SUMMER READING: The inside-outside game

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's roots and the future of the Democratic Party

At The Ink, we’ve talked a lot about the importance of the insider-outsider perspective. To understand one world, sometimes you need to have seen and known another.

It’s an idea we often associate with the foreign correspondents and immigrants we’ve talked to about this, but there are multiple worlds within the United States, too, and moving between them is no simpler.

For his 2023 book The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy, Anand talked to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the great political talents of our day, at length about her ability to negotiate between perspectives — and how that shaped her approach to politics and her efforts to reshape the Democratic Party.

At this moment, when there’s even more at stake for the country and the future of the Democratic Party — and the question as to whether its leadership is up to the task of fighting for its constituents — we invite you to revisit Anand’s piece and think about its lessons for this critical moment.

For our supporting subscribers, we present this chapter in installments this week. You’ll find the first part below; we’ll post the remainder over the coming days. And over the coming weeks, we’ll be returning to the archives to bring you more excerpts from Anand’s writing.

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The inside-outside game

On a temperate October day in 2019, on a stage in New York City’s Queensbridge Park, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to the microphone.

“What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeyyyy?” She wasn’t satisfied. “Let me ask you again: What’s up, New York Cit- eeeeeeeeeeyyyy?” She was wearing a dark power suit and one of the more fiery lipsticks in her arsenal that she sometimes referred to as war paint and that signaled to the colleagues who knew her best that she had big ambitions for the day. Facing Manhattan, with the borough of Queens, which she represented, at her back, and the Bronx, which she also represented and where she was born, to her right, she stood before a glistening sea of placards. Bernie. Bernie. Bernie.

“Last February,” she said, pointing across the East River, “I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan— at a taqueria. I worked shoulder to shoulder with undocumented workers, who often worked harder and hardest for the least amount of money. I was on my feet working twelve-hour days, with no structured breaks. I didn’t have health care. I wasn’t being paid a living wage. And I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things.”

Upon hearing these words, from out in the sea of placards, a man yelled, “I can relate!”

“Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country,” Ocasio-Cortez continued, “that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.” And then she delivered a sentence that I, having heard many political endorsements, will not soon forget. “It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders,” she said, stopping mid-phrase here to take in the crowd and the roars, “that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being.”

She went on to catalog the virtues of the senator from Vermont. But it was that line that hung in the air and that helped me to see Sanders’s achievement even more clearly. She wasn’t saying Bernie had persuaded her into an ideology— at least not at the beginning. She wasn’t saying he had enlisted her in the battle for a particular policy. He had persuaded her that she was human, fully human. “I used to, frankly, abuse myself mentally about how I’m nothing,” she once said of those days before her political awakening, with those gross men hitting on her at the Flats Fix taqueria and her $200- a- month health insurance that came with an awful $8,000 deductible and no stairway to a better life in sight. “I realized that I need to choose myself,” she had said, “because if I don’t, I’m just going to waste away. I’m just going to give up.” Sanders’s 2016 campaign, for which she ended up volunteering, had given her a new way of looking at herself. And now here was the disciple, a few years after she learned his name, standing on that stage as perhaps the most significant new arrival in Congress in American history, rescuing his cause.