Don’t Screw This Up, Lefties

This might come as a surprise to a lot of mainstream Democrats, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not the most popular politician on the left these days. Repeating the Biden administration’s craven line at the convention that they are “working tirelessly for a ceasefire” of a genocide they fueled, a ceasefire that by all reports was ultimately catalyzed by Donald Trump’s ultimatum, was the culmination of a lot of justifiable frustrations many on the left have had with AOC. It’s not out of the question that she may be more popular with normie Dems these days than she is with lefties.

After storming into Congress by taking down the third-ranked Democrat in the House and calling for primaries against many other Democrats, she began to play more inside baseball, determined to alter the machine from within. Those who alleged that she was on a hopeless quest to change a gerontocracy that will not deviate from the belief that their social club takes precedent over American democracy have been proven right pretty much non-stop for the last few years as she has run into endless roadblocks. When AOC’s bid to chair the House Oversight Committee was recently rejected in favor of a 74-year-old man undergoing treatment for throat cancer, teaching her that helping establishment Dems does not necessarily help you, many on the left like Chapo Trap House’s Will Menaker could not help but laugh, as her attempt to change the party from within was rejected yet again.

Now that I have acknowledged the left’s justifiable complaints with our highest profile representative in government, I would like to ask us a question: is there a politician better positioned to achieve our goals at the national level than Rep. Ocasio-Cortez? Who is a better communicator than this not just on the left, but in the entire Democratic Party right now?

Pin this, save it, we’ll need it.

“When a prison camp opens in your town…when a DREAMer is disappeared from your classroom…when the President destroys what’s left of the Constitution…They will all say they didn’t know this was coming. And I want the American people to know that they did.”

AOC 🔥🎯

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— News Eye (@newseye.bsky.social) January 22, 2025 at 2:16 PM

This is the de facto leader of the Democratic Party, folks. Leadership is bumbling around, only being forced into some kind of nebulous action once Trump threatened to revoke a third of all state budgets and yank trillions of dollars of services out of people’s lives in a bid to nuke the economy, and no one outside the cloistered, out-of-touch world of establishment Democrats has any confidence that anyone connected to the people who got us here will figure this out. People are desperate for new leaders in the party, and one from our coalition has decidedly emerged.

AOC’s attempt to change the Democratic Party from within may not have worked, but her instincts to fight the seminal issue of this new era, Trump’s lawlessness and his assault on our fellow Americans, are objectively pointed in the right rage-filled direction. People are responding to her passion, and the amount of MSNBC types that I’m seeing hopping in Chuck Schumer’s Bluesky mentions to say “shut up Chuck, let her cook” makes me wonder if there might be a real groundswell of support happening here, lining up the left’s most prominent politician as the betting favorite going into the 2028 Democratic primary.

My fellow lefties, I love us, but one thing we have proven to be demonstrably true is that we are very good at cannibalizing ourselves. The “purity contest” charges come from people who don’t believe in anything and thus have no credibility to say where the moral line in the sand must be drawn. But there is a point in that critique that we draw additional unnecessary lines in the sand behind the main line, which undercut our overall goal to change the status quo that can unite a broad-based coalition, as we splinter into our respective corners of what in the long run, are mild disagreements that muddle our core message. I have spent the last couple of decades in and around activist movements and watched this happen time and time again, and I see the groundwork currently laid for it to happen to AOC too.

We cannot play hardball and throw our weight around like we own the place the way the Trumpers are doing right now. We saw in 2020 that the natural base for the Bernie/Warren left in the Democratic Party is roughly a third of Democratic voters, and this is backed up by polling suggesting the very notion of a Democratic “base” is a self-flattering concept, and the party is more accurately described as warring pluralities.

That immovable chunk of self-described moderates is the nut the left must crack if we are to take power in the Democratic Party, and AOC has proven better than any lefty yet that she can reach some of them. The plot to ingratiate herself to Democrats still won her 84 votes in the House against Gerry Connolly, even if it wasn’t enough to get her near the levers of power. Her vast messaging talents help her bridge the ideological gap between us and the cable news watchers, as AOC understands what many Democrats don’t: politicians need to name their enemies. Those enemies are billionaires and their lackies currently looting and pillaging the country, and people know it. They want someone to fight back against the corrupting powers that be, and that’s the left’s whole deal. This is our moment. We shouldn’t be focusing on arguments about Marxism or tired ideological debates, but simply how to fight these corrupt motherfuckers and take power back. That’s what AOC has done since Trump’s inauguration and it’s why she has commanded so many people’s attention.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has 8.4 million followers on Instagram, 12.8 million on Twitter and a brand and name recognition that is the envy of the majority of politicians. From a purely tactical political perspective, she brings a lot of things you’re looking for in a presidential candidate, and it’s clear as day that as the gerontocracy continues to age into irrelevance and widen the Democratic Party’s power vacuum, she will fill some of it.

There is a lot of time until this rubber meets the road, and supporting those to her left in the battle leading up to 2028 is perfectly fine. I’m not doing a DNC brain here and saying we should bend the knee in advance to whomever seems the most electable. We need as many credible lefties in the national conversation as we can get. Just don’t do what we’re very good at doing and tear AOC to shreds. We need her.

If there’s anything we should have learned from 2020, it’s that Democratic primary voters tend to like known quantities as they spin themselves into unprovable debates about electability. The next Democratic primary will mark a decade since AOC entered political life, and a lot of work has been done to elevate her and the rest of The Squad to more respectable heights within the party (despite the party stabbing two of them in the back last year). Who knows if she’s running, but it’s very possible that she could be the Democratic candidate in 2028 with the best name recognition, the most lethal trump card in American politics. Even if she doesn’t run for president, she’s due for a promotion, and getting her in Chuck Schumer’s seat or in the governor’s office in Albany or the mayor’s office in lower Manhattan would do a lot to advance lefty power in America.

The coming years are an opportunity for us to flex our organizational and political muscles and get our priorities front and center in an aimless Democratic Party. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez proved in 2024 that many people who vote for Trump also vote for her, and we shouldn’t discount the broader appeal she has demonstrated, while also being able to appeal to the core Democratic constituency (in 2019, 74% of Democrats and leaners said they would at least consider voting for AOC for president). Past baggage aside, she is a phenomenal spokesperson for the movement.

The central lesson of the Trump years is that the future is unpredictable, but it’s clear that AOC has a growing part to play in what awaits us around the corner. With her at the forefront of America’s political attention economy, this is a better opportunity to advance the left’s agenda than Bernie Sanders ever had, and we shouldn’t take it for granted. It might be the last chance like this that we ever get.