Mark Provost, August 11th 2026:
If you're a leftist, there's a temptation to speed past AOC's interview on NBC's 'This Week', in which she made comments regarding abolishing police and prisons. I'm well aware that our democracy, mental wellbeing, and political hope feel more precarious than ever, and thus leftists have every incentive to ignore the larger meaning of AOC's interview and its place in presidential history. I ask you not to indulge the temptation...
AOC's interview on Meet the Press is arguably the most significant of her career —one because it unambiguously signals she's running for POTUS in 2028, and because it brings into sharp focus a disturbing pattern of the dynamics that shape US presidential politics.
To review, AOC was asked pointedly by ABC news anchor Jonathan Karl, "Progressive candidates have talked about abolishing prisons and abolishing police, those are not positions held by the majority of Americans. How do you get around that?"
Karl then cued up AOC by reminding viewers that Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate and DSA member Francesca Hong recently stepped back from those positions, which AOC confirmed with an ear-to-ear smile, "Look there's a New York City Council member who says, "Woke1.0 was crazy", eliciting AOC and Karl to share a hearty laugh.
Most people will treat AOC's remarks as unworthy of scrutiny, but they mark a highly specific rite of passage every presidential candidate for the past 55 years has taken to win, namely throwing Black people under the bus.
For Republican candidates, this takes the form of overt bigotry like attacking a conjured trope or Black boogeyman. For Democratic candidates, this ritual takes the form of a public disavowal of a Black celebrity, Black friend— or, most often —Black liberation activists. Let's review the sorry record of how candidates actually win the White House.
To become President, Nixon denounced desegregation, bussing, and stoked white voters' paranoid fantasies. He used anti-Black backlash among white voters following the Civil Rights Act to drive a semi truck through the Democratic Party's coalition of dusty whites.
We are still living in the world Nixon built, the tail end of a 60-year white backlash. Notably, Nixon alum served in one capacity or another as top campaign and administration figures from Reagan, both Bushes, and were instrumental operatives in the rise of FOX News and Donald Trump. Despite Nixon causing two dire energy crises and the worst economy since the Great Depression, Nixon harnessed the racial antipathy of whites using coded dog whistles to win 49 states in his re-election campaign.
To become President, Ronald Reagan found a useful enemy in the conjured trope of 'welfare queens', a term he debuted at the 1976 RNC convention and served as the base building phase of his victorious election campaign four years later. Reagan built his brand around the boogeyman of 'welfare queens driving Cadillacs' — and like Nixon, despite causing the worst recession since the Great Depression —was reelected by 49 out of 50 states. To the extent he had control of basic faculties, Reagan closed his second term championing AIDS deaths as a trophy to white voters that the Black and gay disco queers got what they deserve.
To become President, George HW Bush relied on a relentless ad campaign featuring Willie Horton, a Black ex-con who was released in Dukakis' Massachusetts and murdered someone while on release. The only thing political scientists remember from George HW's unremarkable 1988 campaign is one comically racist ad which looked like a closed caption black and white camera feed inside of a prison, showing a menacing Black man walking through a revolving door, which for white viewers might as well have been their front door. No surprise, George HW Bush handily won.
For Democratic candidates who seek the top office, the nature of denouncing Black people is not as outwardly bigoted, but the effort undertaken to parlay effective dog whistles and the repeated pattern suggest the ritual serves the same ends.
For Bill Clinton, that meant using his moment at the DNC convention in 1992 to define the future of the modern Democratic Party as pro-corporate, pro-Pentagon, pro mass incarceration, and neoliberal. Bill Clinton sought to sever the Democratic Party from Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, a movement which comprised the fount of the party's energized working-class and diverse base, and instead hitch the party's future to donors and lobbyists at Citibank.
To sever the party's Rainbow past from its corporate future, Bill Clinton publicly denounced the hip hop artist Sister Souljah for her commentary in a magazine where she talked about systemic racism and how politicians in the hood are obsessed with intra-Black violence but stay silent about the levers of institutional violence which spare no one.
Instead of trying to articulate Sister Souljah's valid concerns about police violence and poverty in his own words, Clinton compared her to KKK leader David Duke. The incident would be memorialized as Clinton's 'Sister Souljah moment' and defined the course of his presidency and his party's political strategy with respect to fusing its white and Black voting base.
Bill Clinton's candid and calculated remarks point to a bleaker truth: the Black people he relied on to get elected and provided energy to his early campaign were the first people he kicked in the teeth. And the damage goes beyond words to inform state policy: President Clinton, with both parties full support in Congress, oversaw the most sweeping incarceration of Black people in our nation's history.
Skip forward a few years, and Obama found himself in the same pickle: the white corporate media pointedly asked the young candidate his thoughts on his friend and mentor Reverend Wright, who'd recently given a sermon where he recited a long list of real grievances committed by the US government against Black people for centuries and shouted, "Not God Bless America, God damn America, God damn America!!"
Without hesitation, Barack Obama publicly rebuked his friend's statement and severed their relationship. They never spoke again and today Obama's buddies are Epstein island charter members and other parasitic billionaires. Barack Obama's race or background did not spare him from participating in this absurd ritual.
America's first Black presidency gifted its successor a wide open path to certain victory. Trump, whose family real estate business relied on redlining Black communities and who became a household name by calling for the deaths of innocent Black children, spent Obama's entire second term surfacing a baseless conspiracy theory that Obama wasn't American at all, but born in Kenya and therefore illegitimate —as a president, as an American, and as a human.
Trump's Birther conspiracy may seem like just another stupid right-wing meme lacking a shred of supporting evidence, but it served to build his base and attract an army of loyalists, voters, and eventually powerful donors, never shy to stoke a race war to keep their system of extraction and accumulation running smoothly. Like a powerful bug lantern, the MAGA movement was built, tweet by hateful tweet, by anti-Black animosity then powered with a capital infusion from America's 100 wealthiest predators.
The Trump era is little more than a vessel of white backlash, except this time with a white electorate broadened to seduce, if not include, roughly 40% of Asian voters and 40% of Latino voters. People racist enough to throw their Black neighbors in a gas chamber but too stupid to realize they'll be tossed in next.
Trump's singular brand is hatred of Black people, which informs the larger structure of Republican dominance: burning books, banning DEI, disenfranchising Black voters, and stealing Black property, wealth, wages, and even Black slang, most prominently the violent disfigurement of the concept of woke.
Trump's election began with Elon Musk throwing a Nazi salute and celebrated the nation's 250th Fourth of July celebration with a mouth-breathing MAGA screaming Michelle Obama is an ape. When Trump handed the keys to the federal government to Elon's cronies at DOGE, the first thing they did was fire 350,000 Black federal government employees and cut relief aid to African countries. The most senior business advisors of the Trump administration are tech billionaire stowaways from apartheid South Africa who sought to parlay their decaying system of de jure segregation here.
Trump's storied past in business, media, and politics leave no doubt about his commitment to Black suffering. When Trump's anti-Black animus didn't appear sufficiently grotesque in the final stretch of 2024, his running-mate claimed his Black constituents in Ohio eat dogs and cats. The vast majority of white American voters, and not a small portion of non-whites, absolutely loved vile stories of pet-eating Black people, and 80 million distinct American voters co-signed Trump's blank check, foreclosing any chance of a decent future for this country.
AOC's womanhood does not grant her exemption from this absurdly racist ritual of throwing Black people under the bus, nor does her Latino identity, nor her progressive bona fides.
AOC's interview on 'This Week' was her Sister Souljah moment. It was her opportunity to reintroduce herself to an audience of predominantly white geriatric primary voters and campaign donors, none of whom incidentally have the ability to navigate or historicize the meaning of 'Woke1.0' 4chan slop.
For many Black activists, they understand keenly that Woke with a random number affixed is a shorthand code to disparage the BlackLivesMatter and modern Abolitionist movement, one which saw too many freedom fighters perish.
Today, on the anniversary of Mike Brown's murder and during Black August, named in commemoration of political prisoners who organized a strike in San Quentin, we need to be speak humbly and honor those who came before us.
And we especially need to respect Black justice activists who all too often don't get the same opportunity as white leftists to build fulfilling careers through their activism. Their fate is often much bleaker than that. Today we should be honoring the revolutionaries and freedom fighters in Ferguson, Bmore, Chicago, Philly, Memphis, and Oakland who died to get us closer to the Promised Land, instead of pissing on their graves in hopes that it earns a scrap of white validation.
AOC's remarks are neither clumsy nor accidental. That's the point of a dog whistle: you need to affirm to white voters that you are aligned with their distorted moral vision, while leaving just enough doubt about your intention that your supporters can gaslight allies and critics. What's perfectly clear is AOC's remarks formally severed her ties with many racial justice activists whose lifelong commitment and sacrifice she accused of being consumed in the 'excesses of woke'.
As you can imagine, AOC's remarks haven't landed well with some Black liberation activists and scholars who have spent not one decade, not several decades, but a century of scholarship and struggle to inform and inspire their political perspective. The DefundthePolice movement is no less studied or serious than the original Abolitionist movement, so to hear their position mischaracterized and cavalierly dismissed by a leading figure on the left has created the rupture it was intended to provoke.
AOC chose this very public venue to distance herself from any talk of abolishing police and prisons, and was so evasive in her response she refused to even modestly articulate that police terror is a real issue — and worse, she didn't even try to point out that after twelve years of the largest social movement in American history, which resulted in a wide array of reforms like body cams in countless cities, the crisis of police violence hasn't improved one iota.
In fact, it's worse than ever: more Black and brown people are dying at the hands of police today than six years ago when George Floyd was murdered, or 11 years ago when Sandra Bland was killed in police detention or 27 years ago when Amadou Diallo was gunned down by 43 police bullets in the Bronx. That AOC's dismissal of police reform landed on the anniversary of Mike Brown's lynching has elicited widespread feelings of fury among many Black activists who are hip to how white leftists move.
AOC's interview has set off a range of reactions and responses, with various camps jostling to reiterate their prior allegiances and biases. The biggest mistake is to view AOC's remarks in isolation.
As but one example, a few weeks ago, the founder of Jacobin Magazine sat down for a lengthy interview with the NYTimes resident bigot Ross Douthat and insisted, 'America is no longer a racist country'.
Sunkara, who also serves as the president of The Nation, cited the history of the US abolishing slavery as evidence the US is no longer racist, which is bizarrely ahistorical considering the US was the last rich country and the second last nation in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery [sic], and the only one which had to blow itself up to end the slavers' republic.
Nor did Sunkara talk about the legacy of Jim Crow or Nixon's Southern Strategy or the larger white backlash that led directly to Donald Trump.
The leading luminaries of the white left do not believe white supremacy is a pressing problem. They expend zero percent of their time or influence talking about the centrality of anti-Blackness to US capitalism, nor does their agenda seek to address or improve lives of Black people. The contemporary left steers a fairly close line to early Eugene V Debs, who insisted, "the class struggle is colorless" and that "the socialist party has nothing special to offer the negro". The nation's leading leftist publication donning the name of Black liberationists while engaging in open anti-Black sentiment qualifies as an atrocity, but we will leave examining that decrepit corpse for a future exhumation.
The pattern which emerges is as clear as it is dismaying: every candidate who has become US President has sought to win the validation of white voters by weaponizing anti-Blackness as their chief appeal. AOC, in her brief remarks, has signaled she will in all likelihood run for president, and will probably win. For many Black activists and leaders, many of whom have been on the streets fighting for a better country since AOC was a child, any hope they may have had about their place in an AOC presidency has been laid to rest.
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