In Praise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

The future belongs to the young.

"All your private property is target for your enemy. And your enemy is we. We are the forces of chaos and anarchy. Everything they say we are, we are. And we are very proud of ourselves.

We must begin, here and now. A new continent of earth and fire."

               Jefferson Airplane, Volunteers to America, fifty years ago.

She Guevara

I am no longer young. I used to be young.

This blog is roundly criticized by people in progressive groups in Facebook. "This is neo-liberal BS," some observe. I am understood to be white, male, presumably financially comfortable, and therefore inherently "centrist," like Joe Biden, or, worse, Hillary.

From my point of view, this makes me a useful ally in the effort to change America. I figure people like me are necessary to fund the campaigns of candidates progressives like, and perhaps to bring along my age cohorts to the voting booth. After all, people my age vote. Young people are full of energy and indignation, but hardly any of them vote, alas. So they get screwed, stay angry, but say "Heck with politics. It is done for the benefit of the wealthy." I agree. Old rich people vote.

My many progressive detractors say it is impossible for me to understand the world as they do. They forget I used to be young. Candidates are suspect--or condemned--if they get support from the likes of me. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

I consider Guest Post author Thad Guyer to be a disrupter by habit. He posts things on this blog that surprise and irritate people, and get me in trouble. He writes original, out of the box things, and I think he likes shaking people out of their bubbles. His professional life involves representing people who do exactly that work: whistleblowers. Disrupters.

Whistleblowers get in trouble because they reveal things that people in power don't want said. Not all white, male, financially comfortable people are powerful, but in America in 2018--and for generations before--they had a near monopoly on power. Such people are invested in the status quo. Claire McCaskill, whom this blog wrote about yesterday, understood how to navigate in that world. She didn't "get" Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-Cortez, I wrote, and A O-C is a disrupter. 

She is too young to have settled into the world of comfortable white men, and she is Latina, and her power came from the charisma of youth and smarts and connection to her neighbors who are, like her, on the outside looking in and up. She is a whistleblower.

Thad Guyer writes about her in this Guest Post, which he titled "She Guevara."

Thad Guyer:

"I am inspired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka "She Guevara", and not just because of the cool clothing line you can buy on Amazon with her image above that nom de guerre 

Shehearkens me back to when 26 year old Julian Bond was refused his seat in the Georgia legislature because of his civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activism. We were awestruck and inspired by the rise of that young charismatic Black leader.  Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is engaged in an equally important struggle for wealth redistribution, a socialist philosophical footing she solidified in the Bernie Sanders campaign.  She infuses it with an immigrant liberation theology (Jesus as refugee) undoubtedly ignited during her internship with Ted Kennedy's immigrant outreach program in Boston where she went to college. 

Everything about "She" has a James Dean feel to it.

She has remarkable political instincts and agility, and pushes back with a kind of charming blade to the "obsessive" ridiculing of conservative media, each time seeming to assimilate lessons and growing still stronger. 29 is very young, mistakes are going to be made, and a fund of knowledge to undergird our youthful worldviews takes time to build. But the grit, the charisma, the deep wellspring of commitment to the have-nots, that is all there in Ocasio-Cortez, supercharged from the start. 

Donald Trump has made Democrats look hungrily at every new (and re-imaged) political face for signs that she or he "is the one". Could it be Kamala, Corey, or Beto who leads us to safety, how would he or she measure up in that screening?  

And when we easily conclude that "She" is too young, too socialist or too impulsive to coalesce a national leadership following, our eyes move on in search for "the one" elsewhere. What we need to be doing is drawing inspiration from Ocasio-Cortez, not prospecting for our own salvation in her aura. She and the constituents of her new world district ousted the establishment and the status quo in celebration of new political meaning and hope.  

After a fortuitous 2012 gerrymandering, She's 14th District shed the ever more white and affluent voters in Manhattan’s Lower East Side and East Village, with the new reconstituted district being made up only by neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens.  There half of the population is of Hispanic or Latino heritage, especially Puerto Ricans like her.  She showed her people how to use that new found political power.

We don't just need national leaders in the age of Trump, we need regional heroes too. Unfortunately, once an inspiring regional leader gets the presidential primary bug, they lose some that selfless patina, and with it some immeasurable amount of inspiration will be lost to us. We need models of what is politically possible, especially when those possibilities synthesize out of thin air as Ocasio-Cortez did. 

We need to just watch this woman blossom as a Congresswoman, and be thankful that Art. II, Sec. 1 of the Constitution will make her wait until age 35 to enter some crowded Iowa primary with grandeur in her eyes."