April 2021 Quickie.

In today’s Quickie, we’re taking a look at a developing phenomenon related to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In reality, it’s an age-old issue that all powerful women experience. The three separate things happening to AOC take the form of detractors from conservative, moderate and progressive circles. Related, because they all have one thing in common, which will become painfully clear.

This is the story of true love and Princess Buttercup, who…

Fuck. Wrong story. Hang on. Ah, yes.

This is a modern interpretation of Hercules, son of Zeus and his human mistress, who was destined to live a tortured life at the hands of Hera, Zeus’ wife, who loathed his very existence. Hercules, a demi-god living between two worlds, committed the sin of murdering his family, caused by Hera inflicting him with temporary madness. His punishment was to perform 12 labors, none more difficult and dangerous than facing Hera’s pet and protector of the underworld, the dreaded Lernaean Hydra. According to legend, the Hydra possessed one immortal head and several other toxic spewing heads that would cripple foes with its very breath before devouring them indiscriminately. Every time Hercules severed one of its heads, two would grow back in its place.

The legend of Hercules and the Lernaean Hydra continues today in the form of our modern day heroine, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, tortured daughter of the immortal expectations of our political system and human parents who bore her on this Earth. This is the story of AOC's battle against three heads of the American political system, the Lying Men Hydra.

The Conservative Hydra Head

In the audio essay, we played back-to-back clips from conservative commentators Mark Levin and Ben Shapiro, both of whom challenge AOC to appear on their shows and debate them.

Instead of listening to the actual clips, I’ve provided the subtext below. You’re welcome.

You are a thoughtless turd ruining America. I invite you to come on my show and debate me, you with your red lipstick and fiery Latina blood. I’ve watched that video of you dancing in college a thousand times, in slow motion, alone on my laptop when my wife is asleep. So I think you should put on your high heels, take that hair out of a bun and stomp on my dick on live television because this talk show host has been a very bad boy.

Of course, conservative white male pundits are having a field day calling out AOC. She’s the best thing that has happened to them since a Black guy won the presidency. In reality, she’s the perfect foil for them because it doesn’t take much to whip up antipathy among their supporters. She’s everything they’ve been taught to hate over the years. Strong, young, Brown, female, smart and powerful.

Plus, she represents an urban area in a hated liberal state and can speak the language of “dangerous immigrants” stolen across the border. Conservative white men with platforms easily shifted the narrative on her right out of the gate and started to pick away at her strongest characteristics.

They all employ the same tactic by the way. Hannity, Levin and Tucker—they begin by praising her for being strong and idealistic, then shamelessly mansplain why she’s so utterly dangerous.

The right eats this shit up, which is why they can run this play over and over and over again with great success. Move the Xs and Os around on the chalkboard for a slightly different formation and you get a different head of the same hydra.

The Careerist Democrat Hydra Head

As a New Yorker, I don’t need a whole bunch of clips for this one. I’m surrounded by well-meaning, but exhausting at times, corporate Democrats who really did pull the Biden lever because they thought it was safe. And it would get Professor Orange von Fucknugget out of the White House. And it was better than socialism. And it would be just like Obama. Blah, blah, blah.

As obvious as conservatives are in their playbook is as loathe as Democrats are to reform. I know it’s trite at this point to say that Democrats and Republicans are the same. Neither camp likes to hear that. But if you want to bring out the inner Republican in any Democrat, just ask them how they feel about AOC. The anger is real. “She’s stupid. She’s childish and unreasonable. Her inexperience is going to ruin the party.”

Because I’m of a certain age, I still use Facebook unironically. I keep in touch with people there, belong to a few groups, and genuinely enjoy the lighter side of it when asshats aren’t trying to cancel one another. So this isn’t scientific, but I can testify to the fact that the most vitriolic, spiteful and venomous posts from my Democrat friends throughout the presidential campaign weren’t directed at Trump.

The real animus in their souls was saved for Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. “She’s fucking this up for everyone!” “If Bernie wins the nomination, it’s her fault because we’ll have another four years of Trump.” “If Biden loses, it will be all AOCs fault.”

When Biden won, they didn’t paint it as a victory that included progressive ideals; it was in spite of AOC’s effort to tear the party down. But when Democrats didn’t increase the number of seats in the House, it was all her fault.

Of course, every progressive running for a House seat won. So the only seats that were lost were lost by moderate Democrats. But Democrats simply cannot connect those dots:

• Between 65%–70% of Americans support a universal healthcare model.

• Support for gun ownership background checks is nearly 90%.

• The majority of Americans support the legalization of weed, the Green New Deal, ending endless wars and that Climate Change is an existential threat and crisis.

• Only 6% of Americans believe that no changes are required in how we police.

So when corporate Democrats don’t run on these fucking issues and then lose, they blame AOC.

That makes perfect fucking sense.

The Progressive Hydra Head

Here’s where shit starts to get a little dicey. There’s a developing trend among progressives with platforms to criticize AOC and even Bernie. It’s pretty wild. A lot of this sentiment is being stirred up by commentators like Lee Camp and Jimmy Dore, who have a history of “calling out bullshit” when they see it. When they, along with journalists like Glenn Greenwald and Chris Hedges, started to pile on, that’s when I really took notice.

While I haven’t heard Chris Hedges explicitly call out AOC, he has allowed arguments about weakened progressivism to include her. Greenwald is just going for it. What Greenwald, Hedges, Dore and Camp all have in common is an unmitigated disdain for compromise of any kind. Camp and Dore are a different breed because they rely on pushing the boundaries.

In the case of Greenwald and Hedges, you’re talking about two journalists who are so unrelenting in their criticisms that they can’t function in a world outside of their own self-contained creation. Greenwald co-founded the Intercept and then publicly quit because he felt they were in the tank for Biden. Hedges was the star writer for Truthdig, another outlet funded by a wealthy person who pulled the plug when he and others attempted to unionize. So for Glenn, it’s Substack for now, and for Chris, it’s his books.

The reason I’m explaining where they might be coming from is that when you have a Hedges or a Greenwald start lobbing bombs at sacred cows in the progressive world, it’s important to take note. 

Hillary Clinton, Neera Tandin and Nancy Pelosi have now all publicly stood behind Ocasio-Cortez. Undoubtedly irksome to progressives. She was given a position on two important committees: Financial Services and Oversight and Government Reform. So I guess that makes her a sellout? She raised a fuck-ton of dough during the last election cycle—albeit 80% from small donations of under $200, so I guess that makes her a Washington player? She didn’t kill the entire Recovery Act to fight for the federal minimum wage increase. So I guess that makes her spineless? As Ashley Reese recently wrote in Jezebel:

“This is the only way that men on the left with platforms and influence seem to be able to talk about Ocasio-Cortez now.”

Of course, she’s one of 435 people in the whole of Congress and only in her second term. But why not place the entirety of the progressive agenda squarely and solely on her shoulders?

If only I could find a common theme here. If only I could bring this home somehow.

Mansplaining AOC

AOC is a working class, proud Latina woman representing a diverse city area. Taken individually, she represents what appears to be marginalized groups, but when you look at the whole of who she is, the sum of these disparate parts, she represents possibly the broadest coalition of voters in the United States—and those numbers are only growing, not shrinking.

AOC is all of us, and with that we’ve thrust upon her the expectations of Hercules indeed, with her labors being all of our labors.

We didn’t elect her as a monarch. Progressives have some bizarre expectation that upon election to the largest representative body in the country, one of 435 people from Alaska to the Everglades, that she, and only she, has the power to outnumber the other 434 and usher in swift change without ever bending. No compromise is acceptable. It’s as though the only acceptable act she could perform in a body built upon the very idea of compromise is self-immolation on the floor of Congress to make a point that no one will ever reach the impossible standard of the progressive left, of which I’m a proud fucking member.

Corporate Democrats would stand around her burning flesh, fanning the flames and pointing at her as if to say, “See, we told you she would flame out.” And while all this is going down, conservatives and Republicans would sit back and sip martinis poured by lobbyists and gloat in the fact that they knew all along they wouldn’t have to lift a finger to help liberals eat their young and shit them out.

AOC isn’t the culmination of the fight. She’s the beginning. The tip of the spear forged in the would-be revolution started by Bernie Sanders.

She is the first of the warriors on the front lines that represents hope in a two-party system. And if you think for a second that a third party in this country is an actual possibility...that the mechanisms of power would allow for such parties to acquire funding, gain stature on ballots, build a ground game and generate momentum in time to tackle the momentous issues of climate justice and everything else that fucking plagues our existence, you’re living a fucking fantasy and I have not just one bridge to sell you to nowheresville USA, where the corpse of Don Quixote awaits along with the hopes and dreams of Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.

And guess what? These are my heroes. I love and adore them. But loving their ideals and working toward achieving them through coalition building and compromise are not mutually exclusive. They’re intellectuals who exist outside of the political sphere for a reason.

AOC instead determined her path would be inside the system, and by doing so, she decidedly took the more difficult path, if the outcome you desire is true change. This is a complicated system that allows as much time and breathable air to AOC as it does a fuckbreath psychopath as Matt Gaetz or dimwitted carpmouth shitstick like Marjorie Taylor Greene.

There is no straight line from A to fucking B. Just a long, seemingly impossible road littered with terrifying foes with access to money—so much fucking money—and a willingness to literally ruin the lives and potential of anyone who stands in the way of the status quo. But that’s not good enough for progressives. Any movement toward progress terrifies the careerist millionaires that are today’s congressional Democrats. And, of course, it’s anathema to those on the right who profess admiration for a time in our nation when Black people were enslaved, women had no rights and poor people were told their circumstances were either preordained or of their own doing.

Tearing down a bright light like AOC is bad business. We should be putting her on our shoulders. No one, and I mean no one, who makes a difference in this world escapes unscathed by the dreaded demon of compromise.

Let’s look across the spectrum and beyond the so-called Squad at other members of Congress. Take Ro Khanna, California congressman who is nearly identically aligned with AOC. Or Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who defends the rights of Palestinians, supports the Green New Deal, advocates for Medicare for all and got his 15 minutes of fame for supporting end of life counseling, which provoked Sarah Palin to make it a campaign issue that Democrats were trying to create death panels for old people. Where is the vitriol over them?

Hmmmmm. Let me think.

What do Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges and Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and seemingly every other fucking AOC critic on the right and left have in common? God. I just can’t put my finger on…Oh, that’s right. White cocks. They all have white cocks. I have a white cock, but for some reason I’m able to see clearly that AOC was elected as one of 435 U.S. Representatives, not some fucking immortal sent here to liberate the world from darkness with the wave of a fucking wand.

As for establishment Democrats, AOC’s original sin was murdering one of their own. A popular establishment insider figure, Joe Crowley, who was by all means well-liked, affable and played the inside game, was unceremoniously booted in AOC’s surprise first election. “Poor Joe,” they said. “A good man,” they said. “Solid Democrat,” they said. I’m sure he was all of these things. He was also guilty of playing so much inside baseball that he forgot to put in the time in his district and was blindsided by someone who remembered that it’s about the people you represent, not the power you wield to maintain the status quo.

And so what became of poor old loyal Joe, the solid blue Democrat? He did what any good former politician would do. He became a lobbyist. You see, to corporate Democrats, that’s a perfectly reasonable, respectable and logical thing to do. But AOC? Taking up the progressive mantle and fighting for her constituents? Bad girl. Bad, bad girl.

The power of AOC to weather withering criticism from the left, middle and right is in itself a superpower. And there are plenty who still support her, as I’m sure many Unf*ckers do. But in our haste to make her the inflection point for all the ills we perceive at every point along the spectrum, my fear is we will chip away at her power and aura until she inevitably raises the “fuck this shit” flag.

AOC looks like the future. She sounds like the future. She acts with the future in mind in all she says and does. And if we make perfect, or whatever version of perfect we all maintain as individuals, the enemy of greatness, we risk losing one of the brightest lights in our sick and corrosive political system.

And so, just as Hercules found that when he severed one of the heads of the Lernaean Hydra, two more would appear in its place, AOC’s detractors seemingly double whenever she fights for something she believes in. Thankfully, Hercules discovered the secret to defeating the Hydra was to cauterize the neck so the two heads couldn’t grow back.

The lesson here is not to silence criticism, that’s dangerous, and not at all what I’m suggesting. It’s to guard against armchair white male privilege that sets irrational expectations and shines a light so brightly on a rising star that it extinguishes its promise. Myriad labors await AOC, but if she dies in the swamp from the venom of the hydra, the loss won’t only belong to her. It will belong to us all.

Here endeth the lesson.