AOC Points The Way Forward
In a number of ways, it makes perfect sense that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a symbol in todays politics. She's espousing a politics remarkably similar to the politics of the left going into and following The Great Depression. Considering that it was right after that, we began a process of political realignment, what we're looking at isn't a new development in US politics, it's that the realignment has reached its culmination. The right hasn't moved farther right, they've just gone back to relying on the motivators that were essentially impossible to activate during that realignment. The electorate hasn't really changed so much, and the acceptable parameters of motivating the electorate haven't changed much either. They've just reverted to a period before we actually had some degree of change. You can trace ideological voting patterns down to the county, based on soil samples. They're remarkably consistent.
I'm 41, and I've never heard a politician for a major political party speaking in terms as close to those my great grandmother spoke in. There is a generational divide, but I don't think the majority of that divide plays out the way most of the narrative suggests. Yes, she's popular among the younger part of the electorate, but some of that is identification because she's also young, and she's also meeting them where they are. She's communicating with them in their chosen channels, in the language they're comfortable with. That's pretty self explanatory. It's the Nixon/Kennedy debate in many ways. Kennedy understood television. Nixon understood radio. AOC understands social media, the Boomer generation understands legacy media.
The rest of her popularity, and the response to that popularity, is due to the fact that in many ways, her politics are framed in similar ways to those the Boomer generation rebelled against, which isn't something that she can be held solely responsible for. Conservative politics have reverted back to pre-sixties terms, and anyone who wants or needs to present an opposition to that only has so many places they can really stand and still be speaking in terms the electorate is going to accept.
Despite all of our bullshit protestations about free speech and free thought, we're pretty narrow in what kind of political terms are allowed to be outlined and treated as worthy of consideration, but that's a function of a two party system too. Having only two parties necessarily determines that we can only have two options to choose from. When the menu of available options becomes too diverse, individual candidates or wings within a party could end up developing a platform that has no connection to the party that can be communicated simply. It's why we've spent the last two decades seeing both parties go through internal warfare to determine their central identities. They can't actually represent the number of ideas, much less be open to determining what might actually be possible to accomplish.
Add in that people who have been historically marginalized are using the internet to make their existence and their needs known in the political contexts where they used to be ignored, and AOC makes perfect sense as a symbol of the left in todays world. These things can't be separated in her becoming the person who subscribes to those politics, and all of them contribute to part of why she's found such mass appeal.
The politics of the American right were dealt a 4 decade long, slow grinding rebuke the last time the politics of the American left took the shape of those espoused by AOC. Beginning with the New Deal, and culminating with the feminist movement, domestic politics were dominated by the left. The capitalist rhetoric of the pre Depression era was neutralized as a means to motivate people, by the Depression. The racist rhetoric of Jim Crow was neutralized by The Civil Rights Movement. The misogynistic rhetoric of basically all of American politics and power wasn't neutralized, but did find accepted opposition in the form of feminism and to some degree the sexual revolution. Where the right had been able to reach some of its objectives, in foreign policy, the anti-war movement presented a level of pushback to even those gains. The right suffered a series of losses over that period which would have been unthinkable before the Great Depression.
There have been two problems for the left in its victories. First is that it has necessarily needed to encompass the ideological ground which was best laid out by Martin Luther King in his "Letter From The Birmingham Jail" as the problem of the white moderate. Taking the underlying theory, that there are those who are comfortably sympathetic, but for whom necessity isn't an urgent motivator, a similar dynamic plays out in across a number of different issues. The idea is the same if you consider men who are sympathetic to feminist ideas don't have the same lived experience as women laboring under patriarchy, so both the urgency is missing and so is a good deal of the understanding that does come with lived experience. Cis gender, heterosexual people might be sympathetic to, but have none of the urgency the experience of living outside of that norm necessitates in addressing it.
The same can be said for at every juncture, where class intersects with any other issue, be it gender, race, sexuality, the right has been able to exploit that fissure. Because of the ideologically coalition that is essentially forced to identify as the left, in response to the ideological hegemony of the right, it essentially gives the right a much greater number of fissures to exploit. Where more than one of these intersects with class, the fracture becomes even easier to exploit. Within each of the communities attempting to advocate for themselves, class becomes an issue.
That has been the space occupied almost exclusively by what we've considered "moderates" and "centrists." It's the space where the fissures are most exploited and are most vulnerable, so the movement of the Overton Window to the right makes some sense. That movement has allowed for the right to return to form, and openly espouse the agenda that has always ben its ideological core.
The right, in it's conservative philosophy, has always been the political embodiment of white, Christian, patriarchy (white supremacy for all intents and purposes). That's not going to change, and all it's done now is revert to form. The left is reverting to the form that most successfully challenged it, and AOC is one of the few national level politicians that embodies it, so it's logical that she has become the bogeyman for the right, as well as the "center," even within the Democratic Party, as it has to nominally represent the left as the result of the previous political realignment that entailed Democrats accepting the necessity of embracing The Civil Rights Movement.
Today, we have a fully far right Republican Party. In the last few years, some of the "moderate" and "centrist" Republicans have jumped ship, either publicly declaring themselves independent or backing the Democratic Party. The "centrists" in the Democratic Party are trying to retain the ground that allows some of those right leaning minds to find refuge from the open hostility toward anyone or anything that isn't directly supporting white supremacy that is the Republican Party. The emergence of AOC, and the popularity of the politics she's espousing exposes all of those fissures the right has successfully exploited in the center, and it's a good bet the Democratic Party leadership understands this, and the aspects of response to her rise that have been negative is the attempt to protect those fissures from the inevitable assault from the right.
The coalition of the Democratic Party can't hold forever. Logically, the best thing that can happen is for the "centrists" to start their own party. They've got the money, and they've got the connections to do so. Leaving the Democratic Party intact, with what's been considered it's left wing in control means one party exists to hash out how to address the issues of people who are living the daily experience of being marginalized. Should the center decide to start their own party, they can support those efforts where they choose. The infighting within the Democratic Party caused by that lack of proximity to the daily experiences of marginalized people only empowers the white supremacist right, and even for the moderates who desperately want it to be 1988 or 1992 again, that's horrifying. Long term, the two party system can't continue and also attempt to portray itself as representative government. The "I don't want to be discomforted by white supremacy" stance does mean they don't want bigots and racists running around being bigoted and racist, but they also don't really want to have to do anything when the people effected by that bigotry and racism are effecting someone else.
Hopefully, at some point, they'll realize that the politics AOC has gained popularity for, were what dealt white supremacist patriarchy the worst blows it's suffered in American history, and returning to them will at least slow the momentum white supremacy has right now.
American politics being what they are though, there's probably little hope for the best options to win out. That the political winds shift is true. That there is always some pendulum effect is true. The fact that the politics of the right have reconstituted themselves does mean this isn't just part of the kind of back and forth we've been experiencing for the last 50 years. It means we have to make a choice about whether or not we want to go backwards 70 or 80 years. At this point, if you're a praying person, it would be smart to start praying that the "center" of American politics acts on its conscience and not on its fears.