“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” – Matthew 25:40
Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters. When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters. – Adam Smith, "The Wealth of Nations"
“I don't think of myself as running from the left of Joe Crowley; I think of myself as running from the bottom.” That’s what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Salon's Charlie May in an April interview, months before her upset primary victory over a 10-term Democratic incumbent on June 26, the most prominent electoral victory so far by a new generation of activists associated with the Democratic Socialists of America.
She underscored that point early in her victory speech. “This is not an end; this is the beginning,” she said. “This is the beginning because the message that we send the world tonight is that it's not OK to put donors before your community.” She said that before she said anything else. Then she said, “The message that we sent tonight is that improved and expanded Medicare for all, health care for every single person in America, is what we deserve is a nation. What we proved tonight is sometimes in the deep midnight and darkness that it feels in our political environment, that there is still hope for this nation.”
But that hope, Ocasio-Cortez continued, was not something passive or abstract. It’s the product of collective action. “You have given this country proof that when you knock on your neighbor's door, when you come to them with love, when you let them know that, no matter your stance, that you are there for them, then we can make change,” she said. “What you have shown is that this nation is never beyond remedy, is never beyond hope, it is never too broken to fix. We will be here and we are going to rock the world in the next two years.”
She’s not alone. As Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times highlighted in a column called “The Millennial Socialists Are Coming,” three young female candidates backed by DSA had defeated establishment male candidates (two of them incumbents) in Pennsylvania legislative primaries the week before. Summer Lee, a black 30-year old, won 68 percent of the vote in a largely white district. They, too, are just the tip of the iceberg.
DSA’s membership has exploded since Bernie Sanders’ campaign — “from 7,000 members to more than 37,000” — and the group is not just doing politics but building community. The Pittsburgh chapter has more than 620 members, and does things that once upon a time political parties might have done:
On some days that public schools are closed, the D.S.A.’s socialist-feminist committee puts on all-day events with child care and free lunches. Like several other chapters, the Pittsburgh D.S.A. holds clinics where members change people’s burned-out car brake lights for free, helping them avoid unnecessary police run-ins while making inroads into the community. A local mechanic named Metal Mary helped train them.
All this is to say that Ocasio-Cortez reflects a much broader and deeper movement than the political establishment has yet to realize. Her story is not hers alone; it reflects her community and her generation — and more. She was born on Oct. 13, 1989, less than a month before the Berlin Wall fell. Perhaps that makes it easier for her to shrug off vestigial red-scare reactions to her victory as a “socialist” than it might be for some older folks. Or perhaps it’s her working-class Roman Catholic faith, whose social justice traditions stretch back through the Gospels to the Old Testament. Or perhaps it’s all that, plus her family, her community and her tenacious faith that — as Langston Hughes wrote, “America will be!”
The first thing she published after winning her primary was for the Jesuit publication America: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her Catholic faith and the urgency of a criminal justice reform.” She began on a personal level:
Christ came to me emblazoned on the upper arm of my beloved cousin Marc. The blue-black ink danced between the bullet scars and stretch marks that graced my cousin’s upper body. Atop this crown-of-thorns depiction was a tattooed banner with the phrase “Only God Can Judge Me.”
Her conclusion, on the other hand, was universal:
By nature, a society that forgives and rehabilitates its people is a society that forgives and transforms itself. That takes a radical kind of love, a secret of which is given in the Lord’s Prayer: Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And let us not forget the guiding principle of “the least among us” found in Matthew: that we are compelled to care for the hungry, thirsty, homeless, naked, sick and, yes — the imprisoned.
This arc from specific, concrete starting points to broad, open-ended conclusions, seems to reflect Ocasio-Cortez's outlook more generally, rooted in her own lived experience, interwoven with so many others. It stands noticeably apart from the normal world of politics, which immediately sought to swallow her, either fixed on her identification as a democratic socialist or some related tell-tale flaw — such as calling for the abolition of ICE, or somehow being a left-wing mirror of Trumpism.
At Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi decimated the “left-wing Trump” argument that’s also been aimed at another 2016 Sanders supporter, Ben Jealous, who is now the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Maryland.
Attempts to paint victories by people like Ocasio-Cortez and Jealous as being anything like the rise of Donald Trump are nuts, of course. A xenophobic, reactionary, science-denying white-power movement has nothing in common with a campaign to give people health care and clean energy. If anything, they're complete opposites. It's asinine.
The only thing the two movements have in common is that both are dangerous to the very tiny group of ineffectual politicians who've been running both parties for decades now.
As for the abolition of ICE, Ocasio-Cortez made a compelling case in a Vogue interview, published right before the primary vote. While it’s common for centrists to invoke “norm erosion” — and even to deploy that idea to scold the left as much as the right — she discussed it far more sensibly and coherently:
One of the biggest dangers of this administration is the erosion of norms, which is pretty typical for authoritarian regimes. This is one of the problems when it comes to immigration. My opponent [Rep. Joe Crowley] has literally called ICE “fascist”, yet he refuses to take the stance of abolishing it, which, to me, is morally incomprehensible. Words mean something, and the moment you have identified something as fascist, that with it carries a moral responsibility to abolish it.
That’s what I’m talking about when we say that norms have been eroded: that we literally have elected officials arguing to basically retain fascist agencies. And that’s on the left. When I talk about the abolishment of ICE, it is not a fringe position.
I don't think the Beltway Norm Police saw that coming. Ocasio-Cortez went to note that ICE “was established in 2003 in a suite of legislation that almost everybody recognizes as a mistake,” which included the Patriot Act, the Iraq War vote and AUMF [Authorization to Use Military Force]. In short, there’s been a lot of regret, but little or nothing done to address or rectify the mistake. In contrast, she said, “Our campaign has been really effective in refining and providing a very clear moral and economic voice for what must and should be done. And it’s very unapologetic.”
Two days after her primary win, the Atlantic tweeted out a story tease: "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her Democratic primary advocating for abolishing ICE. But are young leftists like her overestimating shifts in the beliefs of rank-and-file Democratic voters?"
Political scientist Chris Skovron responded, "Please interview me next time, sigh…. the answer to ‘are they misperceiving their voters as too liberal?’ is almost always never! Only 27% of the candidates we surveyed in 2016 overestimated support for a path to citizenship among their constituents.”
I've written about Skovron's work (along with David Broockman) before, as part of a 2015 story about the follies of centrism. He explained this idea further by email: “We survey state legislative candidates of both parties and find that they typically overestimate support for conservative policies in their districts. Republicans do so by wide margins. ... When politicians misperceive what their voters want, they are overestimating conservatism, not overestimating liberalism.”
While Skovron hasn't collected data about abolishing ICE, he said, “My sense is that opinion on it will be volatile for a bit until citizens learn more about what exactly it means, but I don’t see it as a foregone conclusion that it’s perceived as a radical position. It’s probably too early to tell. We do know that on all the issues we test, politicians consistently overestimate support for the conservative position.”
Admittedly there is still resistance to the label "socialism" and defining what it means — though perhaps not in the way you’d expect. In a next-day discussion with a couple of “never Trump” Republicans, MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle initially echoed their concerns conflating “socialism” and “left-wing Trumpism.” To be fair, she walked much of that back the next day, with a careful explanation of the differences between communism, socialism and democratic socialism — even pointing out that Social Security, Medicare and even Amtrak were ingrained American examples of democratic socialism — before letting Ocasio-Cortez speak for herself. Ruhle started by asking how she dealt with the label of socialism.
Ocasio-Cortez said it was “a perfectly legitimate concern,” but quickly pivoted. “I always go back to how we won this race. And we didn't win this race with labels," she said. "We ran this race with our goals and our issues in mind. ... At the end of the day most people want to make sure that everyone has health care, most people want to make sure that every child has access to equitable education, to college. And that's really what we’re talking about.”
Ever since Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril’s landmark 1967 book, “The Political Beliefs of Americans: A Study of Public Opinion,” political scientists have known that a plurality of Americans are ideologically conservative, in the sense of preferring a smaller, more limited government, while about two-thirds are "operationally liberal," meaning that they want more government spending on almost every specific issue one could bring up. Progressives can win arguments by focusing on meeting specific needs, not by arguing in the abstract. When they frame politics that way, even a majority of conservatives tend to agree.
In fact, Ocasio-Cortez did more than that, by drawing a different sort of frame around issues than the typical conservative frame of "Oh no, it's big government":
“He [Crowley] works for corporations, and I work for people. It's that simple, this is not even about dragging the party to the left,” she told Salon in April. “This is about making politics accountable. … I'm running with the accountability and with the spirit and with the support of people who actually live here, and those people are working-class. And the best things for working-class people are tuition-free college for their kids, health care for their families [and] ... feeling like they're protected from superstorms.”
She went on to say, “I look forward to the day that being largely bankrolled by lobbyists is a disqualifying characteristic for a politician. I look forward to the day that everyday people start asking, ‘Where do you get your money from?’"
Who you’re accountable to and where you get your money — those are perhaps the two key questions on which Ocasio-Cortez’s election turned, outspent as she was 10-to-1 by the fourth-ranking member of the House Democratic leadership. Those two questions go to the heart of her political philosophy, from which everything else flows.
"You can't serve two masters, just can't do it. You need to be funded by everyday people if you are going to represent everyday people. Period," she told Salon. Despite all the centrist handwringing over the word “socialist,” she insisted, “This is not left. This is bottom. This is middle. This is working-class. ... It's about the balance. There's no problem being supported by businesses, especially if those businesses are in your community." The problem arises, she continued, when politicians represent the interests of "multimillion-dollar or rather multibillion-dollar groups" who bankroll their campaigns and become their primary constituency.
Another way to put this is: Who sets the agenda? Whose interests comes first? Adam Smith is regularly referred to as the “father of capitalism,” but if you actually read his classic "Wealth of Nations," you could easily mistake him for a democratic socialist who might support an agenda like the one Ocasio-Cortez has laid out, including Medicare and higher education for all, a jobs guarantee, housing as a human right, and clean campaign finance.
In Book 1, Chapter 8 of his landmark work, Smith writes:
Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.
That’s not Karl Marx but a believer in market capitalism, suggesting how it can best be managed. Such was the case, at least for America’s white majority, during and after the New Deal Era, when “big labor” and “big government” served as sources of “countervailing power,” as John Kenneth Galbraith argued. Such has not been the case since the rise of neoliberalism and finance capitalism, which has severely eroded the power of American workers to make a decent living.
The deregulation of port trucking, an issue I've reported on for more than a dozen years, offers one small example of this. Illegally reclassifying truckers as “independent owner-operators” has resulted in one of the worst examples of wage theft ever seen, with an estimated $850 million in stolen wages per year in California alone, and $1.4 billion annually nationwide, according to a 2014 report.
Since then port trucker organizing has intensified, with 15 strikes of varying length at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, leading a handful of companies to abandon the illegal IOO model. They have now joined with truckers in seeking stronger measures to enforce the law universally, since law-breakers have a significant cost advantage.
Testimony from those companies underscores that it’s in everyone’s interest to protect workers' basic welfare. In a letter of support for a bill currently in the California legislature, Geoff Terrill, a leading executive at Toll Global Logistics (which has 40,000 employees in more than 50 countries), wrote, "Our success in delivering excellent service to our customers not only depends on how we treat our people but how we impact the communities we work in and the planet we inhabit. Therefore, we are committed to creating sustainable value in the movement of goods through highly ethical and socially responsible standards for managing our business."
Adam Smith would be heartened to hear that. It may not be socialism, but it’s a form of capitalism that’s fully compatible with democratic socialism, regulated “in favour of the workmen,” as Smith would put it, and therefore “just and equitable.”
In the Vogue interview mentioned earlier, Ocasio-Cortez explained that she joined DSA because she’s an organizer and an activist, and DSA was always there at demonstrations that mattered for her community. “When I saw these actions, it was like, Okay, this is clearly an extension of our own community. And the thing about DSA is that it’s a very large tent organization,” she said. As for what socialism means, she explained:
When we talk about the word socialism, I think what it really means is just democratic participation in our economic dignity, and our economic, social, and racial dignity. It is about direct representation and people actually having power and stake over their economic and social wellness, at the end of the day. To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live. It’s to say that no individual’s civil rights are to be violated. And it’s also to say that we need to really examine the historical inequities that have created much of the inequalities — both in terms of economics and social and racial justice — because they are intertwined. This idea of, like, race or class is a false choice. Even if you wanted to separate those two things, you can’t separate the two, they are intrinsically and inextricably tied. There is no other force, there is no other party, there is no other real ideology out there right now that is asserting the minimum elements necessary to lead a dignified American life.
In Europe, the entire 19th century was shaped by socialism as a force for expanding democracy, a history that was less influential and remains less recognized in America, where, not coincidentally, the right to vote is still not affirmatively recognized in our Constitution.
It may now be time for socialism to emerge in this country, in distinctively American form. If Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is leading the way, she's definitely not alone.
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