https://www.thenation.com/article/2020-aoc-democrats/
Election 2020
Democrats
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020
“For anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,” she says, “it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn.”
by John Nichols
January 1, 2020
The Nation
Election 2020
Democrats
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020
“For anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,” she says, “it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn.”
by John Nichols
January 1, 2020
The Nation
PHOTO:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to reporters in Statuary
Hall at the US Capitol on December 18, 2019. (Getty Images / Drew
Angerer)
As 2019 closed, the centrist pundits and politicians who make it their
mission to police the Democratic Party were busy reanimating one of the
oldest lies in the book. They were aiming at 2020, the year in which the
party will nominate a candidate to take on the biggest liar in American
politics: Donald Trump. To beat Trump, the centrists argued, Democrats
must reject “purity tests.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, luckily,
has recognized this threat contained in the coded language about “purity
tests” and countered it with a masterful defense of the politics of
principle that will be essential to upend Trump and Trumpism. She
finished the year arguing, correctly, that Democrats must stand strong
for their ideals in 2020, or they will run the risk of letting Trump
frame the debate.
“For anyone who accuses us for instituting
purity tests, it’s called having values. It’s called, giving a damn,”
the Democratic representative from New York told a cheering crowd of
14,000 at a December 21 rally for Bernie Sanders in Venice, California.
While at least one Sanders rival, Pete Buttigieg, has been busy
decrying purity tests regarding issues and strategies, AOC has pushed
back against a politics where the parties are defined by the demands of
big donors—and the cautious policies they favor. “It’s called having
standards for your conduct to not be funded by billionaires but to be
funded by the people,” she said.
The wrestling over standards
between progressives and centrists is real, and it can be healthy for a
democracy. Unfortunately, the centrists who refuse to surrender their
rigid grip on the Democratic Party—especially when it comes to naming
presidential contenders—want Democrats to believe that the only way to
tackle Trump, the man who has shredded every standard for electioneering
and governing, is with a return to politics as usual. They imagine that
it is possible to make politics great again. Their back-to-the-future
approach, which is as dangerous as it is naive, suggests that the 2016
election was an aberration.
Centrism is an unyielding ideological
construct. It demands that candidates and parties abandon ideals in
order to satisfy the whims of professional pessimists like David Brooks
of The New York Times, who earlier this year reduced the Democratic
contest to a David Brooks primary. In a Times column headlined, “Dems,
Please Don’t Drive Me Away,” Brooks warned, “The party is moving toward
all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely
the nominee will be unelectable. And it’s doing it without too much
dissent.”
Never mind that poll after poll shows that the
“positions” Brooks perceives to be electorally poisonous—support for
real health care reform and a sufficient response to the climate
crisis—are, in fact, quite popular. Never mind that Brooks, a man
unscathed by even the slightest measure of irony, bemoaned the lack of
dissent in a column prominently featured in the nation’s most
influential newspaper. Brooks was not happy because no one seemed to
accept his premise that “the moral case against Trump means hitting him
from the right as well as the left.”
The defenders of the empty
politics of the past spent 2019 in a fret fest over the success of a
democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a progressive anti-monopolist,
Elizabeth Warren, in framing out a bold vision for the party and the
2020 campaign. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell warned against
“lazy sloganeering — lately exemplified by Medicare-for-all and the
Green New Deal” and counseled that Medicare-for-All was “in danger of
becoming a purity test for 2020 candidates.”
Actually,
Medicare-for-All should be a purity test for candidates; as AOC said,
“it’s called having values.” If the Democratic nominee in 2020 cannot
communicate a vision for treating health care as a right, then the party
will sacrifice one of its strongest tools for mobilizing young and
disenfranchised voters.
Democrats should recognize the value of
keeping pure on major issues—even if major donors might ask them to
compromise. Clarity on the big issues helps a party to increase turnout
among potential voters who agree and to shape the discourse in ways that
appeal to independent voters who are frustrated by the concessions that
both major parties make to America’s oligarchs.
It is reasonable
to suggest, as does former President Obama, that the Democrats must
avoid being so pure that they only attract “people who already agree
with us completely on everything.” Even Warren, who made her name taking
on the big banks, admits, “Nobody is perfect, and nobody is pure.” But
Warren also says that Democrats have to avoid compromising at the start
of the process, with “vague calls for unity.” And Sanders continues to
advocate for a renewal of former President Franklin Roosevelt’s
“I-welcome-their-hatred” approach to the billionaire class.
In
the last Democratic debate of the year, Buttigieg decried efforts to
apply “purity tests” when it comes to campaign fund-raising and claimed
that “in order to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready
for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the
most important election.”
Warren and Sanders stood their ground,
making the case for funding campaigns with lots of small donations as
opposed to bundles of big checks. Buttigieg stood his ground, as well,
rejecting charges that he is running as “Wall Street Pete,” defending
“traditional fundraising” and telling The Washington Post, “The thing
about these purity tests is the people issuing them can’t even meet
them.”
Perhaps. But Democrats should at least try to meet some of
them. That was AOC’s point when she warned against buying into the
fantasy that “there is no difference between being funded by a handful
of wealthy people and being funded by small grassroots donations.”
“Let me tell you something,” the former waitress explained, “I go into
work all the time and I hear people say ‘what will my donors think?’ I
hear that phrase. I hear and I see that billionaires get members of
Congress on speed dial and waitresses don’t.”
If Democrats want
to mobilize the masses in 2020, they’ll need the waitresses—and the rest
of the working class—not the defenders of billionaire money and elite
centrism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Nichols is The Nation’s
national-affairs correspondent and host of Next Left, The Nation’s
podcast where politics gets personal with rising progressive
politicians. He is the author of Horsemen of the Trumpocalypse: A Field
Guide to the Most Dangerous People in America, from Nation Books, and
co-author, with Robert W. McChesney, of People Get Ready: The Fight
Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracy.
PHOTO:
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks to reporters in Statuary
Hall at the US Capitol on December 18, 2019. (Getty Images / Drew
Angerer)
