I’m not trying to pick on this tagger but this is exactly the thing I’m talking about: as AOC advances in her career, if she’s going after genuine political power (and it’s not going to be a bad thing if she does: that’s how you turn your platform into legislation,) she is going to compromise. She is going to support bills you don’t like and not support things you do like. Right now she’s one of four hundred representatives and is in a good place to grandstand, but if she ever gets into the Senate, or the cabinet, and even if she just spends the next 20 years in the house, she will do things you disagree with and have to make compromise votes you don’t think went far enough and have to give up on legislation with no path forward that you really wanted and support things that are necessary but make you feel icky.
After which, two paths are likely to follow: she will either be Canceled, because we were all rooting for her how dare she let us down like this, it just goes to show you can’t trust anyone in the system– regardless of whether there were practical reasons for her to do what she did– or her supporters will just go into mass denial. A few years ago I had very liberal friends of mine decided that gun control wasn’t really important after all…  as soon as they learned their favorite congressman didn’t support it. (Because I guess they considered “I disagree with him on this point but support him anyway because the things we do agree on far outweighs what we do not, compared to the other candidates running” as admitting defeat? I don’t know. They sure were on the gun control train again after the next mass shooting, though.)
And the reason the congressman didn’t support it wasn’t some deep moral failing: it was because he was from a state with a strong gun culture, and he wanted to keep getting elected. This is how representative democracy is supposed to work. And because of that track record, I didn’t support his higher ambitions– because while I didn’t always agree with his opponent, the gun thing tipped the scales into “agree more than I disagree, compared to the other candidate”– which is also how representative democracy is supposed to work. Right now, AOC and elected officials like her are in a position where they can support the things they support and still win, but that might not always bet he case.
I admire AOC. I respect AOC. I agree with a lot of AOC’s platform. But we’re setting ourselves up for a mess if we keep acting like AOC is a fun twitter celebrity who posts good clapbacks, and not, you know, a highly ambitious person juggling multiple agendas who we hope will continue to vote for things we like.
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