Does AOC Want to Be Anything More Than a Celebrity?

By Jim Geraghty

Thursday, September 08, 2022

 

Ben Shapiro offers an astute observation, spurred by three glossy magazine profiles of famous women:

Ben sadly concludes, “we live in serious times, and we are led by completely unserious people. Our enemies are not. And they know this.”

 

My one quibble would be questioning whether any significant number of Americans really see Alexandria Ocasio Cortez as the ideal choice to lead Americans against dangerous enemies. No doubt, she has her ardent fans, adoring throngs on social media, and portions of the Washington press corps who idolize her for combining hard-left politics, youth, and a Hollywood-worthy story of a plucky bartender who upset a calcified apparatchik of the Democratic establishment.

 

But do even those groups really see AOC as a “wartime consigliere”? That GQ article is full of praise, but is surprisingly clear-eyed about how little influence she has over the rest of her party or the overall political scene. Yes, the article calls her “the voice of a generation” and “the most talented political communicator of her generation,” but it also describes the “hostile reception she says she still receives from colleagues.” AOC describes “a lot of targeting diminishment from my party. And the pervasiveness of that diminishment, it was all-encompassing at times.” AOC says she doesn’t feel she has the power to shift the Democratic Party in the direction she wants, and that she gets “undiluted spite” and “open hostility” from parts of the Democratic Party establishment. (No doubt, these are not pleasant experiences, but the congresswoman won her primary in part by trashing her party’s establishment. Just how did she expect her party’s establishment to welcome her?)

 

AOC leads a loud but not particularly large segment of the Democratic Party’s progressive base; she’s had little or no success at broadening her base of support, or even building a non-hostile relationship with other branches of the party. Leading a faction is not nothing; lots of frustrated politicians wish they could achieve that height. But that’s a long way from being a party leader or a national leader. It’s the difference between having a seat at the table and having a seat at the head of the table.

 

Ben is right that we live in a dangerous world: Vladimir Putin’s war of aggression, China’s saber-rattling and far-reaching influence operations, Iran’s nuclear ambitions and implacable hostility to both Israel and its Arab neighbors, North Korea’s nuclear program, Islamist terrorists, ruthless drug cartels and other bloody transnational criminal organizations, human traffickers, failed states, and cyber-crime, ransomware, and other Internet-based threats.

 

Thankfully, the fate of the country rarely rests on the decision-making of a second-term congresswoman.

 

All the troubles in the world are unpleasant to think about, and for most Americans, the easiest way to deal with them is to simply not think about them. Not every member of Congress focuses on every issue, and AOC is free to choose to focus upon her hopes to impeach two Supreme Court justices, ensuring that the New York City subway system doesn’t have more cops on patrol, defunding the police, urging others to use the term “Latinx,” blaming high crime rates in heavily-Democratic cities on Republican governors, and wearing a “tax the rich” dress to the Met Gala.

 

It is not hard to see why other Democrats, like former governor David Paterson, dismiss AOC as “a phantom of the media,” with little or no real political influence beyond her ability to generate headlines. The AOC playbook is to propose some headline-grabbing, controversial pipe dream that will never become law, bask in the applause of progressives, introduce a bill or amendment that will never get adopted in legislative chambers with narrow Democratic majorities, and then move on to the next issue. Progressives never seem to get annoyed that so few of her proposals become reality.

 

In this sense, no, AOC isn’t serious, she doesn’t want to be, and her fan base doesn’t want her to be serious, either. Asked about whether she wants to run for president someday, she responds, “I admit to sometimes believing that I live in a country that would never let that happen.” She laments, “so many people in this country hate women. And they hate women of color.” But that’s the most ideologically and personally convenient scapegoat. Winning the Democratic nomination, never mind the general election, would require building a broad coalition of support beyond the progressive wing of her party. A serious run for president would require AOC to stop being the progressive idealist dream candidate and telling her fanbase to accept half a loaf instead of none. Reality is messy; in her current role, AOC gets to live in the glittering illusion of the ideal.

 

So yes, AOC plays a role akin to that of Jennifer Lawrence or Meghan Markle – the glamorous young woman who makes provocatively progressive statements in gushing, glossy magazine profiles. The more interesting question is whether AOC wants to play any role beyond that. It’s a lot easier to be a celebrity than to be a political leader to gets into messy negotiations and makes compromises.