Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

[lpetrich]

Continuing with The Nation's review,

There, Ocasio-Cortez excelled in school—she has described herself as a “dorky kid”—despite feeling out of place among her richer, whiter classmates. When Freedlander turns to her college years, he offers the most thorough account I’ve encountered, with some amusing and illuminating new details. At Boston University, “Sandy” performed cringey slam poetry, pushed David Foster Wallace on her friends, and started a blog; she studied abroad in Niger and, like other high achievers with altruistic instincts during the Obama years, got roped into a bunch of “social change through innovation”–type entrepreneurial bullshit.

This stuff—market-based philanthropy, “leveraged” nonprofits, microcredit—was everywhere when I was in college. Always vague in their pecuniary underpinnings, these projects were prized by administrators, who tended, by contrast, to ignore those of us who merely aspired to be “organizers.” (Not that we knew what that meant, either, but at least we knew we weren’t starting banks or pyramid schemes.) AOC, like many people I knew in school, soon burned out on this model of social change. She didn’t get a job out of it, and anyway, anarchists camping in the park seemed to be getting more done. As she wrote on her blog in a critique of “conscious consumerism” during her junior year at BU, “We’ve made a world where 10% proceeds sprinkle karma on our transactions…. Is social consciousness enough? What about social action?”

Right-wingers have snickered about how AOC's class origin is more bourgeois than proletarian, to use Marxist terminology, and it is true that she didn't experience the lowest of the low. But then again, most revolutionaries are relatively bourgeois, including the American revolutionaries.

Rather, her trajectory resembles that of many highly educated millennials calling themselves socialists today, who experienced downward mobility and economic insecurity as they entered the workforce. Like them, AOC is ultimately a product of the failed promise of meritocracy in the United States.

...
“She had been a star in high school, a star in college, and a star as a graduate, who suddenly, through the vagaries of the modern economy, found herself serving overprivileged hipsters and overripe tourists.” Now she was paying for doctor’s visits in stacks of ones. For AOC’s generation, all it took was a single false step, an unforeseen misfortune or health crisis, to “fall through the cracks,” as she put it, and lose any sense of stability.

When she graduated, AOC could have become an analyst for some Wall Street firm, and from that, she could have led a very comfortable life, but she didn't.

The Nation's review then discussed her sort of celebrity.

But to dismiss AOC’s tweets and Instagram stories as mere exercises in vanity or pandering is a mistake (one often buoyed by sexism). She has become what the scholar Paolo Gerbaudo calls a “hyperleader,” using digital platforms to form affective bonds with her base and beyond, which compensates for the failure of more traditional forms of political organization (e.g., parties, unions, and so on) to generate collective identities.

 

[Derec]

The Nation's review then discussed her sort of celebrity.

It's basically a cult of personality.

 

[untermensche]

The Nation's review then discussed her sort of celebrity.

It's basically a cult of personality.

As oppose to the celebrity of who else?

There are idiots that claim it is her problem she is ineffective because she is surrounded by the corrupted.

 

[lpetrich]

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and America’s Most Liberal Generation - The New York Times

Perhaps the most striking political change that occurred during the stormy reign of Donald J. Trump is one his devotees utterly abhorred: the growth of a sizable left outside and inside the Democratic Party. Young radicals and middle-aged white suburban dwellers both flocked to “the Resistance,” under whose militant rubric one could do anything from marching in a demonstration to starting a Facebook page to canvassing for a favored candidate. During his second run for the White House even more than during his first, Bernie Sanders inspired millions of young people of all races to imagine living in a nation with strong unions and a robust welfare state instead of the “neoliberal” order long favored by leaders of both major parties. And, for many Berniecrats, socialism became the name of their desire instead of a synonym for state tyranny.

The two Arthur Schlesingers would chuckle over what has been happening. They'd say that it's the emergence of the sort of movement that has made great changes in the past: the Jackson Era, the Civil War Era, the Progressive Era, the New Deal Era, and the Sixties Era.

"At the center of his story is Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who may need no introduction but still might blush to read this glowing portrayal by a reporter who lives in her New York City district and appears to have interviewed only people who share his sentiments."

It's hard to find anyone from her pre-politics years who has very negative sentiments about her, despite right-wing publications being very eager to run such stuff. Like a fellow waitress who claimed that she once hogged tips.

One of her college friends recalled “Everybody I knew was in love with her.” One Democratic Party activist(?) politician(?) once said about her “I think I met the future president of the United States.”

"What binds together most activist members of this generation is a mixture of populist anger and political savoir-faire." -- willing to avoid a lot of the dogmatic, sectarian thinking of past left-wing movements. The sort of thing that Monty Python's Life of Brian lampooned as the Judean People's Front vs. the People's Front of Judea.

"In working to embed a growing social-democratic faction within one of America’s major parties, these activists have demonstrated a strategic realism that their progenitors in the old Socialist Party of Eugene Debs and Norman Thomas never possessed."

About Bernie Sanders almost winning the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016, DF writes “leftists realized that if they wanted power, and if they wanted to enact the policies they purported to believe, they would need to engage in political fights, and more importantly, they would need to start winning them.”

 

[Derec]

As oppose to the celebrity of who else?

There are idiots that claim it is her problem she is ineffective because she is surrounded by the corrupted.

No, that's absurd. She is ineffective because of her cockamamie ideas.

 

[lpetrich]

Now the book itself.

Its intro sets the scene with activist Sean McElwee who hosted a happy hour at a bar for fellow activists back in 2017. He founded Data for Progress, a polling site. "He also predicted that one day his own children would find him to be a moral degenerate for eating meat and said that he was working on building a world where ecoterrorists could receive veterans benefits." AOC was there, invited by SME. People there remembered how she was unusually interested in the work that the activists were doing.

AOC didn't do it alone, of course. David Freedlander credits Bernie Sanders as helping make AOC's career possible. He wasn't the first left-winger to run for President. Dennis Kucinich in 2004 & 2008, Howard Dean in 2004, Ralph Nader in 2000, Jerry Brown in 1992, ...

BS was an odd figure: white-haired, balding, looking like some stereotypical professor.

Back to SME, he was the one who got the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE. He went to King's College in NYC, founded by Campus Crusade for Christ, with student houses named after the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Queen Elizabeth I. He found an ad for it in the only magazine that his parents subscribed to, a right-wing publication called "World".

He was a "rebellion Libertarian" for a while, interning at the Reason Foundation and at Fox Business Network, then returning to his rural-Connecticut home and finding out that libertarianism failed to address the social problems there. SME then got involved in left-wing think tank Demos and started hosting meetings, because it's hard to discuss politics on Twitter, and because "I fucking hate books". He was motivated to start Data for Progress to find out what works and what doesn't.

Then he talks about how millennials tend left-wing and Democratic, living through two failed Republican Presidents, Bush II and Trump, and a successful Democratic one, Obama.

 

[Derec]

Its intro sets the scene with activist Sean McElwee who hosted a happy hour at a bar for fellow activists back in 2017. He founded Data for Progress, a polling site. "He also predicted that one day his own children would find him to be a moral degenerate for eating meat

Nazis were also fond of that term. There was even a whole category of "enartete Kunst" (degenerate art). In any case, if eating meat is "degenerate", then just give me a steak and call me a neutron star!

and said that he was working on building a world where ecoterrorists could receive veterans benefits."

For what purpose? Ecoterrorists, like all terrorists, belong in prison. They should not be rewarded with money. This is not Canada!
This just goes to show how far out there leftists are.

Back to SME, he was the one who got the idea of abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement - ICE.

So an open borders nut. We need immigration enforcement just like we need all other law enforcement agencies.

 

[lpetrich]

"The Sanders campaign of 2016, with its electric energy, massive crowds, millions in small-dollar fundraising contributions, and millions of votes, despite—or because of—being the most avowedly left-wing political campaign in thirty years, began to change the calculus."

BS almost won, with him getting 1846 pledged delegates and Hillary Clinton 2205, out of a total of 4051.

“Those of us in our twenties or younger, just coming into the electorate now, I don’t think people are ready for us,” McElwee said. “It is the most liberal generation ever polled. We could grow much more conservative over time and we would still be the most liberal generation ever polled. We are going to be deeply fucking with American politics for a very long time to come.”

Completing the intro.

Chapter 1: "Sandy" - AOC's nickname for a long time. Her nickname is now Alex.

The chapter started with her speech on MLK Day on 2011, the only Boston University student to do so on that date. It was more important at BU than elsewhere, since that's where MLK earned his doctorate. She did a speech on "Can This Generation Be Great?" Her answer was that one must choose to be great. She also talked about being concerned with broader things than one's day-to-day affairs, and also about how one can reach out to all over the world.

"But she really found her home at a BU multicultural arts and social justice community space called the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground." named after MLK's mentor, pastor, philosopher, and theologian Howard Thurman.

The core of Thurman’s teaching centered around the notion that African Americans and other oppressed people needed to find a spiritual, internal (and eternal) strength to survive their oppressors. In doing so, they could overcome, and help others overcome, their surroundings. His insight was the same for white Americans who were part of the power structure—that by tapping into something deeper within themselves, they could let go of some of their insistence on their own superiority.

He had sayings like “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive,” and “Keep the dream alive, for as long as a man has a dream in his heart he cannot lose the significance of living.”

They would gather every Friday for "Coffee and Conversation" AOC met her boyfriend there. The two were quite a pair, "with Roberts often playing the role of devil’s advocate in the group, the politically incorrect provocateur with the libertarian bent, in order to break the consensus of the group."

People who knew her said that "the young Ocasio-Cortez was not different from the person who seemed to emerge fully formed on the national stage in the summer of 2018. They describe a girl and a young woman who was exceptionally smart, quick on her feet, articulate, determined to make a difference in the world, and genuinely decent and caring, concerned for the inequities in the world and for other people."

People recalled such things as “She was kind, she was funny, she was smart,” “Everybody I knew was in love with her.” “We all loved her,” “She was very, very smart, very sweet, very welcoming. Just a good person. You have seen her on the news, and that is how she was in college. Passionate, outspoken, intelligent, engaging. Just fun to be around.” “the smartest person I know,” “Sandy is brilliant—she is boldly curious and always present,” “She makes me think and could always see multiple sides of any issue. Sandy is also heart and soul real. It is wonderful to see Sandy emerge as a leader—I can’t wait to see what happens when her time truly comes.” “She was really a genuinely kind person,”

“People ask me all the time when they find out that I was friends with her, ‘Is it real? Is it an act?’ And all I can tell them is that the person you see on TV is 100 percent her. And the thing I most remember about her and that drew me and others to her was that she just had this incredibly deep well of empathy, and this incredible ability to listen. I know people may scoff at it, but it is genuinely incredible. When you are talking with her, you feel like she is totally engaged with you. It is just this ability to make you feel seen and feel heard. I think it is one of the reasons she has become the leader of this movement. There is a strong energy about her that exudes kindness and empathy and says, ‘I see you and I am going to fight for you,’ and she always had that.”

“She just had this sense of gravity about her,” “Like when she was in the room and when she was talking people knew to be quiet. She wasn’t mean or presumptuous about it or anything, but just sort of commanded the room. I guess you could call it a natural charisma.” “There is this Maya Angelou quote, ‘People may forget what you say but they will never forget how you made them feel.’ That’s what I always think of about her,” “There was always this calm fury, or not fury really, but power to her words. She was the one at the end who would sort of invite everyone to reflect on what we had said, what we were doing and talking about, how the event unfolded before us.”

That fits with the Boston Globe's profile of her not long after her first primary victory -- people gushed about her.

 

[Derec]

BS almost won, with him getting 1846 pledged delegates and Hillary Clinton 2205, out of a total of 4051.

In hindsight, it would have been better had Sanders won the primary. He'd have lost to Trump too but it would not have been a close call but more like 1988. The hard left would have been discredited for a generation. No AOC, no Squad, no bait and switch Biden. No $3.5T Spendapalooza.

We are going to be deeply fucking with American politics for a very long time to come.”

Fucking us up, more like.

Chapter 1: "Sandy" - AOC's nickname for a long time. Her nickname is now Alex.

I like "Sergeant Sandy".

People recalled such things as “She was kind, she was funny, she was smart,”

By "people" do you mean her NYC architect father's household Help?

 

[lpetrich]

She blogged in her BU days, and DF quotes what she said about feminism. It was not clear what she had in mind. Was she saying that the essential battles of feminism are now won and that "equality for equality's sake" struggles are a thing of the past?

DF then discussed AOC's father Sergio Ocasio-Roman, how he grew up in the Bronx of the 1970's and became an architect.

While at BU, Ocasio-Cortez was part of a spoken word/slam poetry group called Speak for Yourself. Michael Bruffee still remembers, over ten years later, a poem she wrote about her father called “The Topaz Cape of Courage.”

“I remember it because she had a way with words. The pain that she felt flowed so beautifully into that piece. She was painting her father, and her relationship with her father, in this way that had no pretentious bullshit,” he recalls. “She talked about him dying, and him being in the hospital, and he wrapping her in this topaz cape of courage and said, ‘Do me proud.’ I asked her about the topaz, because I didn’t know what it was, and she said it was this semi-precious stone that is blue and kind of cracked. It was this image of something that wasn’t perfect, that said it was OK to be broken, and courage is wearing that.”

She had many of the concerns that she would have more recently.

“We used to joke, you know, ‘Sandy for President,’” said Bruffee, “because she was a very radical person back then. Not in a fire-and-brimstone way but in a way that she wanted to shake things up and push things to the left. We would talk all the time, ‘Why don’t one of us run for office?’ and we would talk about the things we would do, just wipe the slate clean and provide healthcare, education, eliminate student debt, end the wars. If we just wiped the slate and started clean, what would it look like?”

“Obviously, none of us knew what a democratic socialist was or anything like that,” agreed Adam Engel. “But she was a very caring person. She cared for people whether she knew them or not, which is sort of what democratic socialism is in a way.”

She is very diligent, something that was evident in her teen years. But some people in Yorktown felt that she did not quite belong, even if it meant having to cheat to avoid being defeated by her.

Cotto remembers Ocasio-Cortez telling a story about how she wanted to prove herself by selling the most Girl Scout cookies in her troop. She would work the doors of her neighborhood, seemingly getting more orders than everyone else around, but “then there were some Westchester County families that would just come and buy hundreds of cookies from their own kids. She couldn’t catch a break.”

 

[lpetrich]

In hindsight, it would have been better had Sanders won the primary. He'd have lost to Trump too but it would not have been a close call but more like 1988. The hard left would have been discredited for a generation. No AOC, no Squad, no bait and switch Biden. No $3.5T Spendapalooza.

Dream on. I think that Bernie Sanders could have won, because he would seem less like some entitled Washington insider than Hillary Clinton was. But if the Democratic establishment refused to support him, then he might have had the sort of defeat that George McGovern had in 1972, and that would have provoked some major strife in the Democratic Party between pro-BS and anti-BS people.

People recalled such things as “She was kind, she was funny, she was smart,”

By "people" do you mean her NYC architect father's household Help?

People who knew her in college.

There aren't many people with grudges against her, or else right-wing publications would have discovered them long ago. Fox News, The New York Post, you name it.

 

[lpetrich]

One of the striking things about Ocasio-Cortez, and something that has surely led to her sudden stardom, is her preternatural sense of self-possession. For such a young woman thrust onto the national stage, she seemed remarkably comfortable in her own skin and aware in some deep and internal way of who she was and what she wanted to do. Despite having just turned twenty-seven years old when she started her run for Congress, she seemed to have emerged from a box as a fully formed candidate.

I'm not very perceptive of such things.

David Freedlander then discussed the connection of AOC with the National Hispanic Institute, an organization that trains people to lead in the Hispanic community.

People who were with her at NHI remember her as not just warm and ambitious but as unusually open about what she wanted. When the program’s leaders looked for students to return the next year as organizers, others maneuvered to get noticed, but Ocasio-Cortez just went up to the program leaders and said she wanted to be included.

... People who knew her then and in college describe her as dreamy, quiet, and introverted. She was obsessed with art, books, and ideas, a devoted fan of the writer David Foster Wallace, pushing his essay, “Consider the Lobster,” in which he explores the ethics of killing animals of any sort for food, upon anyone who would take it. Her friends also describe her as insisting on taking detours on road trips if there was a Frank Lloyd Wright building to be seen.

... “You had to be very powerful,” “You had to portray confidence. You had to command a room. You could tell she was thoughtful and intelligent, but when it was time to be on stage, she was on. She was the same person I see now.”

Entrepreneur Cheni Yerushalmi:

“We spent hours together every day, and everything you see about her now was apparent then,” said Yerushalmi, “She was a great writer. Smart. Cool. She had a great personality, and she sort of stuck out wherever she went. People knew she was in the room.”

So it's evident that what we see of her nowadays is her real personality, and not some act.

 

[lpetrich]

Being a bartender meant that AOC was going nowhere, and she climbed back out by becoming an activist and a campaigner, then running for office.

In politics, despite enthusiastically supporting Barack Obama, she discovered that one of the biggest contributors to both parties was investment-banking company Goldman Sachs. Continuing the Bush II tax cuts, trying to shrink Social Security and Medicare, and continuing drone warfare, those were all dispiriting.

Chapter 2. District. Starts off with describing late June in 2018, with AOC's campaign posters everywhere in NY-14. It seemed like a long shot, since Joe Crowley was a big political player, a big fundraiser, and 4th most powerful Democrat in the House, after Nancy Pelosi of CA, Steny Hoyer of MD, and Jim Clyburn of SC, all in their late 70's. He was 55, and a likely successor for any one of them, especially NP.

Four years earlier, in 2014, Eric Cantor, a big-name Republican politician, lost to an unknown, Dave Brat. But JC's team was confident that JC would win the 2018 Dem NY-14 primary. Polling showed JC beating AOC by 30%. But it was polling of likely voters, and AOC's campaigners recruited voters who don't usually vote. She thought that even if she loses, she will have built a political machine.

I knew that if she won, it would be one of the greatest upsets in US political history and that Ocasio-Cortez would immediately become a star and hero of the Trump resistance.

“I think I’m ready for it,” she said three days before she would go to bed obscure for the last time in her life. “And I think the country is ready for it.”

One of her recruits was a certain Shawna Morlock.

“AOC just exuded a genuine normality,” Morlock said. “She didn’t seem like a greasy, polished politician. You can feel it. She was a bartender, and I was too, for thirteen years, and you get to be a good judge of people’s character in that position.”

AOC herself said that she could deal with President Trump because as a bartender, “I have dealt with a hundred Donald Trumps.”

“I was like, ‘Yea! Me too, girl!” recalled Morlock. “I know Trump doesn’t even drink, but he’s just like every rich guy at the bar who has had too much to drink and gets obnoxious and sloppy and doesn’t realize people are trying to avoid him.”

 

[lpetrich]

Then the book mentioned activism to unseat NY state legislators who joined the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), an organization of pro-Republican Democratic legislators. While that was getting started, AOC started campaigning, first urging people to register Democratic so that they can vote for her in the primary.

"Which is to say there was no one type of person who was drawn to Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign; they were mostly young, but they were of all races, ethnic backgrounds, education levels, and social classes and had varying levels of experience in political organizing. What they shared was a shock and outrage that someone as ill fit for the job as Donald Trump could become president."

So they got into politics to oppose him. Some activists discussed the Tea Party as a model, noting its members' "extraordinary clarity of purpose" against Obama, and also against Republicans who were insufficiently on their side.

Mentioned a campaign app called Reach, one where one can enter data into anyone that one comes in contact with, rather than working from a big list of possible voters.

Also Black Lives Matter, not only a protest against police brutality and racial oppression but also an alternative way of doing politics and activism, a lot of loosely-organized groups rather than a top-down power structure connected to black churches and the Democratic Party.

When AOC was starting out, nearly all the activist organizations endorsed Joe Crowley, something that many of them would later regret.

Late in her campaign was the only visual-media campaign ad: "Courage to Change". "Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office," she said, introducing herself. "I am an educator, an organizer, a working-class New Yorker. I have worked with expectant mothers, I have waited tables, and I have led classrooms, and going into politics wasn’t in the plan." Then Joe Crowley speaking and some luxury apartment towers being built. "But after twenty years of the same representation, we have to ask: Who has New York been changing for? Every day it gets harder for working families like mine to get by. The rent gets higher, healthcare covers less, and our income stays the same. It is clear that these changes haven’t been for us, and we deserve a champion," with her walking around her district and speaking at a meeting of the Democratic Socialists of America.

The ad cost less than $10K, because it largely used volunteers and family members, and was done on location. The makers were two people who had worked in advertising and corporate communications but had become disillusioned. Like a director flying from LA to Detroit for some video to make some beer seem authentic.

In the weekend before the primary election, she went off to a migrant detention camp near Tornillo, TX. She did that to highlight the Trump Admin's policies toward immigrants, in a district that was around 50% immigrants.

Ocasio-Cortez spent much of Election Day tweeting photos of places where she thought the Crowley forces had hung illegal signs, and then accusing the Crowley forces of taking down her signs and putting theirs up illegally. There was no evidence of it, and it wasn’t the only baseless accusation thrown out by Ocasio-Cortez during the campaign. She accused the incumbent of not having bilingual campaign literature, which was false, and of Crowley acolytes tampering with election machines, which would have been a violation of state law and for which there was also no evidence. Crowley couldn’t make one of the debates because he had a previous commitment in another part of the district, so he sent a surrogate in his place, a local city councilwoman named Annabel Palma, and Ocasio-Cortez accused him of deliberately attempting to confuse voters by sending a Latina in his stead.

 

[lpetrich]

Then about Election Night. AOC: “No matter what happens, this does not stop here. I want every single one of you, to stay active, to keep pushing. Once people have been woken up, they don’t go back to sleep.”

As it became evident that she won, she delivered this speech:

“This room won this seat! Every person out here changed America tonight. What is very clear is that this is not the end, this is the beginning. The message we sent to the world tonight is that it is not okay to put donors before your community. The message that we sent tonight is that sometime between midnight and darkness there is still hope for this nation. You have given this country hope that when you knock on your neighbor’s door, when you come to them with love, when you come to them and tell them that no matter their stance, you are there for them, we can make change. What you have shown is that this nation is never beyond remedy, it is never beyond hope.

Every person in this room is going to DC with me. We have to dedicate ourselves to this fight because I can’t do it alone.

3. Her Revolution

The narrative backs up to when Bernie Sanders was running for President, delivering some speeches in 2014, and officially entering the race in 2015. He did not seem likely to get very far.

• 1992 Jerry Brown: (primary) popular vote 20.20% delegates 14.19%
• 2000 Ralph Nader: (general: Green Party) popular vote 2.74% electoral vote 0
• 2004 Howard Dean: (primary) popular vote 5.53% delegates 3.88%
• 2004 Dennis Kucinich: (primary) popular vote 3.81% delegates 0.93%
• 2008 Dennis Kucinich: (primary) (none)

But he did. He got nearly 2.5 million donors. Among his numerous volunteers was AOC. She said about him in 2020:

I worked shoulder to shoulder with undocumented workers who often worked harder and hardest for the least amount of money. I was on my feet working twelve-hour days with no structured breaks. I didn’t have healthcare. I wasn’t being paid a living wage, and I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things. Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country, that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. . . . It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves healthcare, housing, education, and a living wage.

... I’m proud to say that the only reason that I had any hope in launching a long-shot campaign for Congress is because Bernie Sanders proved that you can run a grassroots campaign and win in an America where we almost thought it was impossible.

She was a "super volunteer", someone whose job it was to ensure that BS had enough signatures to get on the ballot.

Organizers remember her as earnest and probing, wanting to know how the mechanics of a campaign worked, and cracking up when canvassers would tell of Bronx residents who would confuse the “Bernie” on their pins for Bernie Madoff, the disgraced financier.

BS did a campaign rally in the Bronx.

Local artists brought puppets and dolls bearing resemblance to the 74-year-old self-proclaimed democratic socialist. Young students sat on blankets and huddled together as the night got cooler. The smell of marijuana wafted over parts of the crowd.

Among his audience was AOC, who noted that he was the first Presidential candidate to visit the Bronx since Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.

 

[lpetrich]

"But for Ocasio-Cortez, the race was also an introduction to New York’s opaque election laws, revealing how the state laws are engineered to retain the incumbents and to fend off any challengers."

Back to the 2016 campaign, some people wanted to convince Elizabeth Warren to run in it, though she was not interested.

The book then discussed the Occupy Wall Street movement, and how BS took up its issues for his campaign.

BS originally wanted to pull the party leftward with his campaigning, with actual winning being secondary. But as it became evident that Hillary Clinton was going to beat him, his activists needed somewhere to go, and many of them formed the PAC Our Revolution.

Ultimately, Our Revolution was something of a failure. It knew its goals—to create a multiracial social democracy and to pull American politics to the left, but beyond that, it couldn’t quite figure out whether it was supposed to be a vehicle for Bernie Sanders’s political ambitions or some kind of left faction of the Democratic Party.

Then the New York Progressive Action Network and how it supported AOC.

Our Revolution's national organization composed a vetting document AOC vs. JC:

The vetting document—which was provided to me by a member of the group—went on to describe Crowley as “a co-sponsor of the Medicare-for-All Act, however, he takes a lot of corporate money” and as someone who “is very mainline establishment. Pure establishment and definitely a player, can be a bit of a bully. He claims to support now [Minnesota congressman Keith] Ellison’s Single Payer Bill, but most people doubt his sincerity.”

...
The report noted that Crowley had over $1.5 million in cash compared to Ocasio-Cortez’s less than $50,000.

Our Revolution's central organization decided against supporting her. But three weeks before the election, they changed their minds and supported AOC.

People for Bernie, however, supported her from early in her campaign.

 

[lpetrich]

4. The Left of the Possible

Starts with AOC mentioning Star Trek, what she mentioned in her acceptance speech after winning the endorsement of the NY Democratic Socialists of America. It “was one of the most socially revolutionary shows on television.” She talked about Uhura being a black woman “who wasn’t in a subservient position but who was a leader.”

“Watching this was one of the best little treats of my childhood. And the reason I bring this up is because one of the small, foundational aspects of that world, something that we almost take for granted when we’re watching this is that when they think of a society a thousand years in the future, they think of a society that is intellectually, technologically and ethically advanced, a just society, where no one goes hungry, no one goes sick or homeless from lack of resources.”

“We come here together to advance the notion that the number one goal of an individual is not how many zeros are in . . . one’s bank accounts, but how many people are housed, how many people are fed, how much opportunity that every American has to pursue, what they can do to pursue self-realization, and that is what this is about.”

The book then described the history of the Democratic Socialists of America, founded in 1982 with Michael Harrington with Barbara Ehrenreich. Its membership was small for a long time, around 6000, but exploded after BS's candidacy.

“A society in which you have healthcare for everybody, housing for everybody, enough food for everybody, anybody can have as much education as they want,” said Frank Llewellyn, a founding member of DSA, a former national DSA president, and the treasurer of AOC’s campaign.

In Llewellyn’s formulation, there is no mention of destroying private property, liberating the proletariat, or nationalizing industries. There isn’t even any talk of the plutocrats, or the millionaires and billionaires who have a stranglehold on our democracy, or the corporations looting the nation’s wealth. It is a message more focused on lifting the bottom of the ladder upward than shrinking the top.

“Our goal is not to fix capitalism,” he added. “It is to change capitalism into something else.”

So the DSA advocates social democracy, not rule by a centralized, autocratic party that presents itself as the party of the working class.

Michael Harrington had written "The Other America" some years before, describing the US's poverty, and Barbara Ehrenreich wrote "Nickeled and Dimed" about her struggles when she was a lower-middle-class worker for a while.

 

[lpetrich]

Chapte 5. The Civil War To Come

In early 2017, Isra Allison, then executive director of Brand New Congress, said about one of the groups' recruits, “This nomination is amazing. We have to go out and meet her.”

AOC herself, nominated by her brother Gabriel.

“Other people in her position, I don’t want to say ‘sold out,’ but they could have gone and done something more high-paying, and she went back and tried to serve her community,” observed Alexandra Rojas, one of the founders of Brand New Congress. “It wasn’t about checking a box on issues, it was about their experiences, what prepares them to go into a room where there are four hundred people telling you to do something you don’t think you should do.”

AOC, in turn, wanted the BNC people to explain how they were going to run campaigns.

BNC was founded by some Bernie Sanders campaigners who considered what to do next. They hatched the idea of running a candidate for every House seat, and running them on a unified platform, much like some Presidential campaign. This platform would include creation of jobs by a mass mobilization to do socially useful but neglected things, a mass mobilization much like the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal days.

BNC wanted "extraordinary ordinary people", people who distinguished themselves in some way, but who didn't think that a career in politics was very feasible for them.

“The kind of people that we wanted to run were people who actually had skill and experience in running some part of our society, whether they were a nurse or a teacher or a foreman in a factory, all kinds of people,” Exley told me. “People who are good in their field and who are respected and who were really servants of their communities. People who put their communities ahead of themselves and where they had had chances to sell out and hadn’t. I always thought about the factory owner in Vermont or New Hampshire whose factory burns down and who instead of rebuilding in China may rebuild here even though it’s not going to mean the highest profits for them, or the teacher who stood up to their administration and to the union to look out for the interest of their kids, or the principal who just really went to the mat to fix their school. We would literally cold call these folks and say, would you, will you run for Congress.”

They decided to run candidates as Republicans as well as Democrats, because of what people are likely to vote for in some places.

 

[lpetrich]

BNC had 12,000 applications for the 2018 Congressional races, and ended up with 31 candidates, including AOC.

Then Robb Ryerse, an Arkansas pastor who was the only Republican to run as a BNC candidate. Aside from one Independent, all the rest were Democrats. For 2020 and so far for 2022, all the candidates are Democrats. Running as Republicans as well as Democrats was a good way of avoiding the almost-certain failure of running as a third party. The Greens are not much more than a support system for vanity candidacies.

Ryerse calls himself a “progressive Republican,” someone in the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower or former New York City mayor John Lindsay in a party that was previously taken over by conservatives and has since been overrun with Trumpists.

As to who he was running against,

... Steve Womack, a Tea Party Republican who defended Donald Trump’s efforts to restrict immigration from non-European nations, saying that “people from countries that are behind the times, depraved countries,” would have trouble to “actually fit into the society as we know it.” Womack also questioned the science of climate change and suggested that a rise in gun violence was due to a proliferation of single-parent households.

RR met AOC at BNC's candidate-training sessions.

Afterward, Ryerse came home and told his wife, “I think I met the future president of the United States.”

“I had never met anyone so charismatic,” he said. “There is this notion that you see in the conservative media that she is just this clueless bartender, and I found it to not be the case at all. She came across right away as smart, articulate, and incredibly willing to hustle.”

She seems like a left-wing version of Ronald Reagan, the "Teflon President", but she is much more knowledgable and diligent.

“The great divide in the country isn’t between left and right,” she told the group at their retreat in Tennessee, a line she would use over and over again on the trail. It is “between those that have power and those that don’t.”

... “We aren’t going to be able to outspend our opponents,” AOC told the group, another line that she would use over and over again in the months afterward. “But we can out-organize them.”

AOC steered the BNC's platform toward issues like criminal-justice reform and the environment. The BNC now has a "21th Century Bill of Rights", and no longer has a unified platform of detailed policy proposals.

 

[lpetrich]

In early 2017, it was evident that BNC wouldn't be what it was originally intended to be, and some BNC people left to form a more targeted group, the Justice Democrats. They were joined for a while by online broadcasters Cenk Uygur and Kyle Kulinski. JD's founders decided on challenging Democrats in safe seats who seem too complacent and conservative and in love with big money.

But by the end of 2017, JD had no money.

None of their candidates looked like they had much of a chance of winning, and the one who had the best chance, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was growing tired of her own campaign, which was looking increasingly quixotic. She had begun to tell friends that she was thinking of getting out of the race.

The group knew they had something special in AOC from the start. “The thing that struck me about her from the beginning, to be honest with you, is that she just seemed actually kind of normal,” recalled Zack Exley. “She is supposed to be this super-lefty, but she doesn’t present as a super, wacky lefty. She just presents as this normal person, but compared to all the dead fish who are in Congress it means she comes across as something extraordinary.”

They'd originally wanted some 400 candidates, but it was down to 12, and eventually only one: AOC.

Then this odd conspiracy theory from Cenk Uygur:

“After the election, was I mad at Donald Trump? I guess, kinda,” said Uygur. “But mainly I was mad at the Democratic Party for blowing it. How could you lose to this guy?

“I came to realize Democrats are never going to learn,” he went on, “and that the only way to make a difference is to defeat the corrupt corporate Democrats. They get paid to lose. The corporate donor pays them to be weak, and pays Republicans to be strong.”

In other words, that Democrats' donors pay them to take dives, to lose on purpose.