After winning the Democratic primary in New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is now a national political figure. On Wednesday, she made a series of media appearances, including spots on CNN and MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Later in the day, Stephen Colbert hailed her win, joking that when he was twenty-eight he got his first can opener. On Thursday, she appeared on Colbert’s show, and an article in the Times described her as “an instant political rock star.”
Ocasio-Cortez deserves all the attention she’s getting, but it’s important not to focus only on her personal traits: her age, her gender, her ethnicity, and her inspiring life story. As she pointed out in her post-victory interviews, she ran on a platform that transcended these things. “Our campaign was focussed on just a laser-focussed message of economic, social, and racial dignity for working-class Americans, especially those in Queens and the Bronx,” she told Mika Brzezinski, of “Morning Joe.”
Of course, all politicians say that they are dedicated to the interests and well-being of their constituents. But Ocasio-Cortez, who had the support of progressive groups such as MoveOn and the Democratic Socialists of America, isn’t your average pol. She delivered an important message to the Democratic Party by running an explicitly populist, anti-establishment campaign. And, as the Party prepares for the midterms and the 2020 Presidential election, it would do well to listen to her.
Ocasio-Cortez’s first point was that being opposed to Donald Trump and his actions, while essential, isn’t a sufficient political strategy. Ocasio-Cortez herself is vehemently anti-Trump. Last week, she visited a detention center on the Mexican border; after her victory, she said that she would vote to impeach the President. But she has also warned against fixating on him and his every offensive statement. “What we need to do is lay out a plan and a vision that people can believe in, and getting into Twitter fights with the President is not exactly, I think, where we’re going to find progress as a nation,” she said, on “Morning Joe.”
Ocasio-Cortez also expressed the view that Democrats have something to learn from Trump’s rise and, particularly, from his ability to mobilize voters who are detached from, or alienated by, the major political parties. “He spoke very directly to a lot of needs that were not being met by both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party,” she told the Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald. “Our neglect of that is something we wholeheartedly have to take responsibility for, and correct for.”
Although some Democrats continue to insist that it was the Russians or James Comey or Jill Stein who gifted Trump the White House, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t accept this narrative. “I do think the role of Russian interference was aggressive in the election,” she told Greenwald. “But that didn’t get Donald Trump to forty per cent. It didn’t get him to forty-five per cent in the polls.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s second point is related to the first: to attract working-class and middle-class voters of all colors and ethnicities, Democratic candidates need to demonstrate that they aren’t part of a system rigged in favor of the rich and powerful. As a former campaign organizer for Bernie Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez levelled many of the same charges against her opponent, the ten-term Democratic congressman Joseph Crowley, that Sanders hurled at Hillary Clinton during the 2016 Democratic primary. “My opponent takes insane amounts of money from luxury-real-estate developers, from private-equity groups, from pharmaceutical corporations and insurance corporations,” she told Greenwald. “And that is tied directly to the legislation he has been passing.”
Crowley vehemently denied this charge, and his voting record shows that he may well have a point. In May, for example, he voted against a G.O.P. bill that rolled back some of the financial regulations that the Dodd-Frank Act put in place. But in representing a poor, working-class district—the most diverse in the country, according to Ocasio-Cortez—why did he need to raise money from interests like the Blackstone Group, a private-equity firm co-founded by the late Republican billionaire Pete Peterson? The entire business model of private-equity firms is based on upward redistribution, by borrowing large sums of money to take over companies, then squeezing costs—particularly labor costs—so that the companies can be resold at a profit, generating huge gains for the partners of the firm.
There is little convincing justification for Crowley’s association with the Blackstone Group, just as there was little convincing justification for Clinton when she gave highly paid speeches to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in advance of her second Presidential bid. To position itself as a truly populist force, Ocasio-Cortez says, the Democratic Party must make a decisive leap from the standard methods of financing campaigns through corporate-money politics—and from the conflicts of interest that come with them. “Once we break free from that system [and] start to finance our campaigns with grassroots donations, we are able to speak more directly to the needs of the American people,” she told Greenwald.
With the Democratic Party preparing to fight elections against opponents financed by the likes of Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers, many more seasoned Democrats would say (at least in private) that Ocasio-Cortez is being unrealistic, that the Party has no choice but to accept big donations from people like Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg. With so much depending on depriving Republicans of control of Congress, it is easy to sympathize with this argument. Ultimately, however, it is unpersuasive.
With phony demagogues like Trump busy claiming the mantle of populism, progressive parties need to offer voters the real thing. That’s bottom-up, participatory politics—or people power. If sympathetic billionaires wish to align themselves with such a movement, that is all very well (at least until campaign-finance laws are fixed). But if the interests and policy preferences of the wealthy take precedence over those of the average citizen, that is the politics of plutocracy, not populism.
How well are the Democrats doing in heeding Ocasio-Cortez’s warnings? Despite all the stories about potential splits in the Party, there are some grounds for optimism.
On the organizational side, Trump’s occupancy of the White House has unleashed an unprecedented wave of political activism. From dedicated groups such as Indivisible to the suburban moms who participated in the Women’s March, to the marchers protesting the Administration’s immigration policy, participation on the left is on the rise. Small donations are pouring into Democratic candidacies and progressive causes. And the fight over Anthony Kennedy’s replacement on the Supreme Court will only heighten this enthusiasm.
In terms of messaging, Ocasio-Cortez isn’t as much of an outlier as she might appear. Although many prominent Democrats seem to be talking mainly about Trump—to the point that they can barely see straight—that preoccupation is partly an artifact of the media’s focus. In a world of all Trump all the time, Democrats who bring up other things don’t get much coverage. The fact is that many Democrats are concentrating on the same issues that Ocasio-Cortez emphasized during her campaign: health care (she supports Medicare for all), housing, education (like Sanders, she favors free tuition at public universities), wages, and jobs (she has advocated for a federal jobs guarantee).
Listen to the speeches of Senator Sherrod Brown, of Ohio; or of Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor in Georgia; or of Beto O’Rourke, who is challenging Ted Cruz in Texas; or of Conor Lamb, who won a special election in western Pennsylvania earlier this year; or of Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot who recently won the Democratic primary in New Jersey’s Republican-held Eleventh Congressional District. To be sure, these Democrats are attacking Trump and talking about immigration and the Supreme Court. But their main focus is on promoting social and economic empowerment for people living in their districts.
That is the traditional Democratic Party message, and it is one that never grows old. Every so often, however, it needs to be renewed and adapted to new circumstances. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just demonstrated how to do this.