It certainly helps. All these movements and groups had some high level thinkers in their inception, but the difference is that they weren’t dumb like AOC to think uneducated people and informally educated people weren’t capable of learning and understanding.

In fact, many of them believed that the “less educated” were able to understand communism and anti imperialism much better than the bougie academics in their own circles.

But that was a bit different back then. The only people who could afford to be the first ones to study theory had to be well off enough to be formally educated. Nowadays everything is available online that a poor person with a phone can read several books about socialism, so the bougie academic figurehead isn’t all that necessary anymore.