What AOC Wants For The World

If you’ve been on the fence about breaking up with mainstream political news to support independent journalism, do me a quick favor and Google AOC + Munich. Open a new tab and do it right now. No leading words, just enter AOC + Munich and scroll the headlines.

You’ll likely notice a slight bias. We live in the Trump era, yet for some reason Democrats must meet a very high standard of gaffe-avoidance. You’ll see that establishment media (Google included) still enjoys the power to define politicians, and is simply selective about who’s subject to this kind of treatment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fell short of an arbitrary bar, freeing political journalists to depict a topsy-turvy world in which one of the Democratic Party’s most articulate leaders is an incoherent amateur. Their imputation that clarity and polish are essential political skills is left unstated, because that might raise some questions about double standards.

Essentially all substantive criticism of AOC has come from the left. Her progressive critics detected a dissonance between her appeals to economic egalitarianism and her participation in a security conference of, by, and for the global elite—with all of its assumptions about the international trading system, and the defense alliances that undergird it.

“[F]or a politician that has built a progressive platform on criticism of US military interventionism and domestic policies aimed at benefitting the working class,” tut-tutted The Nation, “her presence at [the Munich security conference], widely considered to be the biggest international annual security event in the West and a major hub for hawkish military elites, seemed at first glance out of line with her values.”

In AOC’s defense, I believe these critics misapprehend the ambitious vision she drew in her remarks. But it’s important to probe the limits of that vision.

What AOC wants to see in the world, apparently, is U.S. moral leadership stripped of contradictions, and sustained by global, pro-democratic class solidarity. When we fail to live up to enlightened values, we breed contempt; when democracy doesn’t deliver people a decent standard of living, they will be tempted by the false promises of strongmen. Those vulnerabilities imperil both freedom and prosperity.

It’s a highly ambitious, idealistic vision of a better future. And there’s nothing in it for most progressives to dislike. To be a little flip, it’s a two step process of, first, global class war.

“We are