AOC for President

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent appearance at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta set certain segments of the internet abuzz. Was this the long-anticipated signal that she’s running? A poll released shortly afterward added fuel to the fire (or grist for the mill; choose your metaphor), putting her atop other potential candidates, although Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, another favorite of the party’s left wing, was (inexplicably) excluded. 

I am both incredibly excited by the possibility of AOC’s candidacy and terrified by it. I am scared for what the inevitable sexist attacks will do to public discourse about women and the trickle-down effects of such a toxic media stew. But on a deeper level it is terrifying to try for the thing you really want—not another compromise or best-under-the-circumstances or what-you-think-is-palatable—knowing that you may learn it isn’t possible, that a secret future you held as a form of hope will just never exist.

This may seem overly dramatic, a particularly severe case of politics-as-fandom. Such an accusation would be well placed. As many who share my politics around prisons and gender and public goods have said (I learned it first from Mariame Kaba’s writings), electoral politics is about choosing your enemy, the person you will spend the next four (or two, or six) years yelling at. It is foolish and a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between social movements and institutional power to identify with political leadership rather than view them as a negotiating partner, someone to be held at arm’s length and with feet to the fire of extremely uncomfortable group meetings. Consider Zohran Mamdani’s recent reversal on library budget cuts.

But here’s the thing: The reason I am so excited about AOC’s candidacy is because I think she understands this, too. And I think she does so in part because of her political values and insight but also because she has been and knows she will be subject to sexist attacks. So whether or not she runs is less important than whether Democrats (or, more realistically, the anti-fascist coalition of which Democrats are only a sometimes active and frequently deadweight member) can internalize this lesson.

Which is why it wasn’t AOC’s speech in Atlanta, but her answer to a question in Chicago that was the most important political statement she made in her recent flurry of activity. At an event at the University of Chicago, David Axelrod asked Ocasio-Cortez about a Washington Post op-ed that criticized her comment that billionaires did not “earn” their money. After observing that the op-ed referred to her as a potential 2028 candidate and characterizing it as a “veiled threat” to a potential presidential campaign, went on:

What’s funny about that is that they assume my ambition is positional. They assume that my ambition is a title or a seat. And my ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, senate, house seats, elected officials come and go, but single-payer healthcare is forever. A living wage is forever. Workers’ rights are forever … When you aren’t attached, when you haven’t been fantasizing about being this or that from the time you were seven years old, it is tremendously liberating because I get to wake up every day and say, "how I am going to meet the moment?"

Yes, yes, these are the sort of platitudes one could expect from a politician playing coy about a primary. But I believed her. Part of that belief is her personal electoral history, the famed bartender-goes-to-Washington story. AOC was asked to run for Congress after her brother sent a letter to former Bernie Sanders staffers looking to recruit candidates. She got the literal and figurative call to run while on her way back from the Standing Rock Sioux protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Her campaign was the test run for nascent electoral efforts of NYC DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and her victory won the organization national credibility. AOC’s national political identity grew out of a self-consciously socialist constituency and its insistence on political relevance; nothing about her personal history suggested a candidate in search of a race so much as a leader found by a movement. 

Genuine or not, of course, such a disavowal of positional ambition is also necessary, a strategic concession to sexism. Here is the thing about being a woman, and especially a woman in a position of public authority or attention: You do not get to be a genius, the hero. These are not cultural tropes or roles readily available to women. When is the last time you heard a woman in politics or just in your profession, described as “charismatic”? “Brilliant”? “Ambitious”—in a good way? It is vanishingly rare for a woman leader to be perceived sufficient-unto-herself, the reason for which other people take action. For women in politics, even being seen is dangerous. Visibility, the food on which men’s careers feed, is always double-edged; a woman’s physical person is subject to scrutiny no man’s is ever subject to, her vocal tics not edited out but a knock to her credibility. Democrats have tried twice now to elect a woman president, and failed. Whether and to what extent the specifics of either candidacy make their failures generalizable to all women candidates could fill several books, but the brute fact remains. 

AOC of course knows this. When she speaks of wanting to change the world, but not necessarily to be the president while the world is changed, and of responding to conditions on the ground (as she did later in her response), I hear her acknowledge this reality, the fact that because of her identity, there are unjust but no less real-for-their-wrongness limits to her ability to be the instrument for the change she wishes to accomplish. 

But the profound thing for me is that she understands herself as just an instrument, a conditional candidate, and not the source of the politics or principles from which change will come. In identifying the idea of politics-as-position as one held by the Bezos-owned Washington Post, and in calling policy changes more ambitious, she rejects this idea of the heroic elected as the lesser form of leadership it is. Contrast this response with the aesthetics and argument of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the “I’m With Her” branding. Hillary’s pitch to feminists was that the mere fact of her ascendancy would constitute a victory for gender equality. The positive case for her presidency (as opposed to “keep Donald Trump out of office”) was exhausted in her person, in the office she would assume. Sure, Hillary would offer marginally increased taxes on the wealthy, means-tested college tuition assistance, but her pitch was basically to be the status quo candidate, but in heels (and, perhaps, backwards).

AOC is right: The bigger ambition is to change the world, not just to be the one in the position to change it. To borrow from Hannah Arendt, action, “the political activity par excellence,” entails starting processes that, through the plurality and interconnectedness of humans, multiply consequences and thus persist as long as humankind does. Such “[a]ction reveals itself fully only…to the backward glance of the historian.” Who held a particular office at a particular time becomes, a century later, a fact highschoolers skim over in a history book, a pub trivia question. In the present it is at most an opening of a possibility, a set of tools placed at your disposal. An institution, a change to the social or economic order established through law that outlasts one’s paltry lifetime, that entangles other humans in such a way as to persist beyond one’s ability to direct them, that is immortality. 

I happen to believe AOC is extraordinarily well-equipped to serve as U.S. President; she is charismatic and brilliant, a generational political communicator. But having held a subject position in which that possibility of power was not dangled in front of her, in which centering herself was perceived as a distraction or a risk because it permitted identity-based attacks, I believe she has avoided adopting the all-too-common belief among male politicians that the One Weird Trick to accomplishing any political goal is getting themselves into office. 

AOC’s response thus calls forth a feminist politics that is desperately needed. Trump, of course, is the apotheosis of masculinist personality politics, a figure of domination that manages an ideologically incoherent coalition and the object of so-misplaced-as-to-be-ridiculous male fantasy. (Recent polling found 39% of Republicans believed the 79-year-old man with visible injection bruising on both hands could beat them in a fight.) While Democrats may mock Trump, who, constitutionally incapable of subtext, famously declared “I alone can fix it” at the outset of his first run for office, the opposition party isn’t doing much better. Consider Gavin Newsom, pivoting to a podcast where his first guests are not good faith political opponents but the very architects of our current political hell in an effort to build a personal brand that might win him the presidency. Or Graham Platner, whose qualifications for the Senate boil down to his willingness to say especially assertive versions of political shibboleths while wearing Carhartt. What is either candidacy but an appeal to the idea that this man, in his particular gender performance and patter, will dissolve opposition the way obstacles have always melted away in their respective privileged lives? 

And then there’s Eric Swalwell, around whom the California Democratic establishment briefly coalesced in his campaign for Governor despite rampant rumors that he harassed women on his staff. While it shouldn’t be surprising that a man who felt as entitled as Swalwell did to the bodies of his female staffers also felt entitled to run for President and then Governor with such scandals waiting to explode, somehow his political self-belief adds a cherry of chutzpah on top of his years of abuse.  

Newsom, Platner, and Swalwell all promise (or promised) to defeat Trump, to put an end to MAGA. Meanwhile, the most successful effort against not just MAGA, but its most violent domestic wing, was the Minnesota uprising. The collective defense of the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs effectively ended Stephen Miller’s city-by-city campaign of ICE terror, forced Greg Bovino’s retirement, precipitated Kristi Noem’s firing, and forestalled if not reversed any possible national popular sentiment in favor of increased deportations. And I could not name a single “leader” of this movement. Of course, the names of Alex Pretti and Renee Good are widely known and revered, but both martyrs were absolutely indistinguishable from the thousands of other volunteers who ran into danger to protect their neighbors prior to their deaths, a fact that made their respective murders that much more powerful in the national discourse. (And Standing Rock, too, where AOC spent time just before deciding to run for Congress, was a movement that picked up its share of celebrity participants but which did not have nationally prominent leaders.) The people who held the line against ICE and DHS, who stood up to fascist violence, who went out, again and again in the freezing cold, who delivered food to neighbors in hiding, were nurses and PTA moms. They were women, or doing “women’s work,” and they won. 

As Ella Baker, NAACP field secretary, Southern Christian Leadership Conference organizer, and co-founder of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), often said: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.”

AOC was wrong about one thing in her Friday response: Rights are not forever. The recent rush by Southern states to undo Ella Baker’s work and re-gerrymander Black representation out of Congress makes painfully clear how fragile even seemingly transformative institutional change can be. If we are going to win these victories back and make them permanent, this time—and, God willing, go further and get single-payer health care and a decarbonized grid and pathways to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and the PRO Act—we need a politics of Minnesota and not of capital-m-Men. Too much of leftist politics at this moment is chasing Trump’s personalist appeal to a mythical male working class. The left has run this play before, and it failed. 

I am, of course, speaking of Bernie Sanders, whose legacy in Democratic politics will likely be both complicated and ironic. Bernie’s 2016 campaign was a political awakening for many young people, including AOC herself, who cites it as the first time she shifted her efforts from community organizing to electoral campaigning. Bernie’s slogans (“Not me, us” and “are you willing to fight for someone you’ve never met?”) invoked precisely the type of relationship between candidate and constituency I have advanced here. And for a while, it seemed as if Bernie’s campaign would become a resurgent electoral left, an energized DSA prepared to engage as a sustained faction within internecine Democratic party fights, a broader policy-based movement. Except that is not what happened. And again, while the why of that failure could be the subject of multiple volumes, the brute fact remains. By running again in 2020, Bernie either implicitly acknowledged or made it the case that he was the movement, the personality around which it gained strength but could not move beyond. And the vitriol exhibited by his supporters for other potential political allies who failed to share their commitment to Bernie, personally, as the avatar for single-payer health care and anti-oligarchy revealed that ultimately too many in the DSA coalition had succumbed to a politics of personality. (Mamdani’s election is, at least for NYC DSA, an opportunity for redemption on this front: Gifted another exceptional political communicator, will the movement exhaust itself in identification again or build an electoral effort from this that can uplift candidates on the basis of commitment rather than charisma.)

Which brings back to AOC, Bernie’s appointed heir. AOC may not be the right vehicle for the revolutionary constitutional change demanded by this moment. But I trust her, more than anyone else in U.S. politics, to approach her own candidacy as such a vehicle, and to decide whether or not to run based on what is needed, now, in this moment. By grounding her campaign in what is needed, both to defeat fascism and to secure our collective freedom and well-being, she is likely to avoid the Bernie problem, to inspire her voters to continue the fight without her rather than take their ball and go home. Although she remains the most prominent member of the bunch, it’s worth remembering that AOC almost immediately after being elected referred to herself as part of a squad.

And, to take my own advice and commit to a political cause beyond a candidate, I want to urge my political allies, those who share my commitment to substantive policy outcomes, to adopt this same political orientation, to embrace feminist politics of solidarity rather than personality. Feminist not because AOC is a woman; men certainly can relate to their own leadership in this way and women often fail to do so. (For an ongoing example of the latter, see Katie Porter’s insistence in remaining in the California gubernatorial race despite the risk of Republican lockout and her pivot to tax cut slopulism, a move AOC has rejected.) It is feminist because it rejects the model of political leadership as individual domination, heroism, and investment—a model which has never been available to women—in favor of collective work and accountability, conditions under which equality within political movements can flourish.

If we are going to do a third Reconstruction—and I think we have yet to grapple with the degree of political conflict accomplishing such a thing would entail—we need politicians who conceive of themselves as working on behalf of a constituency, rather than would-be-saviors who decide they should be in charge and then go looking for one. And, like the people of Minnesota, we need to do the work to be that constituency, to lay the groundwork so that if and when those representatives get into office, there’s a movement spring-loaded to build democratic and egalitarian institutions that will, this time, outlast the people who made them.

Featured image is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at Women's March NYC, by Dimitri Rodriguez