022. By this point he had become known as too much for other Congressional Democrats to handle and his position on Gaza was only the final straw. He was challenged by pro-Israel candidate George Latimer in what became the most expensive House of Representatives primary is US history. AOC and Bernie Sanders did everything they could to rally for him in that race but he lost to Latimer in a landslide, losing by more than 17 percent.
After six years in the House AOC is the biggest success story of a failed movement, the most well-known representative of a caucus that has in six years only managed to reach double digits in representatives in 2022 and has been contracting since. And yet against all the trends that recent elections have made clear, many major Democrats still believe that both she and the movement are the direction for the party to go in.
That is a remarkable conclusion given that one of the major reason Harris lost is that so many parts of the multi-racial coalition Obama appeared to have built in 2008 went to Republicans in near record numbers this past year. African-Americans, LatinX and women voters made a clear decision to go to the right. The argument that one can win them back by going away from where many of them went would seem to be ludicrous were it not for the fact that it is the natural decision of the left at the end of any election as to why Democrats lost.
The left has spent far more time in the last two decades trying to either explain or dismiss the conservative movement. It is either an aberration of history or the fact the average voter has been brainwashed by the right; it is led by a relatively few group of oligarchs and the people who vote for it are misled; it is a product of white supremacy and toxic masculinity that are either what America truly is or what it really isn’t, depending on the time of day you catch them in. None of these arguments ever seriously consider even the possibility that the left’s point of view is out of touch with the rest of the country or that there’s something about conservatism that appeals to the masses. There is certainly infinite evidence based on the results of elections, both in the recent past and the present, that argues that both are true. But extremists on the far right aren’t the only ones who can deny reality.
The Justice Democrats movement demonstrates how ideological purity is the biggest obstacle to the left’s being able to manage a takeover of the Democrats the same way the conservative’s have effectively taken over the GOP. To run on a platform this far away from where establishment Democrats are is difficult enough; to do so without using the money and methods they will has been proven nearly impossible. And one sees with other candidates that their unwillingness to relent and even double down on issues that will end up hurting them with the voters has come back to bite them multiple times. Yet the left honestly prefers losing horribly and staying pure than compromising and getting a chance to put your policies in the action.
And that’s before you consider that so much of the Justice Democrats doctrine — an unwillingness to compromise, a preference for activism and making noise rather than governing responsibly — is nothing more than the mirror image of the Freedom Caucus. Indeed the only real difference between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ocasio-Cortez is that Greene is closer to where most of her party is at the moment then where AOC is right now with the Democrats.
The idea of AOC being a successful national candidate is ridiculous when you consider that none of the members of her caucus are in districts that are even close to purple and that those few that have tried to won in red states have been resoundingly defeated. Even the idea of her being able to win a Senate seat is hard to believe as a native New Yorker: I suspect she’d do well in the urban areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn but suburban areas like Long Island and the deep red districts of Utica (represented by Elise Stefanik, once third in Republican congressional leadership) is laughable. New York State is not Brooklyn, something that many progressives refuse to acknowledge.
And that’s before you consider another problem: since she was elected to Congress, AOC has spent more time on college campuses in other states than she has in her own district. Her most famous return to New York was at the 2021 Met Gala where she famous wore a dress that said: ‘Eat the Rich’. How this was supposed to help the voters she represents economically or politically is unclear to the rational observer. I’m reminded of how Nancy Mace wore a Scarlet A on her shirt not long after she voted to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker in 2023. (Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the Squad voted with her to do so. That’s not the kind of bipartisanship I think many voters are looking for these days.)
Six years in, there has yet to be any sign of any kind of AOC effect. We have yet to see a huge influx of young people running for office under the principles she founded and fewer examples still of any getting elected. We have seen the Democratic representation in the House drop from 235 to 214 in the six years since she was elected as well as the reelection of Trump last year. If she and the Justice Democrats speak for the people, as they often claim, then she’s clearly not listening to them or at the least, she and her followers (again that word) ignoring the messages that they are sending to the party in the last three elections.
Those who believe she can become the voice of the Democrats are basically still making the same argument they always have: that there are masses waiting for a true voice of progressive standard bearer. Those who doubt it can argue the record, which includes the ‘movement’ that launched her and the fact that nationally the electorate has been going to the right ever since. There’s an argument that when Republicans make arguments they do so because they think is the right thing to do and when Democrats do its because they feel it is. I don’t generally hold with it but in the case of AOC and her national ambitions I think the record shows how little chance her movement has of national acceptance and I feel if Democrats dismiss it they will lead the party to true disaster.
I know that I will be told in the strongest possible terms with the worst possible names that I’m wrong. But I’m not a progressive, I’m a Democrat. I want to win elections more than I want to win a purity contest. Last I checked, only the former counts to getting things done.