The very idea of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez using her power has the men in Washington running scared.
On Tuesday, Politico posted a provocative, anonymously sourced piececlaiming that New York congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might be planning, in concert with Justice Democrats, to recruit a Democratic primary challenger to her fellow New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries in 2020, in part in response to his undercutting of California congresswoman and progressive stalwart Barbara Lee in a November House leadership election. Ocasio-Cortez later dismissed the piece, calling it “birdcage lining.”
However inaccurate the facts in Politico’s reporting may have been, the piece was useful and telling — the expression of a building fever dream about Ocasio-Cortez, and the fears of what she might be capable of, should she continue to flash her unprecedented willingness to make bold demands and push her party where she thinks it should go. Ocasio-Cortez’s eagerness to flex her muscles, without demurring or waiting for her turn — without even waiting to be sworn in — is undergirding nightmarish fears about her as an agent of chaos and destruction. The Politico story itself was illustrated with an image of the Bronx native appearing to literally rub her hands together while grinning like Dr. Evil.
Reading the piece, I couldn’t help but think of Naomi Alderman’s brain-bending novel, The Power, published last year. It depicts a world in which women develop the power to inflict physical pain, and to kill, via electricity that emanates from their fingers. In Alderman’s fictional universe, this power is exhibited first by young women who in turn awaken it in their elders; as they are learning the possibilities and limits of their new power, the women giddily experiment with it, sending sparks and currents, determining how much of it they have, whether they can control it, and how they might best deploy it.
The book is extraordinary because it forces readers to think about all the ways — within our social, sexual, professional, and political relationships — in which men’s power over women is so much taken for granted that we don’t question it, don’t even notice it. But when women acquire an equivalent force, chaos and fear reign. The Power read to many, and was regularly reviewed as, a piece of chilling dystopian fiction. But as Alderman herself has said, “It’s only a dystopia for the men … nothing happens to a man in this book that is not happening right now to a woman somewhere in the world.”
What the reaction to Ocasio-Cortez makes undeniable is that if and when women gain enough power to start behaving, in a political sphere, as men have for so long, they will be viewed with fright and discomfort.
