The Politics of Unrespectability

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

 

Kamala Harris made a mistake by campaigning with Liz Cheney in 2024, or so a certain type of leftist will tell you.

 

A conservative with Republican royal lineage, Cheney was a strong corroborating witness for Democrats’ case that Donald Trump is a fascist who shouldn’t be trusted with power. Team Harris hoped her endorsement would create a “permission structure” for the Trump-leery center-right to cross the aisle on Election Day.

 

What they neglected to consider, our certain type of leftist would note, is how the Democratic base would feel about partnering with someone whose surname had become a byword for right-wing warmongering. Coalition-building is important, yes, but progressives were already suspicious of Harris on foreign policy due to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s operations in Gaza. Linking arms with the doyenne of neoconservatism seemed to confirm that, if she won, it would be business as usual in Washington with respect to the Middle East.

 

Demoralization followed, then defeat. One Democratic strategist framed the Cheney problem starkly after the election: “People don’t want to be in a coalition with the devil.”

 

Which sounds clever—until you remember that the fascist on the ballot became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote in that election. Lots of Americans are quite willing to be in a coalition with the devil, it turns out, if the devil promises to reduce the cost of living and keep the country out of foreign wars. That deal is currently working out for them precisely the way all deals with the devil do.

 

It would be more correct to say that people don’t want to be in a coalition with certain devils. One of those people is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

 

AOC was willing to join a coalition with Cheney against Trump, albeit with misgivings. “I think there’s plenty of people that aren’t happy about that,” she said in 2024 of Harris’ new conservative campaign surrogate, confessing that she didn’t love the arrangement herself. But strange bedfellows are “part of the nature of putting together a coalition,” she observed. If Cheney wanted to help Democrats get Harris elected, fine.

 

Fast-forward to last week, when Ocasio-Cortez was asked in an interview about partnering with Republicans on matters of common ground. “I care about results,” she allowed, endorsing the idea, but warned her audience against letting wolves into one’s tent for the sake of making that tent bigger. “I personally do not trust someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a proven bigot and antisemite, on the issue of what is good for Gazans and Israelis,” AOC went on to say. “I don’t think that it benefits our movement … to align the left with white nationalists.”

 

Some bedfellows are a little too strange to share a pillow with, it seems.

 

Many of the same progressives who rejected the devil’s bargain with Cheney have spent the past week grumbling at AOC for rejecting a devil’s bargain with Greene. No Republican politician has been more outspoken than MTG in condemning the Jewish state’s war in Gaza as a “genocide.” If Ocasio-Cortez was willing to hold her nose and make common cause with one distasteful right-wing figure to defeat Trump, those progressives reasoned, surely she should be willing to do so with another to move America’s Overton window toward opposing Israel.

 

“For all her professed radicalism, AOC is still beholden to a politics of respectability,” Sohrab Ahmari wrote, more in sorrow than in anger, of the congresswoman’s skepticism of Greene. (One would think Ahmari, of all people, would be cautious about making any new deals with devils right now, but no.) It’s hard to disagree: God knows, if there’s one thing American politics needs less of in year 11 of the Trump era, it’s respectability.

 

Why doesn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alleged populist, see that?

 

The Israel litmus test.

 

The disagreement between AOC and her progressive critics is only nominally about whether the left should partner with Republicans to contain Israel. Of course we should, I presume she’d say.

 

She’s worked before on subjects of mutual interest with the likes of Ted Cruz and defended cooperating with House Republican Tim Burchett in the same interview in which she denounced Greene. We should work across the aisle “where we trust intent,” she said of Burchett. But she doesn’t trust Greene’s intentions.

 

Who can blame her?

 

MTG has been harassing Ocasio-Cortez since before she was elected to Congress, leading a group of men to AOC’s locked congressional office in 2019 where, according to the Washington Post, they recorded themselves “taunt[ing] the congresswoman’s staff through a mail slot and defil[ing] her guest book, all while mocking Ocasio-Cortez.” When the video of that resurfaced in 2021, AOC called Greene “deeply unwell” and encouraged her to seek help for a “fixation [that] has lasted for several years now.”

 

In 2020, during her first run for Congress, MTG posted a photo of herself holding a gun next to an image of Ocasio-Cortez and fellow progressives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “We need strong conservative Christians to go on the offense against these socialists who want to rip our country apart,” she wrote in the photo’s caption. The following year, long before she became a critic of Israel, she began referring to AOC’s far-left faction in the House as the “Jihad Squad.”

 

On one occasion shortly after she joined Congress, Greene caught up to Ocasio-Cortez as the latter was leaving the House chamber and began shouting at her about Black Lives Matter and the Green New Deal. “You don’t care about the American people,” Greene reportedly yelled. “Why do you support terrorists and Antifa?”

 

I don’t think AOC is against being in a coalition with the Republican devil against Israel. I think she’s opposed to being in a coalition with this particular devil, whom she has ample reason to distrust.

 

But that’s why progressives want her to do it. The reason the left has picked this fight with her is because it hopes to make opposition to Israel an ideological litmus test on par with, say, support for universal health care. So urgent and righteous is the cause of severing America’s relationship with the Jewish state, they mean to say, that there is never an excuse for declining an opportunity to advance it, even if doing so requires you to glad-hand a crazy person who may or may not wish you personal harm.

 

(It follows, I suppose, that the cause of preventing a second Trump presidency was not so urgent and righteous as to excuse glad-handing Liz Cheney.)

 

What more powerful statement can there be of how committed progressives are to that litmus test than taking sides with Marjorie Taylor Greene, for years the queen of MAGA kookery, against Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the avatar of supposedly ascendant young socialism?

 

Poke around on Twitter and you’ll even find a few alleging that MTG is better than AOC on Israel because Ocasio-Cortez once opposed an amendment offered by Greene to cut funding for the Iron Dome missile defense program. AOC has since reversed course and promised that she’ll oppose any new military aid to Jerusalem, but you don’t need to squint to see why an Israel skeptic like her might support money for Iron Dome. Every Hamas rocket that does damage to the Jewish state is cause for reprisal and war; if those rockets are shot down before impact, retaliation becomes optional rather than obligatory.

 

But hard feelings aren’t the only reason that Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t want to share a tent with Greene, I’m sure. Ahmari may not have learned the lesson of the past 10 years, but AOC seemingly has.

 

Learning from postliberalism.

 

The lesson is that you can’t partially normalize postliberalism. If Marjorie Taylor Greene is worth listening to on Israel, she’s worth listening to, period.

 

The Republican establishment believed it could partially normalize Trump in 2016. He’s worth listening to on immigration, conservatives conceded to the GOP base. Banning Muslims from entering the United States might be excessive, and we’re not crazy about his admiration for Russia. But building a border wall is worth thinking about.

 

If Trump was worth listening to because he had the right idea on immigration, he was worth listening to, period. And the right did listen. They listened when he said the 2020 election was rigged, that he was entitled to seek “retribution” against his political enemies, that his tariffs would create a golden age of prosperity for the United States, and that the Iran war was no big deal because it would be over in four to six weeks.

 

All sorts of destructive ideas went mainstream in America once Republicans normalized Trumpism. His current Cabinet includes people who think the problem with the military is that it’s too reluctant to commit war crimes and that the problem with public health is that it’s too enthusiastic about vaccines. When you move the Overton window sharply on one issue, you may find that you’ve inadvertently moved it on others.

 

Marjorie Taylor Greene has described herself in the past as a Christian nationalist. She supported Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and marked the fifth anniversary of January 6 this year by lamenting that “political protesters” had been held in a “D.C. Gulag.” Last week she reassured Twitter followers that ivermectin, the antiparasitic medicine embraced by right-wing cranks as a COVID cure-all, would work on hantavirus as well. Those who took “the good ole horse paste” and gained natural immunity from the last killer virus should follow the same protocol for the next one, Greene advised.

 

Telling opponents of Israel that her opinion about the Jewish state holds value inevitably invites them to consider that her opinion about all sorts of other things might hold value too. Progressives weren’t willing to take that risk with Liz Cheney’s neoconservatism but they are, it seems, willing to take it with MTG’s postliberalism—notwithstanding their entirely correct belief that postliberalism is hollowing out America in numerous ways. AOC seems not to be as risk-tolerant in this case as they are, and correctly so.

 

There’s a second lesson she may have gleaned from watching Republicans over the past decade, a corollary to how you can’t partially normalize postliberalism. Namely, right-wing postliberals very seldom have good intentions and eventually that fact will make itself plain.

 

It’s possible that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s concern for Gazans is earnest, an example of human compassion in its purest form. But it’s also quite possible that it’s driven by enemy-of-my-enemy political logic, reflecting the priorities of the “America First” faction to which she and figures like Tucker Carlson belong. Those priorities aren’t limited to questioning whether Israel wields too much influence over U.S. foreign policy, an increasingly mainstream view as the Iran war wears on. In Greene’s case, they include insinuations about larger conspiracies involving Jews and the Jewish state.

 

The most famous example is her “Jewish space lasers” theory from 2018, in which she speculated that a fire in California was caused by a space-based laser connected to the Rothschild family. (Last year she told Bill Maher, implausibly, that she “didn’t even know the Rothschilds were Jewish.”) She toned it down a little after joining Congress in 2021, limiting herself for a while to casual Holocaust analogies by comparing Joe Biden to Hitler and likening proof of vaccination to Jews being compelled to wear yellow stars.

 

But things picked up in 2023, when she opposed a House resolution condemning antisemitism because she thought the language might penalize Christians for believing that Jesus was “crucified by the Jews.” Last fall she sided with Carlson and Candace Owens during an intra-right debate by implying that the martyred Charlie Kirk was preparing to disown Israel before he was shot. A few months later, after her falling out with Trump over the Epstein files, she wrote, “It really makes you wonder what is in those files and who and what country is putting so much pressure on him?”

 

Last week she cried foul about the White House effort to oust her friend Thomas Massie from his House seat, complaining that “Trump and the 3 billionaires from Israel, NOT Kentucky, are supporting a hollow controlled puppet that can’t even speak his own words!!!” The week before that, she promoted Dan Bilzerian’s primary challenge to “Zionist First Randy Fine,” a Jewish Republican congressman from Florida. Among other things, Bilzerian believes that “most of the problems today are caused by Jewish supremacy,” that fewer than 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, that former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was a “hero,” and that John F. Kennedy was likely assassinated by Mossad.

 

It is not crazy for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to look at all of that, suspect that MTG’s views on Gaza are motivated by little more than the Lindberghian impulse to strengthen American (or, rather, white) nationalism by encouraging hostility to Jews, and say no thanks.

 

A question of motives.

 

You don’t need to believe that AOC’s own motives are entirely pure in doing so.

 

One way to understand her reluctance to join hands with Greene is as a matter of pure political calculation. Poll after poll shows opinion in the United States trending against Israel after years of war in Gaza and now months of war in Iran. The Democratic consensus that the Palestinians are the more sympathetic party in that conflict is becoming the national consensus. After decades of being treated as an outré position in establishment politics, opposition to the Jewish state has gone mainstream.

 

The last thing a person who’s pleased with that development should want is to discredit skepticism of Israel anew by promoting cranks who are destined to alienate persuadables. The “Jewish space lasers” lady who’s hoping to see Dan Bilzerian in Congress is not a net gain for normalizing the cause, even if she has a left-friendly view of Gaza.

 

Frankly, it’s not clear to me that Greene still commands a meaningful constituency on the right that the left should covet. That was a core progressive complaint against Harris’ alliance with Liz Cheney, ironically: How many Republicans realistically were still listening in 2024 to Cheney? She’d already been aggressively un-personed within the party by Trump such that any conservatives who still preferred her to him had likely already turned against the GOP, making her endorsement irrelevant.

 

The same is true for MTG, no? She was also excommunicated from the cult by the president, undermining her previous influence with average MAGA voters. And the sort of hardcore groypers who might share her take on Gaza have already ditched the GOP because of Trump’s warm relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu.

 

Welcoming her to the anti-Israel cause would be subtraction by addition, in short, deepening the left’s already considerable antisemitism problem while supplying it with few new votes to compensate. Good luck squaring that with “big tent” logic.

 

But if you want to be more charitable to Ocasio-Cortez, you can do that too. She does occasionally speak up against antisemitism; her objections to Greene and comparative tolerance for bigotry among left-wing fellow travelers may be due to an ideological blind spot, not pure partisan hypocrisy. Intentions probably explain why she grudgingly backed an alliance of convenience with Cheney but can’t stomach one with MTG, in fact. Everyone to the left of Ted Cruz understands that Cheney’s intentions in opposing Trump were noble. Greene’s intentions in opposing Israel are considerably deeper in doubt.

 

Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez’s dispute with progressives in this matter is less an argument over coalition-building strategy than how radically “counter-hegemonic” (to borrow a term from Ahmari) left-wing politics should be. To a burn-it-all-down populist on either end of the proverbial horseshoe, MTG going rogue on Israel is a heartening rebellion against establishment conventional wisdom, the sort of thing America desperately needs more of. Draining the swamp will require bold, transgressive action by leaders who not only don’t care about respectability but actively disdain the concept. Which sounds … familiar.

 

The fact that their favorite progressive congresswoman doesn’t believe that as unconditionally as they do makes her a timid party hack at heart.

 

But to Ocasio-Cortez, I suspect, an effective “counter-hegemonic” strategy means avoiding subtraction by addition and the moral corruption that inevitably comes with welcoming in elements who don’t have the movement’s best interests at heart. The right failed to learn that second lesson and will never fully recover from it. Whether it might learn the first will depend on what happens in November and 2028.