THE RISE OF AOC: The crucible
How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez came to her very particular theory of persuasion and power. Part two of my portrait of her rise
This is part two of my in-depth portrait of the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (Find the first installment, and the series introduction, here.) Today’s chapter recounts what she calls her “crucible” — the period that gave rise to her highly particular theory of how power functions.
Special thanks to my publisher, Alfred Knopf, for permission to unlock this for Ink readers. This report first appeared in my book The Persuaders.
Catch up on part one:
The rise of AOC: Part 2: The crucible
“Make me proud,” her father had said. And for a time after his death, the obvious fulfillment of Sergio’s wish was for Alexandria to succeed in college. But with college behind her, the crisis that had resulted from Sergio’s death rose to the fore. Blanca was sinking in debt. Her daughter returned to the Bronx to help even as she got on her own feet. In the abridged and oft-repeated narrative of Ocasio-Cortez’s life, what happened next is some waitressing followed by the parlaying of waitressing into a seat in Congress. What this narrative skips over is Ocasio-Cortez’s early career in the Bronx, a period in which she encountered and trained herself in some of the ideas and methods that would gird her subsequent life in politics.
Straight out of college, she took a job with an organization called the National Hispanic Institute, run by a charismatic founder named Ernesto Nieto who would leave a profound imprint on her. She had first become connected to the organization in high school, attending a conference that drew students from across the country. “That’s when I was like, ‘Holy shit. I’m Latina. Like, Oh, wow, there’s actual other people like me,’” she told me. “It wasn’t until I met other people from across the country that were like me and I was like, ‘Oh, there are other people like me.’ That changed my narrative in my life.” She kept coming back to the organization, volunteering with the NHI during college at its high schoolers’ conventions, then taking a full-time job with the NHI after Boston University.
The NHI was animated by a particular philosophy that Nieto has called the “third reality,” a path between what he saw as the road of protesting the white establishment and the road of seeking to engage with it at the risk of assimilation. “Should we surrender to the omnipresence of mainstream culture and merely attempt to fit in, whatever the costs to our identity as community and culture? Should we continue the fight for social justice and reform? Or is there a third choice, a third reality?” Nieto writes in his book titled Third Reality. That third reality, in Nieto’s view, broke both from the cultural erasure of the melting pot and from the endless waiting of fighting the Anglo power establishment. Instead, it focused on helping the community see itself in new ways. “A third reality was needed, one that would lead our young to shape a different Latino community. They no longer needed to spend time reacting to issues outside their control. Efforts had to concentrate on reshaping and recreating a different self-identity and belief, one that enthused youth about their future in the Latino community.” But Nieto wasn’t interested in identity for its own sake. Rather, he spoke of how the development and sharing of self-knowledge could aid the pursuit of system change—how, as Sanders would later grapple with, the personal could aid the structural.
In keeping with Nieto’s vision, Ocasio-Cortez was given a grant by the NHI to develop projects in the Bronx, focused on helping Latinos tell new stories about themselves and cultivate a new self-image. An early project was starting a small publishing company called Brook Avenue Press, which had a goal of making children’s books that reflected the demographics and issues of the surrounding community and helped change the dominant perception of the Bronx. Another project involved creating a new curriculum to teach young Latinos in school.
Suddenly she was a teacher of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in the Bronx. “Bronx middle schoolers? Trump would cry,” she told me. “I think middle-school teachers in general probably have some of the hardest jobs in the country. Kids are hormonal; they’re distracted by changes in their bodies, by emotional developments, by these ideas of manhood and adulthood and what have you. They’re learning so much socially that trying to teach them a damn thing in those years of prepubescence is extremely difficult."
She taught the kids about storytelling, and community storytelling in particular. She had them build out characters and make stories about them. The sixth graders wrote stories for the third graders, which Ocasio-Cortez then parsed with them to tease out their worldview. “I tried to use that as a tool to say, ‘Now, what values do you think are important? And how are you going to tell a story the same way that you were told stories to share these values with your younger brother, younger sister, et cetera?’”
It was trying work. “I had no idea what I was doing. There were days where I had zero control of the classroom,” she said. On certain days, the children were into it. On other days, Beyoncé had just delivered her first child or some other conversation fodder was dominant.
She was in the schools one or two times a week. Much of the rest of the time she spent in a co-working space called the Sunshine Bronx Business Incubator. The New York Daily News described it as having been founded to redress “the lack of future Facebooks and Googles in the struggling borough.” Dozens of start-ups paid a few hundred dollars a month each for space in the eleven-thousand-square-foot incubator, including, the Daily News reported, a composting company, a marketing outfit, and Ocasio-Cortez’s publishing house. At age twenty-two, not quite yet the democratic socialist firebrand, Ocasio-Cortez was quoted in the newspaper playing booster: “You see a huge return on your investment here. People pay $500 an hour for consulting that we get for free by the water cooler.”
Working in the incubator, Ocasio-Cortez, like many in her precariously employed generation, developed a side hustle. She had always been a strong writer in college and had even nursed the idea of becoming a professional writer one day, and now she began to sell her ghostwriting services. One day a corporate CEO who also worked in the incubator came to her in a panic. He was delivering a commencement address the next day. The only catch was he had failed to write his speech. His dyslexia was a further complication.
“What do I do?” he asked Ocasio-Cortez.
She tried to calm him down: “Okay, just sit down and tell me about yourself.” She began to interview him, pull out the things he wanted to say but had been too cowed to write, and she drafted a speech. Afterward, he told her he had gotten a standing ovation.
Ocasio-Cortez began to do more of it, interrogating people to find out what they had to say and then doing the part they struggled to do as well as she did: framing it for others to hear. Many clients were entrepreneurs in the Bronx who were struggling to relay a narrative that changed perceptions of the borough in order to get support. “I started really just working with all of these other entrepreneurs and telling their story in a way that was compelling to attract attention, or investment, or what have you,” Ocasio-Cortez told me.
It was this early phase of her career that made Ocasio-Cortez’s future turn less of a lark than it might have seemed, and left her with lessons about how to change minds in pursuit of greater changes. As she worked on projects for the National Hispanic Institute, she continued to enjoy a close friendship and mentoring relationship with Ernesto Nieto. What he taught her sheds light on what she would become and the worlds she would straddle, no longer as an uprooted kid hoping to fit in, but as a leader specially gifted at combining the sharing of a raw and real self with an unblinking focus on the bigger picture.
If we live in a time that has seemed to many to force a choice between a politics of accommodation and a politics of confrontation, Ernesto Nieto was determined to break that trade-off, or prove that it wasn’t one.
Before I spoke to Nieto myself, Ocasio-Cortez told me about him, and it was interesting to hear how she processed the lessons of his long career astride the worlds of activism, public service, and civil society. “He was a radical in the ’60s,” she told me. “He graduated during the LBJ Great Society programs. He was hired by the Johnson administration, part of this corps of young people, to desegregate the South. His job was to go into the belly of the beast, into KKK territory, into white supremacist territory, as this six-foot-tall, brown-skinned, dark Mexican Chicano man, and tell them that they have to integrate. He ran the gamut in his life. He started off chaining himself to bridges to not allow segregationist vehicles and such to pass forward. But then he also was at this very bizarre point in the administration where he was literally winning these very hateful guys over. He operated in so many different spaces.”
His work had been to strike the same forbidding balance that she later would attempt—between being intransigent about what is right, where things must go, what progress is, and, on the other hand, calling people gently in to your visions: to give no quarter while assuming enough of the humanity of those you want to win over that you’re willing to try to change them.
I asked Ocasio-Cortez what had most struck her about Nieto’s approach. “He spoke directly to people’s humanity. It starts with actual mutual respect. I think that that lack of respect is usually the first place where things fall apart,” she said. “That’s one thing that Ernesto did. He never belittled anybody; he never made anyone feel stupid, even if you were just so off base. He was very Socratic in his approach, and he never, ever, ever expected one conversation to change someone’s mind.
“But what he did,” Ocasio-Cortez went on, “was that every conversation left you with a powerful experience that made you want to have an experience with him again. If a given interaction can make you think, can make you feel good, can make you feel heard or seen, even if you are at polar opposite ends of things, it encourages the person listening to you to come back and have another interaction with you. If that is a person that you are trying to persuade, that’s a very important tableau to set.”
When I reached out to Nieto, he was eager to share his stories about the institute’s most famous alumna. He remembered sitting on the sidelines of an NHI conference one day, where high school students were debating and college students, of whom Ocasio-Cortez was one, were supervising. At the time, Nieto was working on a new book called Third Reality Revealed. “All of a sudden,” he told me, “this voice comes from behind and says, ‘What do you have there?’”
He told Ocasio-Cortez about the book in progress. On the spot, she offered to edit it. “She said it with such assurance that it caused me to laugh, because she was a college freshman,” Nieto said. “Long story short, she ended up being the editor.”
That editing project immersed Ocasio-Cortez in Nieto’s philosophy, the “third reality” between protest and assimilation. In Nieto’s view, those who wanted to change systems too often went straight to challenging them, skipping over the work of self-discovery, self-interrogation, and self-assertion. They didn’t dwell long enough in their own assumptions and experiences to work effectively to change others’ minds. They didn’t understand the constraints they placed on themselves even before the world constrained them. They didn’t dig in to how their beliefs were a product of their upbringing, which left them ill-equipped to make sense of the people they would eventually try to persuade as themselves products of their upbringings. So a great deal of Nieto’s focus was on getting young Hispanics on a path of investigating themselves and what they believed for the ultimate goal of making them more gifted persuaders.
The Nieto school of thought was that the self shouldn’t be an afterthought in the pursuit of system change. You had to know yourself to change others. You had to be interested in their inner lives. You had to cultivate warmth even with those you disagree with, without letting that warmth lull you into milquetoast compromise.
In Ocasio-Cortez, Nieto had a sponge of a student. What began with book editing blossomed into a years-long mentoring relationship that included phone calls and long drives and trips to Texas, where Nieto remembers Ocasio-Cortez getting bitten by the ferocious local ants and ending up in the emergency room. As Nieto shared his memories of these travels and talks, it was striking that what he remembered Ocasio-Cortez for cut against what has become the dominant portrait of her as the embodiment of a more confrontational, provocative politics. That perception didn’t ring true to Nieto. “She doesn’t condemn and judge; she understands,” he said. “She’s open to inclusion. Alex does not eliminate people.”
Among the lessons of Nieto’s that Ocasio-Cortez has publicly brought up is one he calls the golden gate of retreat—that notion of giving people who might change their mind a face-saving way out. All too often now, a latecomer to an idea is dismissed for their tardiness rather than celebrated for coming around, which was the whole object of trying to persuade them. Nieto told me he had gotten the idea from one of his own mentors, Ben McDonald, a former mayor of Corpus Christi, Texas, who later ran the Texas Department of Community Affairs, where Nieto served as his assistant. McDonald would go from city to city, having difficult confrontations with citizens. One day he told Nieto, “Whenever you confront somebody and you win, don’t walk away from the table. Always give them the golden gate of retreat.”
The point was not that you let the other side advance. The word “retreat” was key. That was the intransigent part. You needed your vision of progress to prevail over theirs. What was up for grabs was how it would go down. Retreat itself was not negotiable, but there could be ways of their retreating that bred resentment and made the conflict live on forever and other ways of retreating that made those who had lost or had changed their mind feel considered and seen, feel that they still had their dignity intact, which allowed them to let go of having to be right and having to win.
“That, to me, is at the core of change,” Nieto told me. “If you push people up against a wall where they’re defending whatever they defend, then you’ve lost the battle to begin with. They just shut you out and you shut them out and you move on.” Many years later, when his mentee, then Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, noticed a Republican senator, Mitt Romney, declare that “Black Lives Matter,” she broke from many on her own side who pounced on him for offering too little, too late. “Not long ago, ‘Black Lives Matter’ was *also* a rallying cry for justice that politicians worried polled too poorly, was too ‘divisive’ & required ‘too much explanation,’” she tweeted. “Now Mitt Romney is saying it. Progress is a process. It’s normal to work through discomfort along the way.” She was giving him the golden gate of retreat.
On the night Ocasio-Cortez won her primary in 2018, and thus all but secured the congressional seat, she phoned Nieto in the middle of the night. She told him the news and began to cry.
“How can I tell you how proud I am of what you’ve done and what you’ve accomplished?” he said to her. “I want you to know that all these lessons, all this time we spent together, was behind it all,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I want you and NHI to feel that you won, too.”
It was around this time of working on the NHI projects and ghostwriting on the side that the story of Ocasio-Cortez’s early career intersected with the better-known narrative. With her mother still underwater in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, she was now on the verge of losing their home. “So I walked into a restaurant in downtown Manhattan and I was just like, ‘You guys have any openings?’ That’s the story.”
She worked endless shifts at Flats Fix, making cocktails and enduring the boorishness (and worse) of men who feel that ordering a drink buys fractional ownership of a waitress. “People touch you, they tell you things,” she told a reporter of her time at the restaurant. Sometimes she made $200 a day or so; sometimes, a third of that. She thickened her skin through it all, and serving in the trenches with co-workers was a radicalizing experience politically. Long before she railed against politicians who sounded the right notes but failed to act against historic, growing inequity, she and her colleagues were living it, cramped by low pay, precarity, and debt. America was in the late years of Barack Obama’s presidency. The Affordable Care Act was the signature domestic achievement of the administration. It was making health care available for millions who hadn’t had access before. Or so the dominant storyline went. Ocasio-Cortez once told a journalist about asking several of her co-workers at Flats Fix whether any of them had health insurance. “Not a single person that I worked with was covered,” she said. She did have coverage, but with that high deductible that accustomed her to taking a fistful of tips to the doctor’s office to pay the bill in cash, according to Vanity Fair.
It was around then that the public narrative of AOC was born. Early in the 2016 Democratic primary, Ocasio-Cortez was said to have been torn between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. But as the campaign went on, something in her clicked for Sanders. She began to connect what Sanders was saying, had forever been saying, to the facts of her own life—the debt she still hadn’t paid off, those fistfuls of cash at the doctor’s, the long days on her feet, the sense she sometimes had of letting her late father down. That was when she went to work as an organizer on his behalf. It was her first real foray into electoral organizing. She helped find the campaign a physical base in the Bronx. She rubbed shoulders with activists from various groups in the Sanders coalition.
Sanders, of course, lost that 2016 primary. And the Democratic Party he had tried in vain to change lost that election to a faux populist. And in the aftermath of that cataclysmic defeat, party officials and activists and organizers began a period of reflection and autopsy, and a thousand PowerPoint decks were born. Why did the Democrats lose? What was the answer to rising populism? How do you win over white working-class voters, Black voters, suburban women? Is the answer to Trumpism to resist populism or to embrace it?
One of the more insightful of these PowerPoints was titled “Race, Class, and Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” developed by Waleed Shahid and other progressive activists. It laid out, in a hundred picture-studded slides, a strategy of persuasion. What the left needed to do to win, in its telling, was to merge the rival persuasive approaches of two of the party’s most effective recent movements: Bernie Sanders’s and Barack Obama’s—to combine, as Shahid put it to me, “Bernie’s message of ‘them’ with Obama’s message of ‘us,’” the Sanders campaign’s critique of an unjust system with the Obama campaign’s rousing call for unity and hope.
In the PowerPoint’s telling, each of these approaches was powerful but, on its own, inadequate. Obama’s approach had won two presidential elections on behalf of a Black man whose middle name was Hussein. “My parents have been citizens since the early ’90s,” Shahid told me, “and the first person they ever voted for was Barack Obama, in part because he told a story of multiracial America that they felt included in.” The weakness of the Obama approach, though, was that it shied away from a structural critique of the powerful forces stoking the divisions that Obama wanted Americans to transcend. Obama’s politics, in Shahid’s view, risked blaming Americans for their own divisions rather than the media owners and funders of gerrymandering and shadowy right-wing Astroturfers who were really responsible. “Someone is causing these divisions,” Shahid said. “Someone is causing these problems, and that is the billionaire class.” The politics of an expansive “us” was powerful and beautiful and resonant, but without a politics of “them” added to its analysis, it risked advocating for what Shahid likes to call a “rainbow oligarchy,” an America that looks more inclusive, that celebrates diversity, but is fundamentally still controlled and exploited by the few.
That was where Sanders came in. “Bernie made a structural critique naming clear enemies in American politics and clear adversaries who were holding the country back from its whole potential,” Shahid told me. In the PowerPoint, this politics of “them” is defined by a generative calling out: calling out the Democratic Party leadership for being too cozy with Wall Street and neglecting working people, and calling out the divide-and-conquer politics that define the modern Republican Party. If Obama had tried to bring Americans together around a common humanity and a new pluralist patriotism—“There is not a Black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America. There’s the United States of America”—Sanders had rallied voters around a common enemy, the powerful billionaire and corporate class preying on their dignity. But Sanders had his own limitations. Unlike Obama, he hadn’t won. And he hadn’t assembled a sufficiently broad coalition, with a particular weakness among Black voters and older voters.
Was there a way to put these political projects together? the PowerPoint’s authors wondered. To combine Barack’s call in with Bernie’s call out? To rally voters around what they share with others, tapping into those warm and fuzzy sentiments that put Obama in the White House, while rallying those voters to “punch up” at the ruling class? Could you combine we-are-all-in-this-together inspiration with righteous anger? The authors of the slide deck believed you could. And they described this hybrid approach they were advocating as “inclusionary populism.” This approach would punch up “by pointing at the economic power at the very top,” while lacerating the corporate-friendly party establishment from within the tent, while at the same time articulating “a We the People that includes all of us, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, country of origin.” The slides’ authors envisioned a new generation of Democrats who could be mad as hell and inspiring as hell, who could whip up your anger at that powerful “them” while making you feel part of the ennobling project of building a more capacious “us.” It could add to Obama’s uplifting politics a structural calling out of the powerful, and it could add to Sanders’s principled politics the missing elements of personal story, the painting of the future one seeks, and the tailoring of messages to particular groups rather than merely universalizing.
After the stinging defeat of 2016, the people behind this PowerPoint not only theorized this possibility but worked to bring their vision to life. Some of them helped create an organization called Brand New Congress, which set as its mission to “elect a new type of Democratic majority.” With their talk of inclusionary populism, these strategists weren’t merely suggesting a new message. They wanted new messengers. As they began to recruit potential candidates, they stayed away from anyone who had held elective office before. They favored candidates who not only championed the working class but actually belonged to it. They were looking for younger activist voices who could combine the arts of calling in and calling out, of punching up and summoning a vast and colorful all, who were human enough to relate to voters and move individual minds but who never lost sight of using that connection to challenge structures, who could make you feel what Obama had made you feel about doing what Sanders wanted to do.
Late in 2016, Brand New Congress put out a casting call for potential congressional candidates. They received twelve thousand applications. One of them was from someone named Gabriel Ocasio-Cortez, who nominated his sister, Alexandria.
Around that time, she had been invited by a political organizer she knew to drive out west and participate in protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, not far from the Standing Rock reservation of the Sioux tribe, which straddles North and South Dakota. She and a friend took a road trip in an aging Subaru, passing through Flint, Michigan, on the way, one focal point of activist anger in recent years because of the lead in its water system. The cigarette lighter in the car was past its prime, so Ocasio-Cortez and her friend had to pull over at rest areas along the way to recharge their phones. They had conversations with locals that caused Ocasio-Cortez to see more commonalities with her own life than she might have assumed. As they crossed red states that had voted for Trump and blue states that had gone for Hillary Clinton, Ocasio-Cortez felt a strong sense that the country “wasn’t understanding itself,” as she put it to a Kansas-based journalist named Sarah Smarsh. “We didn’t understand each other, and we didn’t understand ourselves as a collective nation.” The “us” that Brand New Congress wanted to marshal against the all-powerful “them” didn’t feel very much like an “us.” But could it?
At Standing Rock, living in camps with fellow activists, both out-of-towners and members of the local indigenous community, Ocasio-Cortez had what she calls a “profoundly spiritual experience.” She told an interviewer Standing Rock became a “tipping point” in her career, causing her to realize that you didn’t have to have money or connections to make a political dent. Those things helped. But here, she reflected later, were people “putting their whole lives and everything that they had on the line for the protection of their community.” Could she do the same?
Just as she was leaving Standing Rock, her phone rang. It was the Brand New Congress people. They had noticed her file in a haystack of twelve thousand. They wanted to know if she was interested in exploring a run for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District, covering parts of Queens and the Bronx. The timing was good. She was interested. That call led to a few more calls and in-person meetings. Brand New Congress was trying to figure out if she fit their bill of the calling-out, calling-in progressive insurgent. Later, Saikat Chakrabarti, one of the leaders of the organization, summed up his impression of her after these encounters: “Holy cow.”
Until not long ago, the polite custom among Democrats was to avoid primary challenges to seated incumbents. By all means, lobby them to be better, but to primary them was too much. This politeness kept incumbents in office for decades, even when they failed to deliver for their voters but were rewarded by the special interests they served.
Brand New Congress’s theory of change jettisoned politeness. In the 2018 election cycle, it would put forward Ocasio-Cortez and dozens of other primary challengers to encrusted incumbents who it felt no longer, or never had, represented constituents and the working class in particular. Its strategy was dismantling the entrenched system. Each of its candidates was running to take down a supposed colleague of the same party who wasn’t doing what they should have been doing.
Ocasio-Cortez’s target was a powerful fifty-six-year-old political machine boss named Joe Crowley. He was a white man representing a district that is more than two-thirds voters of color, and by all accounts he didn’t even live in his own district. But over two decades in Washington, he had amassed the all-important capital of seniority to become the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. He was a kingmaker in New York City politics, too. In other words, he was a terrible guy to primary. “Anybody who knew anything about politics in New York City told me not to do this,” Ocasio-Cortez later put it, summarizing their advice: “(a) You’re wasting your time; (b) it’s pointless; and (c) you’ll never have a career in New York City politics ever again if you do this.”
But Ocasio-Cortez did it anyway. And her opening salvo was a video ad that went viral and reflected the persuasive methodology of that PowerPoint presentation. “This race is about people versus money,” she said in the spot. “We’ve got people; they’ve got money.” There it was, Bernie’s “them” and Barack’s “us” forged together. She told a story about a city that was rigged against working people and an out-of-touch lawmaker who had slept on the job. She derided Crowley as an outsider, saying that a congressman who “doesn’t send his kids to our schools, doesn’t drink our water or breathe our air cannot possibly represent us.” But to her structural critique was added human outreach of the kind Sanders might have been loath to attempt. Here she is taking off her flats on a subway platform and switching to heels. Here she is talking about waiting tables. Here she is doing her makeup in a humble apartment. She was offering both relatability (I’m like you) and authenticity (I’m me, as is). There was something of Nieto’s mentorship in this approach: system change from the self out. After watching the spot, you might have been the type of person who wanted to go where Ocasio-Cortez was headed because of her plan for a jobs guarantee and tuition-free public college. But you might instead have been the kind of person who chafed at those ideas and would still be cheering for her because of how she made you feel.
From the beginning, Ocasio-Cortez engaged in this multimodal form of persuasion that brought together traits lesser talents might have struggled to blend: being provocative and capable of seizing attention while meeting people where they are and offering vulnerability and humanity.
It was a scrappy campaign that had people knocking on doors and taking no voter in the district for granted, focusing less on conversion than on activation—getting people who had not voted before, or had voted rarely, to do so. “My act of persuasion, my persuasion mission, was not ‘Vote for me instead of voting for Crowley,’ ” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “My mission of persuasion was, ‘You should vote in a primary election for the first time in your life, and here’s why.’ My whole message was tailored to persuade people to show up, that this one could actually matter.
“My strategy and my opening argument,” she continued, “was, ‘You matter, and we have taught ourselves, and we have accepted, in so many ways, conscious and subconscious, that we don’t matter, our lives don’t matter, our input doesn’t matter, our opinion doesn’t matter, and so we’re just going to try to survive.’ My argument was, ‘We can’t live like this anymore, we deserve better, and you matter. And because you matter, you not turning out decides this election, and you turning out also decides this election in a different direction, but you’re making a choice. I want you to know that you matter to me.’”
Ocasio-Cortez’s argument for the agency of her potential constituents wasn’t necessarily intuitive in one of the poorest districts in America; it wasn’t the message life sent; and in spite of that and because of that, the pitch resonated.
Even as her prominence began to grow, she shared of herself, of her own human struggles to know that she mattered, as if to tell others that they did. She spoke of her own fears and doubts about running and what made her persist in spite of them. “I’m glad I didn’t listen to myself when things got really difficult and no one was paying attention and I was like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ” she told a reporter during the campaign. “I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair.”
The press marveled at the biographies of the next-generation operatives who ran her campaign—a “campaign manager who moonlights as an energy healer,” a “photographer who sings in a heavy metal band,” a “Muslim progressive activist who runs a cooking blog,” a former actor “who signs emails with his preferred pronouns (‘he/him’),” a press secretary “who operated a pair of food trucks in Tennessee, processing his own steers, until he heard the gospel of Bernie.” But at the heart of the operation was Ocasio-Cortez herself, who combined the humble, bottom-up approach of chasing every vote and out-knocking the competition with a once-in-a-generation talent for pushing the boundaries of conversation, raising the profile of marginalized subjects, and forcing a response to the provocation of her ideas.
Part of the provocation was what she proposed, and part of it was how she proposed it. She championed a fearlessly left agenda, with a robust and largely unprecedented role for the state in American life, and what amounted to a transformation of the basic structure of the society. She didn’t just want to reform Immigration and Customs Enforcement like most of her Democratic colleagues; she wanted to abolish it. She didn’t just want college to be affordable; she wanted it to be free. She didn’t just want to expand renewable energy; she wanted the entire country to be running on it before she turned fifty. She didn’t just want the government to nurture well-paying jobs; she wanted it to guarantee a job for all. She didn’t want to give people tax credits to afford health insurance more easily; she wanted health insurance obsolete. Setting aside the rightness of any particular policy, these ideas reflected a political understanding, which many of Ocasio-Cortez’s colleagues lacked, of the importance of simplicity in policy communication and, in the age of social media and of a culture of confrontation, the power of the maximalist stance.
From the beginning, she deployed this method of first staking out a provocative position, a fearless goal, the raw, undiluted version of a thing. This separated her from those more sober-minded politicians who negotiated against themselves in their own minds and began with the half measure. But then Ocasio-Cortez also distinguished herself from those of a more activist bent by her willingness to follow the provocation with a meet-them-where-they-are approach of dealing with people’s skepticism, explaining the sensibleness (not the radicalness) of the idea in question, bringing them along. She understood, more than most in politics, the importance of that punch of a first sentence. But she always had the second sentence ready, and the third and fourth and fifth.
You can watch her engage in this persuasive work in this interview with the NPR Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep:
INSKEEP: So one of the things that you called for is something that some Democrats have called for—abolishing ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now, I understand ICE has been fiercely criticized for its role in separating parents and children in recent days, but what do you mean by abolishing customs enforcement and immigration?
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Yeah, no, it’s an excellent question. One of the things that we talk about in that call is essentially that ICE was just established in 2003 in the same suite of legislation as the Patriot Act, the AUMF [Authorization for Use of Military Force], the Iraq War. And so what we’re basically saying is that the structure of ICE, in the similar manner as the structure of the Patriot Act, is kind of built on the scaffolding of questionable civil liberties infringement and abuse. And so what we’re really talking about is reimagining immigration to be humane and in a way that is transparent and accountable.
INSKEEP: Although, I mean, you’re still going to have immigration officers, right? You’re still going to have customs officers, if you got your way. I mean, there’s going to be border enforcement. It’d just be under a different name.
OCASIO-CORTEZ: Well, I think it’s a different name and a different approach, you know? Before ICE, we had Immigration and Naturalization Services, but it wasn’t until about 1999 that we chose to criminalize immigration at all. And then once ICE was established, we really kind of militarized that enforcement to a degree that was previously unseen in the United States.
So she started with her position of abolition, and then met the journalist where he was, explaining that ICE was built on a bad foundation, that she really wanted immigration to be reimagined, that, yes, there would be immigration authorities, just with a different name and approach. And she also seemed here to show a long-game patience that was hard for some activists. The Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ways had probably not been especially to her liking, either. And she had broader critiques of the criminalized approach to social problems in general. But she had the strategy and the discipline not to attempt it all in a day. You could tell the NPR journalist that, yes, ICE needs to be abolished and that’s only the beginning, because we need to abolish the carceral system in general, and so on. And she believed in many of those ideas. But she picked off a smaller target in that moment: take the idea of abolishing ICE and explain it to the mainstream as rebuilding from the ground up an institution set on the wrong foundation. People with a range of views might be convinced of the idea that orienting an entire immigration system toward preventing terrorism was outdated and wrong. Ocasio-Cortez’s was a politics of critique, but often, to rather powerful effect, of patient critique.
In addition to this method of provocation followed by gentle teaching, Ocasio-Cortez showed a talent for recognizing and shaping and making the most of politically opportune moments. She understood that provocation, commanding attention, didn’t just come from putting ideas out there; it often required those ideas to be attached to a moment that people were trying to make meaning out of. Sometimes you sought to imbue a preexisting moment with the ideas you sought to advance. And sometimes you had to manufacture that moment yourself in order to have a vessel for your ideas. So, for example, in addition to calling for the abolition of ICE, Ocasio-Cortez spent the last weekend of her campaign—traditionally a time a candidate might want to stay close to constituents and local media—flying to Texas to confront ICE agents at a migrant internment camp. Sanders, her hero, might have staked out the policy position, but he might have seen the trip as a stunt. Ocasio-Cortez, with an intuitive grasp of where people’s minds are and what it takes to make them focus, had no such qualms.
What she seemed to understand natively was that small moments could be made into big moments, but that this was not a natural, automatic process. The meaning of a political moment was not necessarily self-evident. There might be a vacuum at first, and this she could fill. She could offer interpretation of the moment, help people see it a certain way, provide the frame, gin up the outrage, and then a moment could gain its own momentum. Days before the primary, Representative Crowley ducked a debate with Ocasio-Cortez, which was bad enough. To make things worse, he sent a former member of the New York City Council, Annabel Palma, to debate on his behalf. Palma is a Latina, and Crowley’s cynicism (surely masked as a gesture of respect) was not hard to miss. And some in politics, trained in an earlier generation’s norms, might have left the issue to make its own case, to speak for itself. Not Ocasio-Cortez, with her feel for what would pull people in and make them focus on a campaign that was desperate to be seen, noticed, and covered.
“In a bizarre twist, Rep. Crowley sent a woman with slight resemblance to me as his official surrogate to last night’s debate,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter. Boom. That would do it. By interpreting the event in that trenchant way, she gave news outlets permission to report the idea of a racial stand-in in a way they otherwise might have tiptoed around, which in turn fueled social media outrage and dunking, which bought precious attentional currency to market what Ocasio-Cortez really wanted to sell: those plans to remake the society.
This way of reaching people and changing minds required Ocasio-Cortez to be many selves and to juggle a wide array of approaches.Her multimodal method owed a debt to Nieto and his lessons of confronting white racists, wooing them, and helping them save face, all at once. In some moments, Ocasio-Cortez would be provoking with an attention-seizing idea. Then she would be walking a skeptic through the utter prudence of that idea. Then she would be cutting a social media video sharing her own fears and process. Then she would be in living rooms having coffee parties and humbly listening to constituents, to show and not simply tell them that they mattered. Then she would be in the car, typing out a hopefully viral sideswipe of a guy for his earlier sideswipe of her. Then she would give a speech trying to inspire young nonvoters and invite them into the political process despite their sense of it being too negative and vitriolic. At one moment, she was calling in; the next, she was starting shit and calling out. She pushed. Then she pulled others in.
Early on, when she remained invisible to much of the press, The Nation commented on her ability to straddle these modes of being in a way that felt different from the progressives they were used to, from Howard Dean to Ralph Nader to Bernie Sanders: “full of righteous fury and matching political conviction, yet clear and controlled and unafraid of the camera. There was no ‘Dean scream,’ Naderite arrogance, or Bernie- style gruffness, and none of the coltish uncertainty you’d expect from a 28-year-old newcomer, either.” Ocasio-Cortez could combine the stridency of the activist with the media skills of an insider; she could do anger without seeming angry; she could advocate radical ideas without seeming out of her mind. She had, of course, grown up straddling worlds—the Bronx and Yorktown, Spanish and English, being among her people and sticking out as the brown girl whose house would never be the sleepover house. In her political style, she was comfortable with not needing to be one thing for all occasions. She operated, or so it seemed, with a faith that with her multimodal approach her elongated NPR explications wouldn’t undermine her pithy sloganeering and that her sloganeering wouldn’t undermine her NPR explications. There was a time and place and medium for everything. You could be many yous. You could shift shapes and thus be more, not less, authentic. It was a distinctly modern approach.
On June 26, 2018, it carried Ocasio-Cortez to victory. “Representative Joseph Crowley of New York, once seen as a possible successor to Nancy Pelosi as Democratic leader of the House, suffered a shocking primary defeat on Tuesday, the most significant loss for a Democratic incumbent in more than a decade, and one that will reverberate across the party and the country,” Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Martin wrote in The New York Times, reflecting the magnitude with which Ocasio-Cortez’s rise would thenceforth be treated by media. Because the Fourteenth District was safe Democratic territory, the primary victory was pretty much as good as a general-election one, and Ocasio-Cortez was now on track to be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress.
I look forward to your writing. You are unlike others. Your passion always shines through.