Trump's AOC Lessons

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down the other day with the New Yorker to let loose with what she really thinks.

She thinks Washington is depressing in its cravenness and dysfunction — “Honestly, it is a shit show” — much worse up close even than it looks from afar. She believes that contemporary politics is a drag but urges young people especially not to lose hope. She argues modern Republicans can’t be explained simply through the prism of ideology — people need to understand the “bizarre psychological impulses” that motivate their politics.

More prosaically, she thinks President Joe Biden could transcend the limitations of narrow congressional majorities by making bolder use of executive actions. She hedged a bit but left little doubt of her view that it’s a good thing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in her party’s geriatric class of House leaders almost certainly will be moving on soon.

On close examination, however, there is something striking about the litany of tell-it-like-it-is opinions the hero of the Democratic left shared in her New Yorker interview. In broad strokes, much of what AOC believes is similar to what many centrist Democrats — people who she disdains and who in turn typically disdain her — also believe.

More conventional Democrats would not say it the same way she says it — and the way she says it often sets their teeth on edge — but much of what the supposedly radical AOC thinks is not actually so radical.

This paradox makes AOC’s conversation with editor David Remnick a useful exhibit to illuminate a larger dynamic shadowing the Democratic Party. A primary narrative of the Biden presidency is his difficulty holding together a party beset with wide and sometimes unbridgeable gulfs between left and center, between establishment forces and insurgent ones.

That narrative isn’t wrong. But it’s right in a much more narrow way than is usually portrayed.

What divides AOC and her allies from others in the party is above all a theory of power: How to gain it, how to use it, how to keep it. It is a difference grounded in a cultural mindset about how politics should look, sound and feel. It is a difference grounded much less in ideology than meets the eye.

Yes, it is true that AOC and others on the Democratic left want to spend more money — in some cases a lot more — to empower activist government than more conservative Democrats. But programmatic differences of this sort almost never have existential implications for a party or the broader society. Different sides can simply split the difference. If one side doesn’t like where the difference got split this year they can try again next year to split it more favorably.

These types of divisions are different in character than issues of fundamental values that for generations cleaved the Democratic Party. When Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the party leadership contained many people who lamented the end of racial segregation. When Pelosi was first elected to the House, in 1987, the party had many officeholders who thought that abortion should be banned. Even when the 32-year-old AOC reached voting age, in 2007, the party had many people (such as Barack Obama, at that time) who were opposed to a federal right for same-sex marriage.

But we aren’t imagining the fact that opposing factions among the Democrats on Capitol Hill can’t stand each other. They really believe that wrong-headed people on the other side will weaken the party, hand the initiative to the Trump-led Republican Party and gravely threaten the country’s future in the bargain. What is this shouting about?

AOC opens the window to an answer when she says what she witnesses in Congress is, “scandalizing, every single day. What is surprising to me is that it never stops being scandalizing.” Whoa — what has she seen? Perhaps lawmakers taking bribes, or trading votes for drugs on the House floor?

No, actually, she’s describing the way many of her fellow Democrats were willing to separate passage of infrastructure legislation as opposed to linking this with the more far-reaching proposals in Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan. She and other progressives wanted to keep them linked and insist on passage of everything. They lost the argument and, by their lights, were proven right. A $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed — “important,” but “much smaller” than the real needs — and, so far, nothing else. She scoffed at how Biden believed “he could talk with [Sen. Joe] Manchin and bring him along.”

Perhaps it is a bit deflating when AOC promises scandalous revelations but instead talks about differences over political strategy and legislative tactics. But she is on to something important — a basic divide in the mentality of Democrats.

The lesson many Democrats have learned from watching two previous Republican presidents — Donald Trump and George W. Bush, both of whom took office under disputed circumstances with a minority of the popular vote — is that political realities can be shaped by self-confident proclamation. Power can be seized by equally self-confident assertion. They did it on behalf of what the left saw as a benighted agenda that favored racists and the wealthy. No reason progressives can’t do it on behalf of an enlightened agenda — and awaken a robust majority that would be there if only people were presented sharp choices rather than blurry ones.

Meanwhile, these same people see the last two Democratic presidents — Obama and Bill Clinton — squandering their opportunities and disappointing natural supporters through constant calibration and by pretending that it is still the 1970s, and that the political game as the establishment plays it is still somehow on the level.

The Bush-Trump model is based on mobilization of natural allies. The Clinton-Obama model is based on a forlorn effort at persuasion of a dwindling group of people attracted by cautious, middle-of-the-road politics. That is why AOC in the New Yorker urged Biden to forget about congressional approval and simply cancel student loan debt by executive order. (She didn’t pause after this passing aside to defend why such an action is “entirely within his power legally” or why this policy is genuinely progressive, since recipients of higher education usually command higher lifetime incomes than the average taxpayer.)

Such details are almost beside the point. The persuasion versus mobilization fault line is likely the most consequential remaining divide in both parties — Republicans no less than Democrats.

As she evangelizes for one side of this argument, AOC is not just confronting moderate adversaries like fellow Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) She’s also confronting Obama. While she poormouths Biden’s win on public works infrastructure as small and disappointing, the former president lectured Democratic lawmakers the other day, according to Punchbowl News, to “take the wins you can get,” and that “it doesn’t help to whine about the stuff you can’t change.”

Rather than whining, AOC told Remnick she fantasizes “all the time” about getting out of electoral politics and acting on her values in more meaningful ways. “The day to day of my job is frustrating,” she says, adding, “I ate shit when I was a waitress and a bartender, and I eat shit as a member of Congress.”

Any student of elections might hope she doesn’t quit but stays around to to test her brand of politics beyond New York’s 14th congressional district. The Democratic left has been fantasizing about a candidate who can smash conventional strategies and mobilize all the way to the presidency as far back as George McGovern and as recently as Bernie Sanders. Someone is going to try the old experiment for a new generation.

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By: John F. Harris
Title: What AOC Learned From Trump
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/17/what-aoc-learned-from-trump-00009700
Published Date: Thu, 17 Feb 2022 04:30:00 EST

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