You are diagnosing national trends. You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?
I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.
The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.
Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.
Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?
I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.
Really? Why?
It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion. I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.
But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.
I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.
Incredible.
Donald Trump didn't quit after being humiliated in his 2012 run and he ended up winning in 2016. If we give up the project now, we didn't deserve to win anyway.
My first reaction was "How can someone be so incredibly naive?" My second reaction was: "Nobody can possibly be that naive." I think it's a strategy to convince democratic primary voters that when she challenges Cuomo/SchumerBiden/Harris for governor/sentate/president in 2022 or 2024, she'll be able to say "Look, I tried everything, but these people won't listen."
Unfortunatly, among democratic primary voters, the party is still very popular, for example: 91% has a favorable view of Obama , which makes it harder to run a burn-all-bridges-campaign like Trump did in the 2016 republican primary.
That's a fair argument, but don't you agree with the broader point that running against the democratic party in the democratic primary is harder than running against the republican party inside the republican party?
I guess my counter is that being a crusader anti Obama figure isn't a prerequisite to being a "burn it all down" dem candidate. When trump ran the entire republican establishment hated him, and he didn't even levy a bunch of criticisms at bush specifically.
If a Dem candidate did that but without the "ol Joe and kamala are my friends" shtick that Bernie stuck to all year, maybe? Idk
It's not just Obama. Schumer, Cuomo, Pelosi, all these people are popular among democratic primary voters. People have to learn by experience that they're evil. If you frontally attack them, you're the one who's dividing the party in their eyes.
I appreciate the visceral disgust at the dems, but mostly the willingness to say it to the press. Maybe next time she doesn't endorse a rapist for president without getting guarantees for M4A and GND.
I think we underestimate the pressure to fall in line within the dem party. I think they would go really fucking far for revenge. Just look at the exploitation in Hollywood as an example. Who knows what we don't get to see. When I read stuff like this and look at American politics it literally looks like how the company vaught from the tv series the boys operates. Imagine the shit that we don't know even know about.
I think a hollywood style metoo movement for American politics, uncovering abuse, intimidation, and other psychotic shit would be great to wake up libs to how toxic the party is beyond the extremely fake public appearances.
Bruh our sitting president has had constant sexual assault scandal for decades. Biden got literally metoo'd this year and he was just elected.
I think we underestimate the pressure to fall in line within the dem party.
Oh, I am certain that it is immense. I know it's a tall order to ask AOC to stand against that, possibly alone, but I would really still like to see it.
The Vought analogy is damn good. It’s just a massive PR operation and that’s it
If she sticks around, she'll probably be their next Bernie-esque candidate whom they push in the primaries to inspire a bunch of young people and motivate them to get involved, only to get screwed over and the DNC prop up another neoliberal.
It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.
Then have the balls to be public about this shit. This interview isn't "public." Tell people in your Twitch stream "these guys aren't gonna support you." Burn the fucking thing down. Stop kowtowing to their bullshit. It's nice that she wants to do things, but when she supports DNC platform points that aren't popular enough, it's frustrating to others that want to support her.
I mean, I get it: She has to do it to "compromise" or whatever. But if she's serious about leaving: Fuck it, burn the party down.
exactly. Stop being a loser like Bernie and fucking destroy this cancerous, life-sucking party.
If the Democrats collapsed, the Republicans would follow shortly afterwards. They are symbiotic.
I completely agree, it's just going to be near impossible for us to convince normal people of this
Idk I did feel like Bernie did really view trump as a unique threat. To his credit he said if the DNC doesn’t change someone worse than Trump will be coming in the next 4/8 years
I kinda view this article as a threat that she's going to burn it down in hellfire if they don't take her concerns seriously over the next 2 years.
I.e. she primaries Schumer without giving a shit if she loses, where along the way she exposes to the entire state of NY all the evil shit all these people regularly do.
Bernie said the same thing in an interview with Krystal Ball, and warned if the party doesn’t actually start giving a shit about the popular, mild SocDem policies that himself, AOC, etc support he would support primary challengers against the centrists.
I kinda view this article as a threat that she’s going to burn it down in hellfire if they don’t take her concerns seriously over the next 2 years.
We'll see. She pendulums between being a "socialist" to being a career democrat and back so often. That's honestly the problem with her: For all her talk and bluster, at times she sides with the democrats on things that she REALLY shouldn't side with them on.
Idk I give her a little slack. She was a freshman congresswoman with no political experience trying to feel out her role. If she continues to play both sides during a Biden admin then I’ll be more disappointed
It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy.
Absolutely fucking ghoulish libs
Yep, all this is true. She's going to get blamed regardless.
Democrats should be shitting their pants over the fact that the GOP raked in working class and lower income household voters. Instead, they are just using their new fancy politically correct term of "non-college educated voters" to say that they're poor and uneducated. Trump got the most black and Latino voters of a Republican candidate since the 1950s, and all Dems are talking about is how they need to ramp up the anti-socialism.
All of this is really setting the stage for Biden's presidency where we're going to have a growing fascist movement out of the GOP that is centered around working class, all while the Dems just play identity politics and do nothing. They aren't even offering the empty platitudes with Biden. Dems literally have reinvented themselves as the rich, college educated smug party, and they're going to be in for a serious backlash when people get tired of their smugness in the next few years.
Now would be a good time for congresswoman Omar to impress upon her how disgusting the US acts abroad too.
Wasn't there a Green environment minister in Macron's government who quit after they realised they wouldn't be able to actually do anything meaningful and would just have to rubber stamp awful policies?
Yeah about two years ago. Quit live on radio if I remember rightly.
It's not particularly relevant except that it's the most French scandal ever, but his replacement resigned in disgrace last year for stealing expensive wine from the Presidential Palace Wine Cellar (or something, yes they have an official government wine cellar) and using it to host lavish dinner parties at taxpayer expense.
Honhonhonhon I steal le Presidential Wine, honhonhonhon I get caught embezzling from le public, sacre bleu!
That’ll be all the imperialist American propaganda we need, thank you.
Eyyyy we're allowed ta stereatype Italians but tha French are off-limits? Fuggedaboutit!
Break away. Convince your squad friends to break away and start a party focused on primarying corporate Dems in safe districts. You have nothing to lose if you don’t even want to stay.
You're exactly right, but it needs to be a bit more than just break away IMO. We need to have a unified call to action that gets people where they need to be (feel free to disagree with my take, of course).
Breaking away into a horizontalist socdem party does nothing. They are better off just being more openly hostile but still from the inside, or like form an actual socialist party but that will be difficult.
It's true that there really is just no way to win. If you lose your election, you fail so many people, and you look like shit. If you win, you have to spend all this time around the ghouls in government, they stab you in the back constantly, the media paints you as the devil almost every day, you can't get on social media without being relentlessly attacked, and you also have to deal with death threats—at the very least. On top of that, good luck on getting Medicare for All or a Green New Deal passed. I don't blame her for feeling this way at all.
Also have to remind everyone that AOC is an imperialist, and one of the "progressive" dems she mentioned is my House representative, Jared Golden, who did indeed vote for Medicare for All, but I strongly suspect he was pulling a Susan Collins—only voting for it because he knew the bill would fail. If there's ever a chance that an M4A bill might actually have traction, there's no fucking way he'll vote for it. A few months ago he also voted to continue the war in Afghanistan, and he takes millions of dollars from Silicon Valley. AOC is light years ahead of the average Democratic official, but she's far from what we need.
Except the point is that scoring points with guillable progressives doesn't hurt you electorally like centrist dems are saying.
Which is why it's so fucking nonsensical that they'd be so bold as to claim it and expect anyone to take them seriously
No, my analysis is that winning is entirely based on outreach and voter mobilization. Elections aren't really about ideology like many of us like to pretend they are, that should've been the lesson from the dem primaries.
I hope this finally ends people's notions of "you can change the system from within". You absolutely cannot. Electoralism will never save us. I cannot say what the only option is due to the Smith Act of 1940.
I think it's fair to say that you can't really change the system by just winning a small handful of legislative seats, but you can much more noticably nchange things by winning executive offices (governor, AG, ect.).
