Being for the Benefit of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez!
AOC Derangement Syndrome is just as delusional and pathetic as thinking she's the next Che, and it's a sign of pervasive delusions among American leftists
This article has been updated since its initial publication. All updates are located at the end of the original text – past the line break, prior to the footnotes.
At some point in the early afternoon on the 23rd day of the ninth month of the year of our Lord 2021, a vote was cast by the United States House representative from the fourteenth congressional district of the Empire State. After this vote, she cried, for reasons beyond immediate comprehension. Naturally, the spectacle made headline news for everyone finishing up lunch across the country.
With a smirk-inducing 420 votes, the lower house of the American federal government – thanks to the efforts of the moderate wing of the chamber’s dominant party – passed a bill granting an extra $1 billion to the Israeli government for the Iron Dome, the missile defense system lauded for deterring rocket fire from Hamas and widely seen as a terrifying symbol of the tiny nation’s U.S.-aided military stranglehold on the Palestinian people. Only nine people affirmatively voted against the measure (including lone Republican Thomas Massie) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was not among them.
Why? Because she voted Present in lieu of a Yea or a Nay. In effect, she abstained while not outright missing the vote (Not Present), the fourth option a congressperson can exercise on any chamber-wide vote. Many a tweeter were not pleased with this.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about the reaction to AOC’s vote is the flagrant hypocrisy of it all. The bill literally passed with 97% of the House behind it. In fact, based on AOC’s spot in the congressional roll call, the bill had already amassed a veto-proof majority by the time she provided one of the two Present votes on the matter. Whether she said Nay or Present, or skipped the affair altogether, it would have passed with resounding support, making her act trivial. And obsessing over trivialities by politicians is probably the stupidest thing the leftie Twitterati can do because engaging in trivialities is baked into the job and y’all already know that!
Much Ado About Nothing
From 35,000 feet, it’s somewhat clear why AOC voted Present: she’s afraid of getting swept up in the ungodly massacre awaiting the Democratic Party next November and, despite breaking 70% in both her inaugural and sophomore runs (as well as her first primary as an incumbent), the current and expected future political climate introduces a fair bit of uncertainty that may make politics sufficiently distracting. Israel-Palestine, for a variety of reasons, is a touchy issue that AOC has been repeatedly flamed for as an unequivocal Israel skeptic, and a small move to lay off the heat for a brief moment doesn’t change that.
Besides, why should anyone care? We live in a world of consequences and the consequence of AOC’s Present vote is that she didn’t contribute to the otherwise successful funding of the Iron Dome. End of story! Full stop. You straight up have to lie to yourself or prioritize social media engagement over objective reality to claim otherwise, even if you think her concern with 2022 is extreme.
“But think about the message it sends! And what about solidarity? If she really cared, she should have voted Nay!”
Okay, so she votes Nay. Will that stop Palestinian playgrounds from being riddled with shrapnel when a supermajority of the federal government considers that acceptable? Will that end the system of apartheid that creates a sinister two-state solution of enfranchised Israelis and a permanent Palestinian underclass? Who gains anything by AOC, or the Squad, or Bernie, or any other leftist darling, blindly giving into the takesmiths? The woman is an elected politician who has to run for re-election every other year and, believe it or not, you have to be accepted by your peers and major voices in your constituency in order to function at all. Which begs the question: what is AOC’s function?
“Gotta Do What I Gotta Do”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known by her initials AOC, is an American politician, activist and economist. She has served as the U.S. Representative for New York's 14th congressional district since 2019, as a member of the Democratic Party. The district includes the eastern part of the Bronx, portions of north-central Queens, and Rikers Island in New York City.
Ocasio-Cortez drew national recognition when she won the Democratic Party's primary election for New York's 14th congressional district on June 26, 2018. She defeated Democratic Caucus Chair Joe Crowley, a 10-term incumbent, in what was widely seen as the biggest upset victory in the 2018 midterm election primaries. She was reelected in the 2020 election, defeating John Cummings.
Ocasio-Cortez was born into a Catholic family in the New York City borough of the Bronx on October 13, 1989, the daughter of Blanca Ocasio-Cortez (née Cortez) and Sergio Ocasio-Roman. She has a younger brother named Gabriel. Her father was born in the Bronx to a Puerto Rican family and became an architect; her mother was born in Puerto Rico. Ocasio-Cortez lived with her family in an apartment in the Bronx neighborhood of Parkchester until she was five, when the family moved to a house in suburban Yorktown Heights.
Congratulations, you just read three of the first five paragraphs of AOC’s Wikipedia page. This is who AOC, the literal person, is. She was born on a day to people and lived a life among more people, then she ran for Congress and the rest is history.
But AOC, like every public figure, is more than the person she literally is. She is also the person each one of the tens of millions of people who know of her think she is. She also possesses a general public image, with serves as the source material of the myriad personalized versions of her roaming each of our precious little monkey brains. And that general image is very important because that’s what makes her matter.
The woman is a self-identified democratic socialist and the first of two DSA members elected to the House. She’s also a Millennial, an attribute frequently evidenced by her speech patterns and diction. Additionally, she is a well-received, charming, intelligent, and handsome individual, making her a very attractive political icon for millions of Americans – including, very likely, you, dear Reader, if not now then at least in the past.
AOC’s target audience is not the multitudes of Marxist-Leninists on TikTok or gun girls furiously spewing their ids in 280-character chunks or syndicalist academics. Her zone of concern is roughly 700,000 New Yorkers, her colleagues in the federal government, and the broad American public. She doesn’t have the luxury of exclusively catering to her ideological equivalents and those very equivalents utterly lack the structure, number, and cultural sway necessary to matter anyway.
“Isn’t it her job to bring our concerns to forefront?”
Yes, it is! And guess what your concern should be? Expanding the f**king Left! After all, your concern should be taking all the 18-25’s and working class folk and disgruntled partisans whose interest in something outside the bourgeois paradigm1 is piqued by an AOC (or a Bernie, or even a Mike Gravel, or – hell! – even the wilder parts of Howard Dean) and incorporating them into the movement. AOC is a figurehead. She herself is the symbol, not any given limp-dick vote fueling the discourse du jour, and your job is the take the impetus provided by her, or her progressive peers, or her equivalents in other public fora2, and transform it into the motion necessary for change. Celebrities harvest, it’s your job to process the catch. If you don’t want to do that, then you simply want to lose miserably and bitch about everyone else while you dig your own grave.
I cannot stress this enough: your Alexandrias Ocasio-Cortez and Bernies Sanders, your Hasans Piker and Briahnas Joy-Gray, your Sams Seder and Chapo Trap Houses, your True Anons, your Antifadas, your Vaushes3, your Roberts Reich – man, even your Johns Oliver and Russells Brand – they all operate as “sorters in the rye”, tossing the unformed yet eager masses over the edge toward you, the 1917er’s and the dogmatists and the MLMs and the Good Leftists™, who are responsible for the sacred task of shaping them into proper members of the movement, lest they get too far and stray deep into the realm of reaction (or worse).
Don’t like that proposition? Well, if you and your unarmed friends want to take a swing at revolution against the most powerful empire in the history of the planet, knock yourselves out. I’ll be watching the epic fail compilation on Twitch in my Make America Bern Again hat.
War’s too much for you but impotent whining is still your forte? Well then, you can join the ranks of the genuinely obnoxious subset of leftie streamers who think they can magically conjure up a nationwide labor strike! You can even help them strategize their totally-not-self-aggrandizing March For M4A that they’ve been working really, really, really hard on. I’m sure that’ll do more for the country than, I dunno, a certain Vermonter dropping out ungraciously from a toxic primary (much to the Twitterati’s unfortunately indefatigable chagrin) to live another day so he could give millions of struggling Americans over $15 an hour to do nothing but not die from COVID-19.
Who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and somehow bring the Great Satan crashing down, only to have your success fall apart spectacularly within two years when a disaffected general pulls a coup d’état because someone pronounced “fxe” incorrectly in a politburo meeting!
Oh the places you’ll never go!
AOC is a politician, which means she functions as one. Playing it safe, politicking, doing the dance… that’s her job. That’s what she was elected to do. She and her pals are a placeholder for whatever we build, and whatever we build will require us to inculcate our principles in that which is delivered to us. You get what you get and you don’t get upset, you certainly don’t bite the hand that feeds you, and you stop worrying about trifling, petty drama like a vain vote when you ought to be prepping.
Prepping for what, you ask?
The storm.
Are You There God?
Over the course of 2020, I developed a sort of deus ex machina concept of political change. Specific to the U.S., it relies on several fairly simple observations, as detailed below:
Despite the indisputable (and ever-improving) superpower status of the People’s Republic of China, the United States of America remains the most powerful nation in the history of mankind, with unprecedented wealth, military might, and cultural hegemony, alongside over a century of domestic peacetime conditions and many life outcomes consistent with – if not always proportional to – her G20 peers. (How the U.S. maintains all of this is an entirely different story.)
The U.S. is the “world capital of capitalism”. We motivate trillions of dollars in brain drain, house many of the most pernicious multinationals, and degenerate our political discourse to exclude the historical Left. With an extensive intelligence apparatus and the gifts of Silicon Valley, America’s major corporations and her government are fully capable of squashing most People’s initiatives before they can fully form, oftentimes settling for merely entrapping persons unlikely to threaten the state to begin with.
As members of the preeminent society on Earth, leftists in the American imperial core possess a paramount responsiblity to one day wield their homeland’s resources for good. As the U.S. goes, so will the world, with the death of her suicidal Thucydides Trap permitting the international cooperation necessary to promote a global socialist order. Unlike the naïve Soviets of the early 20th century, modern-day Americans are armed with a century of proof that the United States is a formidable world power fully capable of unilaterally initiating a Left domino effect among the remaining global powers and their client states.
The only reliable way to fight the powers-that-be is to catch them when they’re weak, a state only they can bring upon themselves via pride and neglect (9/11), avarice and disdain (the Great Recession), or any one of countless other failings. The American left saw this to a degree last summer, as the heavy burden of the COVID-19 pandemic-recession hampered the various authorities of the United States when rioting broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd. You cannot take out the beast while it is staring right at you; first, you must wait until it has focused on another mark.
Thus cometh deus ex machina. Monumental change – not petty change, not everyday change, not “passing a really cool niche bill” change – happens when the opportunity presents itself from above. It ultimately comes from the bottom up, but not without a heavenly window provided hitherto. As the record stands right now, it looks like the inevitable next recession is the most likely candidate for such a dynamic event, which means the left has to be ready because the powers-that-be certainly will.
“So are we supposed to sit around and do nothing?”
No! This brave new interim is precisely the time when you should be nerding out on theory, joining local charitable projects, studying modern political history, organizing for various causes, participating in grand strategy discourse, and – most importantly – bettering yourself4 in order to provide a stable, reliable, and productive hand to the Cause. But you have to consciously remember that all you’re doing is waiting for Superman. Otherwise, you will lose your mind and burn yourself out obsessing over every politician’s gaffe or anti-communist headline as if each disturbance is the end of the f**king world.
You are not planning an imminent attack against the enemy. You are not agitating for a general strike that has never happened in American history or gearing up for a leftist sequel to January 6th. You are not the Baader-Meinhof Gang, or the Black Panthers, or the charged masses who defined Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, or the CHAZ.5 While we are still living through a pandemic and a recession, it’s all now managing to happen “in the background” in the minds of most of the country, whose support and participation is mandatory for any effectual collective action. The factors that burned down Minnesota’s 53rd precinct and nearly took out the CNN headquarters simply don’t register as strongly today as they did yesteryear. Now is a time of waiting, as the monsters have their way and the contradictions of capital guarantee the sky will open up once more. We are mere passengers waiting for their shot at the engine.
It Was Still Incredibly Stupid!
Only AOC and God Himself know what exactly brought her to tears. (Nancy Pelosi, who spoke to the 31-year-old congresswoman right before she switched from Nay to Present, may also know a thing or two.) Was it the weight of the ugly politicking and the guaranteed abuse she’d get for the move? Did the Speaker deliver a spooky message from the Deep State to the vocal anti-Zionist? Is this evidence of some sort of psychological decline borne of the spotlight? Is she facing redistricting threats from the New York political apparatus? Does she… want to run for Senate?
Many have turned to AOC’s now-infamous “crying photo” as a harbinger-in-hindsight of things to come, arguing that the perceived phoniness of the years-old photo matches that of her Iron Dome “crocodile tears”. Some, in typical left-liberal histrionics, are already calling the congresswoman complicit in Israeli aggression against the Palestinians, having judged that her pitiful Present vote amounts to a Yea by another name – even if AIPAC still hates her guts. The reactions are legion but they also mirror the very foggy sequence of logic and events comprising Thursday’s episode.
All in all, the crying was weird and it seemed egocentric in the moment; the vote switch still feels incredibly odd, even with enough theories to satisfy most appetites; and it’s not the first time AOC has a made very public and very suboptimal decision, although she’s always gotten away with it and will certainly do so with Domegate. Perhaps only time will tell as details of the drama make their rounds through the grapevine (in which case, I’ll be checking Crazy Days & Nights for… uh… updates), so I guess that’s another interim we’ll have to navigate.
Make no mistake: literally none of this matters. Not AOC’s non-vote, not any other curiosities she or her compatriots engender – nothing, nothing, nothing! She doesn’t operate on all cylinders and she was never meant to, she’s just a placeholder politician. It is our responsibility, our duty, and our prerogative to make do with the exceptionally little oxygen they’re able to provide us to breathe. When the time is right, not too early and not too soon, the People can then ignite.
Mid-morning update, 9/25/2021: Yesterday afternoon, AOC released a statement regarding her vote. Despite many outlets referring to it as an “explanation” of the vote, the Bronxite’s lengthy rambling mainly described the unsurprisingly toxic lead-up to the rushed billion-dollar bill. She briefly touched on “people’s wellbeing [being] tossed aside for political convenience” and only mentioned the “present” vote once (and in all caps).
Either Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is (reasonably) embarrassed to simply name which set of NYC voters she had in mind when she switched from Nay to Present, or there’s some massive leverage holding her in place. In any other case she’d’ve already enlightened us as to why she altered her vote.
Literally none of this matters.
Despite her being a registered Democrat, it is monumentally obvious that AOC is not the precise ideological kin of most blue ties, and I truly fear the terminally theatrical, desperate idiocy required to fool yourself into thinking otherwise.
Yes, I’m talking about the streamers and the YouTubers and the podcasters and the takesmiths and the s**tposters.
He is one of two people whose names I have permanently muted on Twitter, so you have to understand how fair I am being when I extend this role to him and his corner of the web.
As the ignoble Dr. Jordan B. Peterson would put it, “clean your room, bucko”.
I really wanted to put a triple list inside a triple list, so please forgive the disparity in these three events’ weights.