In an ominous sign for the future integrity of the Democratic Party, if the GOP’s evolutionary trajectory is any indication, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s jilted supporters have taken to denouncing their erstwhile ally — branding her with one odious epithet: “establishment.”
From her embittered supporters in the nosebleeds who pilloried AOC as “an enemy to the working class people of America” to the New York Times, which appeared to welcome her capitulation to “her own party’s political establishment,” Ocasio-Cortez is learning that preserving ideological purity means sacrificing political relevance. The congresswoman has declined to court a reputation as a perpetual backbencher, and her core supporters may never forgive her.
The event that has so disturbed the balance of the fragile progressive ecosystem was Ocasio-Cortez’s decision to finally contribute a portion of donations she raises from Democratic donors to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In the second year of her third term in Congress, AOC abandoned her boycott of the DCCC, transferring a meager $260,000 to its coffers in advance of the 2024 general election cycle.
“If Democrats do not retake the House in November, I do not have confidence that a Republican majority would certify the results of a presidential election,” AOC said in defense of her decision. “The threat of fascism is very real and very serious.” The statement marks an about-face for the New York congresswoman. “DCCC made clear that they will blacklist any org that helps progressive candidates like me,” she said of her party’s congressional campaign committee in early 2020. “I can choose not to fund that kind of exclusion.” Ocasio-Cortez had lived up to those scruples until now.
Although her stated rationale for abandoning this position is the threat posed by the GOP’s growing electoral appeal in the Empire State, her surrender comes amid declining tolerance for the progressive left’s ambivalence toward the Democratic Party’s prospects as a whole. “Several ranking committee members and some other prominent Dems don’t contribute to the campaign arm either,” Punchbowl News reporter Heather Caygle revealed. “Some members want to crack down on this. Especially for committee leaders.”
This isn’t the first time AOC has betrayed her true believers by doing nothing more remarkable than behaving like a representative of one of America’s two major political parties. The condemnations raining down on AOC are reminiscent of the attacks she endured in the summer of last year for the sin of — gasp! — endorsing her party’s incumbent president for reelection.
“It was AOC’s last kiss-off to the radicals who had supported her, voted for her, donated to her campaign, and made her unusually famous in American politics, the beneficiary of a wholly unique cult of personality that is now starting to come undone,” read one memorable chastisement via New York Magazine’s Freddie deBoer. “The party Establishment barely attempts to hide its contempt for its leftmost flank,” he added — a fact that renders AOC’s transition “from radical outsider to Establishment liberal” that much more painful.” DeBoer was not alone in his indictment of the congresswoman.
As the GOP’s transformation suggests, AOC’s supposed genuflection before her party’s sclerotic “establishment” is just a step toward becoming the “establishment” herself — and wielding all the power that accompanies that designation. There will always be radicals for whom any accommodation with existing power structures is tantamount to surrender, but caving to the demands of power is a necessary concession to her own political ambitions.