The Bronx congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a Democrat and a socialist—has become more controversial among conservatives than Nancy Pelosi. How did this happen so quickly?
Ocasio-Cortez is a freshman representative with meager clout among her senior colleagues. She’s spent the past few weeks championing the revival and empowerment of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. Pelosi has relaunched the climate-crisis committee—its predecessor was originally Pelosi’s idea—but she’s preemptively stripped the reformed committee of certain conditions that Ocasio-Cortez has advocated for, such as subpoena authority and prohibitions against campaign contributions from fossil fuel industries for the committee’s members. It’s unclear whether Pelosi will even assign Ocasio-Cortez to serve on the committee, yet political observers have come to associate it more so with Ocasio-Cortez than Pelosi. That’s how powerful the Bronx representative’s regard is among left-wing activists, if not among the House Democratic leadership. In a scant few months, Ocasio-Cortez has come to embody the activist impulse to steer Democratic politics to the left.
The emerging contrast between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez nearly resembles the old contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, or rather, the rift that divided the two 2016 presidential candidates’ respective bases. The Democratic Party is split between old-school, center-left incrementalism and a more youthful, unconditional left-wing politics. It’s a contrast that largely defined the previous presidential election and will inevitably define the 2020 primary season too. Pelosi may be popularly defined as a left-wing elitist, but the House speaker will spend the next two years moderating the whims of a skittish caucus that is already struggling to outmaneuver President Donald Trump to end the latest federal government shutdown. Ocasio-Cortez isn’t really concerned with any of that. She has spent her first couple weeks in Congress leading conversations about committee assignments, federal spending restraints, and climate-change legislation—all long-term concerns that will determine the nature and future of a Democratic majority in the House.
Still, Ocasio-Cortez’s provocations in Democratic circles are nothing compared to the new representative’s regard among conservatives, who obsess over Ocasio-Cortez in weekly fits of derision and disgust. To conservatives, Ocasio-Cortez is a lightweight and a nitwit. Ever since she won her nomination in June, conservative pundits have covered her every word and personal quality as faux pas. They’ve mocked her thoughts about Israel and Palestine. They’ve mocked her work outfits. They’ve mocked her dancing. The conservatives don’t fear Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda any more or less than they fear the insurgent left in general. But they do seem to fear Ocasio-Cortez’s heedless, charismatic style. For conservatives, Ocasio-Cortez represents a new and unfortunate sort of opponent—a Democratic politician who teases right-wing media without fear. The Republicans mocked her dancing, and so, of course, she danced some more.
Indeed, Ocasio-Cortez antagonizes right-wing media more frequently and more capably than any other elected Democrat of her generation. The representative’s Twitter feed is a series of cheeky altercations with Fox News. Ocasio-Cortez fact-checks coverage from centrist sources, including Politico, The Washington Post, and CNN, which, she insists, routinely mischaracterize her statements. She makes a lot of statements, many of them styled as provocations.
On Sunday, Ocasio-Cortez sat with Anderson Cooper for a 60 Minutes interview about Trump and the Democratic agenda in Congress. When Cooper asked the representative whether she thought Donald Trump was a racist, she responded, “Yeah, no question,” adopting the angry clarity which senior Democratic figureheads, including Pelosi, have occasionally cautioned their colleagues against. Cooper expresses skepticism about federal funding for a universal health care system, and Ocasio-Cortez answers him with contempt. “No one asks how we’re going to pay for the Space Force,” the congresswoman says. “No one asked how we paid for a $2 trillion tax cut. We only ask how we pay for it on issues of housing, health care, and education. How do we pay for it? With the same exact mechanisms that we pay for military increases, for the Space Force—for all of these ambitious policies.” Strangely, Ocasio-Cortez makes contempt sound optimistic.
The Ocasio-Cortez moment has made for a great shift in congressional posturing. Under Bush, Obama, and Trump, conservatives spent more than a decade vilifying Pelosi as the extremist, left-wing boogeywoman of Democratic politics; a California liberal whose supposed communism was even more dangerous because of her supposed elitism. The Republicans inflated the Pelosi caricature while taking their own half of the partisan spectrum to new, surreal right-wing extremes, embodied by telegenic shit-kickers such as Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, who irritated the Republican establishment while nonetheless serving its core partisan interests. Pelosi has grinned and she’s beared it. Ocasio-Cortez now bills herself as the representative who strikes back.
Following the 2018 midterm elections, Trump repeatedly encouraged Congressional Democrats to once again elect Nancy Pelosi as the new Speaker of the House. It seemed to be a self-serving joke at first—Trump and the Republicans would love nothing more than to spend the next presidential election season drawing a contrast between themselves and the most notorious House speaker. But the contrast has grown only starker as Ocasio-Cortez throws Pelosi into relief. She is an enemy they cannot yet comprehend.
