Her father, Sergio, who had died when she was a sophomore at Boston University, had told her she was special, destined for greatness, capable through intelligence and grit of attaining her dreams, and her education had reinforced that notion. Ocasio-Cortez, like so many other people of color in her generation, had been seduced by the promise that higher education would open up opportunities.īut life out of college was a shock, as it was for millions of other millennials entering the postrecession job market.
“We can only accomplish great things together,” she said. At the very beginning, before she had been elected to anything, Ocasio-Cortez revealed her mission in what would become her mantra. If not for Ocasio-Cortez, there would have been no Squad, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus would not have evolved into a powerhouse. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, and women are entering Congress in historic numbers, though there are still surely not enough to be truly representative. Since she was elected with the help of former operatives in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, her greatest achievements have been a new generation’s continued interest in politics and the door she has left wide open behind her. It might serve at this moment to look away from the blinding star she has become and to the mechanics of her rise, for it’s there that the arguments for optimism lie. The transformation of Ocasio-Cortez from lost millennial into the incarnation of every American hope and fear has been dizzying. Whether the Democrats keep Congress or lose it in 2022, the result will be cast by the natterers as her influence or her fault. But as her public persona eclipses the waitress who launched that out-of-nowhere run against Crowley four years ago, she is in danger of becoming more prop than person. With more than 20 million followers on Twitter and Instagram combined, and the ability to raise $20 million mostly in small-dollar donations in a single campaign cycle, she has amassed so much power that she is a human incendiary device. Ocasio-Cortez was really regular: vulnerable, fun, someone you might actually know, like your friend’s roommate.Īs Americans turn their attention to this midterm year, Ocasio-Cortez has shown that her brand of politics can be formidable. Not, like Crowley and other career pols, ostentatiously folksy. Her leftist mission, her savantlike communication skills, and her moral ferocity propelled her rise, but what people loved about her, at the beginning, was that she was regular. She was cool, gorgeous, a digital polyglot - she streamed, she posted, she tweeted - but she also loved literature, photography, and fashion. With the skills of a social-media influencer, Ocasio-Cortez helped bring the millennials and their younger siblings into battle. Latina and working class, Ocasio-Cortez was demographically distinct from her new colleagues in Congress. As she put it in an interview then, “If a spaceship landed in your backyard, it’s like, ‘What the fuck is that? Is it going to hurt me?’ ” The Establishment didn’t know what to make of AOC.
But he had a résumé - the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago - that the Democratic-consultant class could easily recognize and safely admire. Brown-skinned, good looking, with his own misadventures in the postcollegiate wilderness, he challenged political convention even as he titillated its guardians. Barack Obama, previous holder of the “generational talent” title, may have resembled Ocasio-Cortez in some ways. It established AOC’s prodigious political gifts while showcasing a new sort of Democratic candidate and a new way of recruiting them. Her victory on June 26, 2018, over her mainstream Democratic opponent, Joe Crowley, was a marker delineating the moment after which American politics would never be the same. Months before AOC became the new face of the Democratic Party, she was working in a bar where she was expected to look “hot,” riding the 6 train, fretting about health insurance, and not really sure what she wanted to do with her life. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she said at the start of her journey to Washington. But rewind five years and it becomes clear just how unprecedented her rise has been. Frame a thing as expected and it can be discounted. Even her haters call her a “generational talent,” a disparagement candy-wrapped as a compliment, the implication being that the astonishing rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was somehow encoded in her DNA.