What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

You sure that's what was in the jars?

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/ybYAAOSw0pBjlSI6/s-l500.png

I think Jameson's book is an overelaboration of the Eisenhowerian gag "if the American people want socialised healthcare they should join the marines like I did", tho Kim Stanley Robinson labours the point in one of his novels that the navy has far lower pay differentials between recruits and top rank than any other organisation in the US.

Another Aaron Bastani talking point.

KSR is also in the FJ book.

Controp: conscript armies produce better war poets than voluntary ones

I like Mike Davis's summary of Jameson / New Left Review types: "Ultimately you couldn’t really understand these guys unless you’d taken showers with them when you were ten"

I don't, and think it's a cheap, vulgar insult for cheap laughs at the expense of intellectual engagement; but even if I did, I would doubt that he was talking about FJ, who did not come from the same milieu as Perry Anderson and friends. He grew up in New Jersey, has never seen the inside of Eton.

a nerve! sorry pinefox, i'm no expert, but i'm definitely on team davis in the context of this piece which is where i ran across the quote. it may be an inaccurate picture in some ways, i'm not really sure.

Although Prisoners received overwhelmingly favorable reviews in historical journals and the left press, it drew sharp criticism for presenting a closed and bleak universe that seemed almost wholly resistant to reform. In an otherwise laudatory review in The Nation, Yale labor historian David Montgomery asked, "What role are the prisoners to play in their own liberation?" At the offices of NLR, some had a similar reaction. "Mike is an exceptionally astute analyst of the enemy, but if I were an American trade union leader I wouldn't go to him to ask which way forward," editorial board member Tariq Ali told me.

By and large, however, the NLR board was elated to have a precocious American—better yet, a precocious working-class American—wash up on its shores. "Marxists have long had this feeling that America shows us our future," explains Blackburn. "Mike's very robust, American working-class style further contributed to his charm." Yet, as even this circumspect editor concedes, "tact wasn't his strong suit." Some staffers thought Davis exploited his background. "Mike could be psychotic. He was very in-your-face about his identity," says a former NLR editor. As Davis himself admits, "I've always had a sort of truck-stop attitude toward effete intellectuals."

Among the first to feel its blows was Marxist literary critic par excellence Fredric Jameson. In his classic 1984 article, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," Jameson had breathlessly described L.A.'s Hotel Bonaventure as the archetypal postmodern structure. Its multiple entryways, elevated gardens, and glass mirrored surfaces formed a delirious "hyperspace," inciting those who entered it to "expand our sensorium." While noting in passing that the hotel's glass skin "repels the city outside," Jameson breezily praised the hotel as "a popular building, visited with enthusiasm by locals and tourists alike." Davis's response was unsparing: "To speak of its 'popular' character is to miss the point of its systematic segregation from the great Hispanic-Asian city outside," he thundered in NLR (where Jameson's essay had also appeared). Cutting through Jameson's theoretical haze, Davis emphasized the "smog-poisoned reality" outside and described the hotel as part of an ominous trend of "large vivariums for the upper middle classes, protected by astonishingly complex security systems." (In the endnotes to his 1991 book, Postmodernism, Jameson curtly dismissed Davis as "characteristic of the more 'militant' sounds from the Left.")

Davis's confrontational pose made for an unusually anxious workplace. At one NLR meeting, he stunned his audience into silence with the letter he had sent to Eugene Genovese, who had complained of being spurned by the journal: "Dear Professor Genovese, Fuck you." Then there was Davis's terrifying collection of pets. The centerpiece of the office was his atrarium, filled with a garter snake, an axolotl, and a carnivorous African toad. At an explosive moment toward the end of his tenure, recalled by everyone who witnessed it, Davis spilled his reptiles onto the office's lush carpet.

When I ask Davis about this, he strikes a remorseful note. "If anyone was guilty of wild or outrageous behavior, it was me," he concedes. In the end, though, he says he never felt a part of the Etonian clique around the journal: "Ultimately you couldn't really understand these guys unless you'd taken showers with them when you were ten." He longed to go home.

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/4850-the-american-earthquake-mike-davis-and-the-politics-of-disaster

Map, with thanks for your reply - not wishing to derail the Critique of AOC Reason, I have redirected a reply here:

Perry Anderson

https://www.thecut.com/2021/10/partying-with-gabriel-ocasio-cortez-aocs-little-brother.html

seems cool! just to save the haters some time he used to be a real estate agent though

She's streaming on Twitch again right now:

https://www.twitch.tv/aoc

So I saw there was AOC discourse going on but when I clicked through it was a dang Freddie deBoer article and I just peaced right out.

I was going way back in some stuff I saved off twitter and I apparently still have FdB’s insane allegations screenshotted from when he tried to falsely metoo someone

I can’t think of a more spectacular pundit flameout. I guess he’s lucky it was mostly confined to the internet, so he can still get gigs in New York Magazine.

we’ve got taibbi conversation on the other thread the worse case is right there

Ha ha not really

Certainly not cash-wise

DeBore has a Substack newsletter that I assume pays his rent, or some portion thereof. Pieces of shit like him can always find suckers.

It will not shock anyone that he's a very active poster in the redscarepod subreddit

If you've received an angry email from Freddie deBoer complaining about me, drop me a line. Curious to know how many he's writing.

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) August 7, 2023

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/30/us/politics/aoc-third-term-congress.html

it turns out she doesn't have a single flaw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yec4JDxo5eY

feels like her public profile has dipped but maybe that's just me not being on twitter/house republicans sucking up all the oxygen in the world

lmao “the book was given to us on day 1”

idk seems she actually is interested in doing the work and passing bills and stuff not just trying to be on TV all day

she'll be president some day, i think, if there is a "president" of the united states in the 2030s and beyond

feels like her public profile has dipped

Same thought occurred to me when I saw the thread, but I think the follow-up post about concentrating on governance answers that well. You can also wear out your welcome pretty quickly through over-exposure.

It also seems like the GOP stopped attacking her quite as much. A lot of her exposure came from Republicans shouting at her or stalking her.

We may also have reached a point where GOP congressmen may even silently agree with her.

good interview: https://www.offmessage.net/p/aoc-oversight-senate-democrats

The Pelosification is nearly complete https://t.co/oAkvyHTJoK

— cabral (@doctor_cabral) July 9, 2024

Yes, she abandoned the DSA goal of making Kamala the nominee

🙄

(sorry, that's a reaction to the tweet, not to AOC)

She’s just playing the long game until running for Senate

She's being trained up to bomb other countries.

Girlboss. Gatekeep. Gaslight.

The watusi. The twist.

a lot of the "it has to be Biden" people are leaning hard into the angle that it's Justice Democrats types and their supporters that are trying to change candidates, which just leads into the narrative that they're out of step with the party as a whole. it makes strategic sense to have them take the middle of the road on this one -- any call to swap out candidates needs to come from the center of the party

Leftists like to trumpet every AOC heresy as proof that electoral politics is corrupting and useless.

how dare people take strategic stances in... politics?

people are so gross about her

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qE5BWFRETdk

I'm sure insane Twitter people are doing their thing but it's not unreasonable to express disappointment at one of the ostensibly most left-wing Congresspeople going to bat for Genocide Joe who shouldn't even be running for President.

As far as a strategic stance, maintaining influence in the party, etc. - she doesn't seem to have much influence to start with. Toeing the line on this isn't going to make the unperson wing of the party any more supportive - as it didn't over the last six years - but it does cost her influence with the left of the country such as it is. The loudest official voices calling for Biden to step down are establishment lib media and centrists, if the Bidenistas are going to blame the Squad they're going to do it regardless of what any individual leftish person says, the exact same trap of trying to tailor messages to avoid criticisms from the right.

Hard for me to understand why people go into politics. If you criticize your own party you’re excommunicated forever. To get ahead you have to debase yourself by saying things like “criticism of Biden is ageist.” Doesn’t seem like a good time

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) July 9, 2024

I don't know why you're dragging me into this. Ocasio-Cortez is great for her district and a valuable voice in hearings. I don't think she should switch over to the Senate, or run for president, though. She's much more influential where she is.

people are so gross about her

― budo jeru

As far as a strategic stance, maintaining influence in the party, etc. - she doesn't seem to have much influence to start with.

In the context of the House of Representatives influence comes in a lot of different forms. The most important one is seniority, but that can't be acquired through strategy, only by longevity. For someone like AOC with only a few terms of seniority influence comes with membership -- in the Democratic caucus as a whole, the progressive caucus, her state delegation and any other personal alliances she can maintain.

Because her influence is group-based and/or interpersonal, she constantly has to mesh her own position within the context of those networks of relationships according to her best judgment. She could just say fuck it I'll go it alone, but she apparently has different goals than just standing outside the system and speaking her truth. I agree with her on that. She could stand outside the system without going to all the trouble of getting elected into it.

OTM

it's strange to see Jamaal Bowman falling in line with the Biden endorsement too, like what does he even have to lose