What is it like to go from holding forth about politics from behind a bar to being an insider in Congress overnight? And a national political figure? Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York discussed her experience in an interview with David Remnick of The New Yorker. (There is audio.)
I’ve sketched before the campaign industrial complex and the track budding careerists might take to becoming members of the political fraternity. By the time they’ve ingratiated themselves with enough party “poohbahs” to run for office, they are already the kind of Democrat progressive activists love to hate. It is uncommon to hear a progressive activist reflect on working in the “shit show” after jumping the line at 29. Her perspective is far more grounded than one might expect.
Ocasio-Cortez reflects on where President Biden ought to take his presidency to make the most of it with the thin voting margins he has. Executive actions should not be left in the toolbox. Time is short to get anything done before the next congress. If he is to have “any chance at preserving any of our majority,” student-loan cancellation could not only help her demoralized generation but motivate them to political action now that it is needed most. Democracy itself is in peril.
“What we risk is having a government that perhaps postures as a democracy, and may try to pretend that it is, but isn’t,” she says. We don’t need to look to post-WWI Germany for a model when Jim Crow was home-grown:
And the question that we’re really facing is: Was the last fifty to sixty years after the Civil Rights Act just a mere flirtation that the United States had with a multiracial democracy that we will then decide was inconvenient for those in power? And we will revert to what we had before, which, by the way, wasn’t just Jim Crow but also the extraordinary economic oppression as well?
Ocasio-Cortez is careful in commenting about Nancy Pelosi’s speakership but insists there is need not just for structural but generational change in the caucus Pelosi leads. AOC has no nostalgia for past congresses that passed out of existence before she was born. For Biden, that’s a stumbling block. Her youth, plus coming from a working-class community accustomed to being ignored, brings clarity where long experience can be a hindrance.
Could she walk away if she finds her effectiveness stymied, asks Remnick.
Sure, there are other ways she could help working people that might be useful, Ocasio-Cortez says, “But I also reject the total cynicism that what’s happening here is fruitless. I’ve been in this cycle before in my life, before I even ran for office, before it was even a thought.”
Ocasio-Cortez elaborates on a time she lost hope. She responds in a penetrating way hip cynics need to hear:
It manifested in depression. Feeling like you have no agency, and that you are completely subject to the decisions of people who do not care about you, is a profoundly depressing experience. It’s a very invisibilizing experience. And I lived in that for years. This is where sometimes what I do is speak to the psychology of our politics rather than to the polling of our politics. What’s really important for people to understand is that to change that tide and to actually have this well of hope you have to operate on your direct level of human experience.
When people start engaging individually enough, it starts to amount to something bigger. We have a culture of immediate gratification where if you do something and it doesn’t pay off right away we think it’s pointless.
But, if more people start to truly cherish and value the engagement and the work in their own back yard, it will precipitate much larger change. And the thing about people’s movements is that the opposite is very top-down. When you have folks with a profound amount of money, power, influence, and they really want to make something happen, they start with media. You look at these right-wing organizations, they create YouTube channels. They create their podcast stars. They have Fox News as their own personal ideological television outlet.
Legitimate change in favor of public opinion is the opposite. It takes a lot of mass-public-building engagement, unrecognized work until it gets to the point that it is so big that to ignore it threatens the legitimacy of mass-media outlets, institutions of power, etc. It has to get so big that it is unignorable, in order for these positions up top to respond. And so people get very discouraged here.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been there, and she isn’t going back. She is not giving up again.
There is no movement, there is no effort, there is no unionizing, there is no fight for the vote, there is no resistance to draconian abortion laws, if people think that the future is baked in and nothing is possible and that we’re doomed. Even on climate—or especially on climate. And so the day-to-day of my day job is frustrating. So is everyone else’s. I ate shit when I was a waitress and a bartender, and I eat shit as a member of Congress. It’s called a job, you know?
So, yes, I deal with the wheeling and dealing and whatever it is, that insider stuff, and I advance amendments that some people would criticize as too little, etc. I also advance big things that people say are unrealistic and naïve. Work is like that. It is always the great fear when it comes to work or pursuing anything. You want to write something, and, in your head, it’s this big, beautiful Nobel Prize-winning concept. And then you are humbled by the words that you actually put on paper.
And that is the work of movement. That is the work of organizing. That is the work of elections. That is the work of legislation. That is the work of theory, of concepts, you know? And that is what it means to be in the arena.
Political “Survivor.” Outwit. Outplay. Outlast. Commit to it, work through the frustrations and setbacks and your goals will advance. Quick fixes are few and far between. Those who don’t show up to play forfeit.
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