What are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Flaws?

Because they don’t inherently have anything to do with her constituents (either ideological or actual)? Having your Rep chair the Armed Services Committee isn’t exactly changing your life (traditionally it just changes their donor situation).

"Inherently" is doing some work here.

milo, you seem determined to believe that there is some avenue to getting what you want which completely rejects politics as they are presently constituted. those politics have been shaped over a period of more than two centuries of response to evolving political factors. they constitute the structure of political power today.

I get that the game is rigged to perpetuate power among those with power already, but more than once in US history large shifts of power have been engineered by the power of ordinary people organizing for change. Often this has been a matter of the powerless taking to the streets, but ultimately in the USA it has always come down to gaining and casting the majority of votes in elections, in Congress, and in state legislatures. The powerless have never yet toppled the government through revolution.

Tell me why this is a bad take, and what is a better one.

I believe that’s what Simon suggested that started this whole chain of posts.

As I read what Simon said, he simply expressed the desire that AOC remove herself from the Democratic party. Nothing about forming a new party.

oh yes new party please

(and yes it would be very very very hard)

fuck reforming your genocidal slave state

... you like it how it is?

I'm getting really good at rapidly hopping btwn accounts xp

xps - then you are choosing a much more difficult road than the better-traveled road of becoming the major power broker within one of the existing parties and rebranding it to suit your needs.

xxp of course not I want it gone

"Inherently" is doing some work here.

Not really? It’s leaving open the possibility of a politician’s career advancement being good for their constituents - but they are not actually, directly linked in the way that was being applied.

fuck reforming your genocidal slave state

good luck waiting for it to wither away on its own

you are choosing a much more difficult road than the better-traveled road of becoming the major power broker within one of the existing parties and rebranding it to suit your needs

yup because that better traveled road goes fuckin nowhere the vast majority of the time

sort of like this thread lol

you seem determined to believe that there is some avenue to getting what you want which completely rejects politics as they are presently constituted

I’ve not suggested that. I’m just pointing out that your acquiescent model - waiting for them to come to you if you just keep plugging those pennies in eventually you’ll get your prize, etc. - appears to be completely divorced from reality.

If one advocates horse-trading votes, progressives collectively withholding those difference-making votes, then you’re anathema. Unrealistic, childish, purity politics, etc.

(It’s almost like people saying this shit don’t actually have any interest in progressive goals.)

that better traveled road goes fuckin nowhere the vast majority of the time

and the less travelled road goes nowhere nearly 100% of the time

The better traveled road ends with AOC as Pelosi and gosh why would anyone see a problem there?

when was the last time someone with AOC's politics, profile and talent actually tried it? (tbc I do not think she will actually do it)

appears to be completely divorced from reality

um, show me your powerful progressive organization, tell me its demands and its road map for accomplishing them, and I will bow to its reality when it makes the progress you envision. so far, you seem to have ideals and ideas, but they are not yet a reality

a robust political imagination at work

um, show me your powerful progressive organization, tell me its demands

I don’t know what this has to do with your belief that Democrats will start supporting progressive policy if you’re loyal enough.

as Twitter Nixon said recently, she's an ally of the party leadership, not a soldier

You are characterizing my arguments instead of citing them. You said "it's not a coalition unless you get something out of it". I agreed and used the metaphor of pennies in a gumball machine to make the point that it is an exchange. A coalition partner must also provide something of value in return. That is not "loyalty" that is demonstrating you contribute some of the coin of politics: votes, money, popular ideas. To contribute them, you have to control them.

So far, AOC has not proved she controls votes, in the same way that for example the Teamsters, or Moral Majority can claim to control votes. In terms of money, she has only begun to show that ability. Her power right now is in espousing ideas in a way that clearly excites people, and that sets her apart from most of the House members, who are as exciting as cottage cheese. If those ideas spread and are seen to help win elections, then yes I fully expect the Democrats to start supporting them. Because they want power.

power takes many forms

lots of unelected people have a lot of power. some of those people are even ex-politicians!

How many of those politically powerful people have no money, ideas, or votes?

I think this discussion gets to the heart of a lot of the political debate on ILX: Do you believe that working within established political institutions is an effective mechanism for advancing progressive goals, or do you believe they're inherently rigged against any form of meaningful progress?

(You won't be surprised to learn that I lean toward the former view, for reasons Aimless articulates above.)

I believe in working within certain established political institutions. Just not the Democrats.

How 'bout the GOP?

A coalition partner must also provide something of value in return. That is not "loyalty" that is demonstrating you contribute some of the coin of politics: votes, money, popular ideas. To contribute them, you have to control them.

So far, AOC has not proved she controls votes

Again, this is not about AOC unto herself - she's just the latest and temporarily the most prominent.

Progressives have loyally lined up to vote for Democrats for decades, alongside young people and people of color - their (all three groups) loyalty has bought them little or nothing. Because loyalty doesn't do shit - once your vote is safely locked down, there's no reason to service you.

counterpoint: there's plenty of reason to service me

which is why the squishy cliches of Michelle Obama send status quo Dems to heaven

xp

honestly, i will gladly and happily work within established political institutions on the local and regional level. the democrats who are running for statewide office? the democrats running for the united states house and senate in my district? they have my enthusiastic support. there are certain problems that i would like to see the democrats in my area address that they haven't - taxing nike would be good, for instance, or modifying the quorum rules to prevent superminority republicans gridlocking the congress by walking out. i don't expect the former to happen, ever. i think the latter is going to be a practical necessity if oregon is to continue to be governable on a state level. but so far, none of these problems have reached a point to which i think participating in elections would be pointless.

it's not just that the national party doesn't represent my _personal_ beliefs, the national party doesn't seem to do a good job at giving more than lip service to the beliefs of typical mainstream democrats where i live. i live in the suburbs. i work for a health insurance company. how the hell is the democratic party to the right of us?

this is not about AOC unto herself

You speak of progressives or young people acting in concert as the remedy, but there is no locus of control or agreement in place that would allow them to act as a bloc and wield the sort of power a bloc acquires.

The accomplishments of progressives tend to cluster around ad-hoc coalitions of single issues. Young people have no recognizable organization, occasionally erupt into large scale activism, and have very few political wins to their credit.

People of color have considerably more organization than young people or 'progressives' and not coincidentally they have better defined goals, better coordination, and have a noticeable list of hard-won accomplishments, despite occupying operating from a minority position in numbers, major economic and educational deprivation, and a system rigged exclusively to keep them down.

there was some study recently in the UK that showed the views of labour mps and to a lesser extent labour party members both being to the left of the average labour voter on a whole host of issues (capital punishment and nationalisation of utilities are two that i can remember). is it accepted that that’s reversed in the US? (setting aside the party membership stat; no one is a “member” of the democratic party to my knowledge in the sense of paying monthly monies)

There's stuff like this

Legalize Marijuana

DNC Platform
vote: 106n, 50y, 3a
% support: 31/67 (-36) 👈

Polling – Pew 11/19
Public: 67/32 (+35)
Dems: 78/20 (+58) ←

Medicare for All

DNC Platform
vote: 36y, 125n, 3a
% support: 22/76 (-54) 👈

Polling – KFF 5/20
Public: 57/40 (+17)
Dems: 78/19 (+59) ←

— austerity is theft (@wideofthepost) July 28, 2020

People of color have considerably more organization than young people or 'progressives' and not coincidentally they have better defined goals, better coordination, and have a noticeable list of hard-won accomplishments, despite occupying operating from a minority position in numbers, major economic and educational deprivation, and a system rigged exclusively to keep them down.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless)

and they have you to speak for them too! they are so fortunate.

Her power right now is in espousing ideas in a way that clearly excites people, and that sets her apart from most of the House members, who are as exciting as cottage cheese. If those ideas spread and are seen to help win elections, then yes I fully expect the Democrats to start supporting them. Because they want power.

The frustration in the last few days heightens one shown in the last month, and brings to a focus one exhibited across the primaries, wherein the Democratic Party appears to be aggressively signalling that they do not want these ideas to be espoused, and will squash them.

Restricting AOC to one minute's speech, and announcing mid-convention that your published platform support for reducing climate damage was "a mistake," and declaring that universal health care should only ever be for people suffering from a pandemic (when a million people are likely to have died by the time you're able to get universal healthcare to people infected by the pandemic), are astoundingly aggressive actions against inclusion and reactivity.

Standing by your declarations that police budgets should be increased, and cops trained to shoot protesters, when police are ignoring emergency calls about rape in order to roam cities and beat, as a pack, ordinary citizens walking home alone during the convention broadcasts, suggests a strong opposition to listening to grassroots activism, at a national level.

In case you didn't notice, milo speaks for them, too:

Progressives have loyally lined up to vote for Democrats for decades, alongside young people and people of color - their (all three groups) loyalty has bought them little or nothing.

― Donald Trump Also Sucks, Of Course (milo z)

lol

sic, you are right about all of that. the only remedy I understand to have any effect on this is political organizing.

sic, you are right about all of that. the only remedy I understand to have any effect on this is political organizing.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless)

my politics is no longer limited by what you understand

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/matrixreloaded1.jpg

The Democratic Party of my lifetime -- since Reagan's inauguration -- was so institutionally cowed by the events of 1981 that, faced with the collapse of the New Deal coalition happening even if Carter had won a second term, courted Wall Street bread.

In the last four years, it has a different problem: it's the party of Anybody Not with Trump. It's the party of AOC and Kamala Harris, the party of Terry McAuliffe and, yeah, John Kasich because the piece of shit has no other party that will accept him. Therefore, a party this inchoate in a sense can't govern. It would take a political genius beyond FDR's to keep this coalition together.

And this conclusion does not make excuses for the elevation of Joe Biden. I'm just pointing out how the Dems have turned into Not Republican among its half dozen factions.

wait tracer hand are you saying you think i might be trans?

In the last four years, it has a different problem: it's the party of Anybody Not with Trump. It's the party of AOC and Kamala Harris, the party of Terry McAuliffe and, yeah, John Kasich because the piece of shit has no other party that will accept him. Therefore, a party this inchoate in a sense can't govern. It would take a political genius beyond FDR's to keep this coalition together.

And this conclusion does not make excuses for the elevation of Joe Biden. I'm just pointing out how the Dems have turned into Not Republican among its half dozen factions.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

i gotta say, i harbor different suspicions. these are suspicions, prejudices, not facts, and everything i'm gonna say right now needs to be colored by that

2016 was a battle for the republican party. on one side was more than a century of Tradition, an Intellectual Heritage, a set of beliefs that whether or not they were ever actually coherent were _presented_ as coherent, as coherent and as _universal_. on the other side was a ignorant racist piece of shit with no ties whatsoever to any political tradition. well, not any _american_ political tradition.

over the past four years it has turned out that the supposed Republican Intellectual Heritage was nothing more than a cobbled together bit of excuses designed to reassure themselves that the bunch of racist pieces of shit who constituted their "base" weren't _really_ racist in the same way that they themselves weren't _reallY_ racist. it has turned out that the principles and values Republicans claimed to have never really existed. all those values only existed because of the belief, the false belief, was that they were _necessary_, that they were things their voters wanted and needed to hear. there was only one principle, one value institutional republicans had: power at any cost, power at all costs.

i am not convinced that the supposed traditions of the national Democratic party are any more deeply rooted or supported than the alleged traditions of the Republican party. i am not convinced that the things the DNC believe we "need" to hear are things that very many of us want. i am not convinced that people vote for democrats for any reason other than they vote for republicans, that they have deep and unshakable allegiance to that particular institution, that what matters is not principles, but control. i suspect that the people currently charge of the democratic party know that, believe that, and that their greatest single goal right now is _not_ the betterment of the country, but on holding onto their oligarchical power, at any cost, at all costs.

but hell, i could very well be wrong about all this shit.

The Bidens, Pelosis and Schumers have more in common (in every way) with the Never Trumpers or the Bloombergs of the world than they do with almost all Democratic voters.

As with Harris stitching Biden up in the primary debate, most disagreement is about putting on a show.

haha kate just surfing your vibe there :)

both parties at the national level have been captured by high finance to an extent. yes in terms of their donor base - it all stems from there - but more broadly in how they conceive of the greater good. the objective is to preserve an environment in which the big dogs can eat (in which FDI can flourish, etc). i think there's a genuine belief among a lot of politicians that the conditions for high finance roughly coincide with a 'free' and 'fair' society with a predictable legal system and a government that's not going to start 'crowding out' private investment with its own big ideas, that's not going to nationalize anything, that's not going to hand too much power to unions because they'll negotiate wage deals that drive up inflation. this is all settled in their minds. and it's all based on 30-40-year-old arguments that were playing out when they were just entering their 20s.

anyway it feels like a pretty simple formula. if it threatens our current system of high finance, it's got to go. if it strengthens it, bring it on. democrats and republicans agree 100% on this. it's their ways of getting there that are different imo - which is not to downplay that - those differences are significant and consequential

there was some study recently in the UK that showed the views of labour mps and to a lesser extent labour party members both being to the left of the average labour voter on a whole host of issues (capital punishment and nationalisation of utilities are two that i can remember). is it accepted that that’s reversed in the US?

David Shor’s take iirc is that Democratic donors and staffers are to the left of the median Democratic voter.