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PORTSIDE CULTURE

OH SAY AOC  
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David Klion
April 1, 2024
Bookforum
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_ This new book is a chronicle of the Democratic Party’s left flank
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_The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New American Politics_
Joshua Green
Penguin Press
ISBN: 9780525560241
WANT TO FEEL OLD? Some Americans born during the 2008 financial
crisis will be getting their driver’s licenses this year. These
youngest Zoomers have never known an America where serious people
think that the free market can work without significant government
intervention, and they’ve likely known the names Elizabeth Warren,
Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for as long as they’ve
been politically aware. They have never believed capitalism would
deliver for them, never experienced the disillusionment of seeing it
fail for the first time, and never known the thrill of seeing it
challenged by upstart politicians or the disappointment of seeing
those politicians co-opted by moderating forces. They were born
disillusioned.

Their parents’ generation, typically born in the 1970s, grew up in a
completely different America, one in which the neoliberal consensus
was first taking shape. This is the America of journalist Joshua
Green’s childhood. In his new book, _The Rebels: Elizabeth Warren,
Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and the Struggle for a New
American Politics_, Green traces the neoliberal turn to 1978, when he
was six, and when Jimmy Carter’s populist proposal to restructure
the US tax code to be more egalitarian was rejected by a Democratic
Congress. In grim economic circumstances, Carter then succumbed to
pressure to sign a bill that prioritized tax cuts over redistribution,
two years before Ronald Reagan would unseat him with a platform
promising even more of that. The stage was set for thirty years of
market-driven policies, during which Wall Street bankers would become
steadily more entrenched in both political parties and would set the
terms of national debate.

Green uses this backstory to explain how the Democrats, a party once
primarily accountable to unionized blue-collar workers, became so
dominated by the finance industry that his titular protagonists had to
mobilize for an ongoing struggle to restore the party to its
working-class roots. If you’re my age (forty) or a bit younger,
it’s a story you’ve probably spent much of your adult life
immersed in. As the generation old enough to have grown up with the
neoliberal dream and to have watched it come crashing down right when
we were supposed to claim our stake in it, millennials are the base
cohort for the genre of left-wing populism Green describes in _The
Rebels_. Many of us have, or at least had, passionate feelings about
one or more of the figures Green focuses on.

Speaking for myself, between about 2015 and 2020, an attack on Sanders
felt like an attack on my whole identity. Like many Sanders
supporters—and like our New Left antecedents after about
1972—I’ve spent the pandemic and the Biden presidency
contemplating the limits of romantic, youth-oriented left-wing
electoral politics. When you’re emotionally invested in a
politician’s success, it can be hard to objectively assess their
role in history, especially in the face of bad faith criticism from
defenders of the status quo.

It’s to Green’s credit, then, that he’s able to tell a positive
story about Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez from the perspective of
a mainstream political reporter who is broadly sympathetic. _The
Rebels_ is not the first book about these three or the movements they
represent, but it might be the first to consider them soberly. Green
documents their undeniable impact on national politics without
indulging in hagiography or overinflated rhetoric.

For Green, as for many observers, 2008 is the key moment of rupture.
After the collapse of the housing market and the resulting economic
meltdown, millions of people saw how both parties prioritized rescuing
Wall Street over helping ordinary Americans. As a matter of fiscal
engineering, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s program of
Wall Street bailouts succeeded on its own terms. As a matter of
political optics, it was a disaster, communicating to a broad swath of
the public that Washington had left them behind, as it largely had.
Elements on the far right would eventually find ways to capitalize on
this, culminating in the presidency of Donald Trump and the takeover
of the GOP by MAGA populists. (Green wrote about this in his
best-selling previous book, _Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald
Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency_.) But the populist left
would also see its first real opening since the Carter era to at least
attempt a remaking of the Democratic Party.

Although _The Rebels_’ subtitle and cover art suggest three
protagonists with equal prominence, Warren gets the most attention.
Sanders partisans who are still annoyed at Warren over the contentious
2020 primaries might look askance at this, but it makes sense in
Green’s time line: for most of Obama’s two terms, Warren was the
administration’s most prominent critic on the left, while Sanders
was considered a Senate backbencher and the young Ocasio-Cortez had no
profile whatsoever. It may be hard to remember now, but Warren’s
reputation during Obama’s eventful first term was as a populist
firebrand capable of channeling the public’s anger at the Wall
Street bailouts through effective political theater.

Before she ever ran or intended to run for Senate, Warren drew
national attention by becoming one of Jon Stewart’s favored guests
on the_ Daily Show_, where she had a gift for translating wonky policy
analysis into righteous, commonsensical rhetoric (“We just keep
pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric”). But she also
kept the administration on its toes, leaking unflattering stories
about Geithner to reporters and leading successful campaigns to sink
Larry Summers’s appointment as Fed chair and Wall Street banker
Antonio Weiss’s nomination to a Treasury Department job. At the
time, Warrenmania and Occupy Wall Street were seen as responses to the
same problem. Both signified young progressives becoming disenchanted
by Obama’s failure to deliver real hope and change in the wake of
the financial crisis. By the time Sanders emerged as a national figure
in 2015—with Ocasio-Cortez volunteering for his campaign in New
York—there was a significant network of leftists ready to organize.

In the 2016 cycle, Warren decided not to challenge Hillary Clinton for
the presidency (despite an energetic “draft Warren” campaign)
because she feared that a hard-fought primary would diminish her
influence on a likely Clinton administration. In Green’s telling,
the Sanders campaign inherited what might have been Warren’s
activist infrastructure almost overnight. Sanders’s appeal lay in
his decades-long consistency and authenticity—“a kind of
anti-charisma, a truculent refusal to indulge the bullshit and
euphemism that’s the lingua franca of electoral
campaigning”—which managed to draw thousands of young people to
rallies across the country. It also attracted $228 million in small
donations, demonstrating the viability of campaigning nationally
without any support from Wall Street or other big donors. These
organizing efforts, along with Trump’s unexpected victory over
Clinton, galvanized young progressives and helped inspire a new
generation of activists of diverse backgrounds to run for office.

One of them was Ocasio-Cortez, who was working as a bartender when
Sanders first ran and who found herself drawn into organizing by his
calls for a “political revolution.” Green casts Ocasio-Cortez as a
“natural” while also reminding us how improbable her rise was. He
recounts how a group of Sanders campaign alums founded an organization
called Brand New Congress that set out to recruit novice progressive
candidates in all 435 congressional districts. In the end, they
recruited only thirty, and of those, Ocasio-Cortez was the sole
winner. Her upset victory against consummate Democratic insider Joe
Crowley was a product of organizing, clever local strategizing, and
demographic shifts in Queens and the Bronx, as well as her own unique
strengths as a candidate.

“Thanks to the vagaries of New York’s primary system,
Ocasio-Cortez was able to build her appeal among a small, very liberal
segment of her district’s voters—she won fewer than seventeen
thousand votes in a primary that drew barely 5 percent of the
district’s eligible voters—and that was enough for her to
prevail,” writes Green. “None of this precluded her from becoming
a force in the party or invalidated her full-spectrum leftist
platform. She played by the rules that Crowley and his cronies had
established, and she won.” That’s all true, and it meant that the
Ocasio-Cortez phenomenon would be difficult to scale nationally, even
though a handful of like-minded candidates across the country have
since managed to build up the progressive “Squad” in the House.
What has kept Ocasio-Cortez particularly influential, Green argues,
has been twofold: first, she is based in New York City (with
strongholds in some of the fastest-gentrifying neighborhoods in
Queens) and thus enmeshed in the social universe of journalists and
political staffers with national platforms; and second, she has
skillfully adapted to a different set of political realities in
Washington. After initially trying to legislate as an insurgent
against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic establishment,
Ocasio-Cortez moved away from the “activist phase of her
congressional career,” toned down criticism of her colleagues, and
began taking advantage of the theatrical potential of televised
oversight hearings to drive national debates—a tactic Warren had
pioneered.

Watching Ocasio-Cortez’s trajectory, some on the left have accused
her of surrendering to pressure from the establishment; some liberals
counter that she has left childish things behind and sought greater
influence inside the system. Certainly, to Green, her approach
represents political maturity: “Being on the inside isn’t the same
as selling out. It means your interests are represented. You get a say
in what happens.” There’s something to that, but it risks losing
sight of why Ocasio-Cortez attracted so much attention in the first
place. Politicians who pursue traditional routes to public office
don’t find themselves balancing their principles against the
incentives of the inside game, because they never had principles to
begin with. It is precisely because Ocasio-Cortez ran as a sincere
activist that her adaptation to the ways of Washington represents
sophistication and not simple careerism.

Green credits his three “rebels” with successfully making the
transition from outsiders to insiders within President Biden’s
coalition, and in turn credits Biden with taking on their priorities.
“In a break with past administrations, including Obama’s, Biden
has begun to remake the political economy along many of the same lines
as his populist opponents wished to do,” he writes. Green credits
pressure from the party’s left wing—and its committed
constituencies—for the fact that Biden began his term by pushing a
$1.9 trillion COVID package through Congress “instead of worrying
about deficits”; for walking union picket lines; for reinvigorating
antitrust regulation and labor law enforcement; and for the
record-setting climate investments of the Inflation Reduction Act.

These are real accomplishments, and Green is right that the activists,
organizers, and high-profile politicians on the left deserve to be
proud of pushing the Democratic Party. _The Rebels_ represents the
mainstreaming of the contemporary left’s narrative on economic
policy, which itself is a measure of the mainstreaming of the
contemporary left’s substantive agenda.

Still, the left’s narrative on Palestine remains well outside the
Democratic mainstream. Since October 7, the Biden administration has
squandered much of the credibility it built up with the left on its
morally indefensible support for Israel’s assault on Gaza. To
pro-Palestine activists, Warren, Sanders, and Ocasio-Cortez have all,
to varying extents, fallen short of holding the administration
accountable for its complicity in Israeli atrocities, even as it may
cost Biden his reelection and return Trump to Washington. If that
happens, it will fall to a new generation of leftists to organize for
political power in the face of a hostile and intellectually exhausted
establishment. As Green’s relatively optimistic account shows, that
could take a long time.

David Klion [[link removed]] is a
journalist and cultural critic working on a book about the legacy of
neoconservatisms.

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* Progressives
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Elizabeth Warren
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