AOC’s Revolt Against DCCC Is “Exactly What We Need,” Say Progressive Democrats

https://truthout.org/…/aocs-revolt-against-dccc-is-exactly-…

News
Politics & Elections

AOC’s Revolt Against DCCC Is “Exactly What We Need,” Say Progressive Democrats
by Jon Queally
January 13, 2020
Common Dreams

PHOTO: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chants with housing and environmental advocates before a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on November 14, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
For bucking a key arm of the Democratic Party establishment that has stood in the way of attracting and supporting progressive candidates, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) received applause over the weekend after she announced the launch of a new political action committee designed to directly challenge the power of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee by helping insurgent, left-leaning challengers like herself take on both Republican incumbents and centrist Democrats.

“The rumors are true,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Saturday. “Today we’re announcing the Courage to Change PAC — and we need your help. We are pushing the envelope in D.C. by rewarding those who reject lobbyist money, fight for working families, and welcome newcomers.”

According to the PAC’s first fundraising push:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ✔
@AOC

I give quite a bit to fellow Dems - we’ve fundraised over $300,000 for others (more than my “dues”), w/ over 50% going to swing seats.

DCCC made clear that they will blacklist any org that helps progressive candidates like me. I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion. 

https://twitter.com/marisa_schul…/status/1215652173683531776 …

Marisa Schultz @marisa_schultz

SCOOP: @AOC withholding $250,000 in "dues" from the Democratic party in protest and building her own grassroots fundraising for progressives instead
AOC riles Dems by refusing to pay party dues, bankrolling colleagues' opponents 

https://fxn.ws/39Q2bzg #FoxNews

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12:22 PM - Jan 10, 2020
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In an interview with Fox News, Ocasio-Cortez further defended her decision by saying, “I don’t see the sense in giving a quarter-million dollars to an organization that has clearly told people like me that we’re not welcome.”

AOC’s efforts to stand up the DCCC was championed by many of her fellow progressives:

Brand New Congress ✔
@BrandNew535
🔥🔥The DCCC requires outrageous "dues" while actively undermining primaries and working against grassroots progressive candidates. We've seen it firsthand. @AOC's candor and honesty is exactly what we need to see more of in Congress! 

#BlueNoMatterWhoWontDo 
#BrandNewCongress https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1215730737900638208 …


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ✔
@AOC

I give quite a bit to fellow Dems - we’ve fundraised over $300,000 for others (more than my “dues”), w/ over 50% going to swing seats.

DCCC made clear that they will blacklist any org that helps progressive candidates like me. I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion. https://twitter.com/marisa_schul…/status/1215652173683531776 …

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James J. Zogby ✔
@jjz1600

Many reasons @AOC is right not to “pay dues” to the DCCC. 1. It’s decisionmaking is opaque & undemocratic. 2. It’s a “pay for play” scam -the more Members give, the better their assignments) 3. They punish consultants who support challengers & only give “jobs” to their buddies

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The Washington Post reported Sunday afternoon that Courage to Change had raised more than $150,000 after approximately 24 hours of fundraising, money that would go directly to help progressive House candidates in the 2020 primaries and general election.

“There is a robust infrastructure set up to maintain and defend the Democratic majority, and to support moderate Democrats, and often that infrastructure is running against progressive in blue districts,” Corbin Trent, a former staffer for Ocasio-Cortez and now a spokesperson for the new PAC, told the Post. “So what we’re looking to do is to make sure that progressive candidates and incumbents have the support that they need to back policies that are going to improve the lives of everyday Americans.”
In a tweet on Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez said, “Thank you to everyone contributing to this effort so far — this is a big deal. Help us build a war chest to support progressive red-to-blue seats, bold incumbents, and newcomers to Congress alike.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Jon Queally is senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

PHOTO: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chants with housing and environmental advocates before a news conference outside the U.S. Capitol on November 14, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

AOC And The Ongoing Movement for Progressive and Principled Politics In the Democratic Party

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

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)