Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already made history with her campaign to challenge Democratic Rep. Joe Crowley for his seat in Congress: The 28-year-old Bronx-born woman is the first person to face off against Crowley in a primary election in 14 years. She has shocked skeptics by even getting on the ballot for the June 26 primary election, which will determine the Democratic nominee for New York’s 14th Congressional District. The contest heated up last week when The New York Times editorial board called out Crowley for skipping two debates with Ocasio-Cortez. Crowley’s seat, representing part of Queens and the Bronx, the board wrote, “is not his entitlement. He’d better hope that voters don’t react to his snubs by sending someone else to do the job.” Which is exactly what might happen tomorrow, if Ocasio-Cortez—who just nine months ago was running her campaign while still working as a server in a restaurant—wins the nomination.
Ocasio-Cortez is part of a number of young women of color who are challenging establishment incumbents in the Democratic Party. A third-generation New Yorker whose family has roots in Puerto Rico, Ocasio-Cortez looks a lot more like the constituents in the very diverse 14th District than Crowley, a 56-year-old white man. The optics of the race, then, also reflect a battle for the future of party leadership: Who is better equipped to represent the largely working-class and non-white Americans in the 14th, and in places like it all over the country?
But Ocasio-Cortez’s challenge goes far beyond surface level; Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, a leftist organization that has helped buoy the campaigns of dozens of outsider candidates running on very progressive platforms in places where Democrats like Crowley are used to winning—handily. Some of Ocasio-Cortez’s positions include fighting for Medicare for All and a federal jobs guarantee, abolishing ICE, and insisting on much more severe policing of luxury real estate development (part of the reason she has refused corporate donations). Her push on economic justice has exposed ways that Crowley, as a powerful Democrat who sits on the House Committee on Ways and Means, pays lip service to the post–Donald Trump resistance while maintaining largely centrist politics. Newcomers like Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon, who is hoping to unseat Governor Andrew Cuomo (Nixon and Ocasio-Cortez have endorsed each other), have already helped spur a leftward shift in some of the stances of their opponents.
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Ocasio-Cortez spoke to Vogue on the phone last week before heading to a child detention center in Tornillo, Texas. Trump’s family separation policy has been a flash point not just along partisan lines, but also between Democrats: those who denounce ICE’s action but refuse to call for its dismantling, like Crowley, and those who believe it should not exist. It’s an issue that has also created a debate around “civility,” as pundits squabble over whether or not Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, for example, should have been heckled out of a Mexican restaurant last week. As the people’s millennial challenger, Ocasio-Cortez weighed in on what needs to change in New York, in elections, and in how we talk about holding those in power accountable.
https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018/status/1010943953837805569
What does being born and raised in New York mean to you and your family? How has it changed?
My aunt and my uncle were just talking last Christmas about how they literally heard Malcolm X evangelizing on street corners. That is the institutional memory of my family and multigenerational New York families. It’s actually kind of a rarity, and the reason it’s a rarity is because of the changes that the city has gone through. This city is becoming too inaccessible and too unaffordable for normal people to live in anymore. My family is three generations deep in the Bronx, and my own mother can’t afford to live in the same city, in the same state as me anymore, because it’s gotten too expensive. How I was born I think is really exemplary of that.
I was born to a dad who was born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was burning, while landlords were committing arson to their own buildings. He grew up as a kid with five people in a one-bedroom apartment, and my mom was born in poverty in Puerto Rico. But they met out there, they got married, came back, and had me, and as 20-somethings they were able to take out a small loan and get an apartment in the Bronx, and have me. And the idea of that, for two working-class 20-somethings, it’s almost unimaginable in New York City anymore. New York 14 is one of those last working-class congressional districts in New York City. These communities are very rapidly seeing the cost of living go up: In the last three years or so, the median price of a two-bedroom apartment in New York 14 has gone up 80 percent. Our incomes certainly aren’t going up 80 percent to compensate for that, and what that is doing is a wave of aggressive economic displacement of the communities that have always been here. If this wasn’t even economic, if it was any other force, if due to climate change, or due to any other kind of a social force that would cause like that amount of displacement that quickly, we would call it a crisis. And that, I think, is the core of a lot of what we’re talking about: Who is New York changing for? A lot of people, especially in our community, are feeling like it’s changing to be a temporary playground rather than a place for people to actually raise families and transform their own economic opportunities and their own lives.
What drew you to Democratic Socialists of America? What about socialism appeals to you?
It was a lot more about action than about words or descriptions or -isms, because for me, it wasn’t just like I read a book one day and said, “Oh, okay, I’m a Democratic Socialist now.” I’m an organizer, I’m an educator, I’m an activist, and what I found was that every time I saw myself showing up for something that was important to my community, when I was one of the many people who showed up in Union Square for the 100-day vigil after Hurricane Maria, DSA was there. Every time I was joining my brothers and sisters in the Movement for Black Lives, DSA was there. When I saw these actions, it was like, Okay, this is clearly an extension of our own community. And the thing about DSA is that it’s a very large tent organization. When we talk about the word socialism, I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity, and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day. To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live. It’s to say that no individual’s civil rights are to be violated. And it’s also to say that we need to really examine the historical inequities that have created much of the inequalities—both in terms of economics and social and racial justice—because they are intertwined. This idea of, like, race or class is a false choice. Even if you wanted to separate those two things, you can’t separate the two, they are intrinsically and inextricably tied. There is no other force, there is no other party, there is no other real ideology out there right now that is asserting the minimum elements necessary to lead a dignified American life.
Donald Trump has made it easy for politicians to be part of the “resistance” without really doing much . . .
One of the biggest dangers of this administration is the erosion of norms, which is pretty typical for authoritarian regimes. This is one of the problems when it comes to immigration. My opponent has literally called ICE “fascist”, yet he refuses to take the stance of abolishing it, which, to me, is morally incomprehensible. Words mean something, and the moment you have identified something as fascist, that with it carries a moral responsibility to abolish it. That’s what I’m talking about when we say that norms have been eroded: that we literally have elected officials arguing to basically retain fascist agencies. And that’s on the left. When I talk about the abolishment of ICE, it is not a fringe position. [ICE] was established in 2003 in a suite of legislation that almost everybody recognizes as a mistake. People recognize the Patriot Act as a mistake. They regret voting for the AUMF [Authorization to Use Military Force], they regret the Iraq War, and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security], and ICE were right in there with all of that legislation. Our campaign has been really effective in refining and providing a very clear moral and economic voice for what must and should be done. And it’s very unapologetic.
How do we actually get bolder candidates elected?
The biggest thing is that right now voters need to start taking an elevated level of responsibility over our elections. Because if you look at my district, for example, we have about 3 percent primary turnout. I spent the first nine months of my campaign operating out of a paper grocery bag while I worked in restaurants. That’s how I spent May of 2017 until February of this year. And there was this kind of self-fulfilling or self-defeating cycle for nine whole months where people were saying, “I’d really love to support you,” but people were waiting until somebody else donated to my campaign. What we need to realize, especially when we’re talking about women of color, people of color, working class, poor candidates, you make them viable by choosing to support someone who you agree with. I got lucky. There are a lot of other candidates like me out there: 2016 was disheartening for a lot of people, but the problem, again, is early cynicism. Our first reaction should be: How can I help you? And the only reason I am here today is because a very small critical mass of people was willing to take a risk.
There’s a lot of talk of “civility” right now.
I do know that because of who I am, there are characteristics that people would be predisposed to think about me. It’s easier to label someone like me as emotional, or explosive, or whatever. But what I think is powerful is the fact that [my campaign uses] such unapologetic language while remaining composed. People in my opponent’s camp have accused me of running a negative campaign. I find it very interesting that we have now interpreted holding people accountable as negative. I never called him a name; I have never insulted him. But because I talk about the fact that he takes money from immigrant detention center profiteers, because I talk about the fact that he has been under ethics investigations within his role—both in Congress and as the chairman of the Democratic Caucus—because I’m holding him accountable for what he’s done, that accountability is being interpreted as negative. Because he’s a Democrat, and also because he is powerful, and we’re somehow not allowed or not supposed to talk about the misguided actions of people who are in power. Our democracy is designed for that to happen. Our democracy is designed to speak truth to power. Our democracy is designed for elections to be these kinds of conversations and referendums on our leadership.
This interview has been condensed and edited.