the next guy
Superstar
Black faces on TV is good. Black faces pushing the same crap white faces do, while having zero minority production staff is not good. Just me.
The Contrarian/Anti-Woke left continue trend of Anti-Democrat/Black & Dirtbag Leftist grift
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The GameStop Rally Exposed the Perils of ‘Meme Populism’
The GameStop Rally Exposed the Perils of ‘Meme Populism’
Eric Levitz
The road to socialism probably doesn’t run through WallStreetBets. Photo: Jim Ruymen/UPI/Shutterstock
Last week, a motley mass of shytposters, gambling enthusiasts, and disaffected Zoomers — united by hate for Wall Street and love of chicken tenders — beat a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at its own game. Through their collective intelligence and audacity, users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets executed a sophisticated “short squeeze” that took money away from some billionaire speculators, gave it to some badly indebted workers, and made a mockery of neoliberal capitalism’s legitimizing myths. Unfortunately, right when these working-class retail investors had Wall Street’s titans on the run, the plutocracy’s visible hand appeared to reach down and thwart them: Robinhood, a trading app popular with young recreational investors, suddenly barred its users from buying GameStop shares, thereby relieving pressure on the hedge-fund shorts.
That is one way of recounting the GameStop rally, anyway.
Here is another: A group of small-time speculators — including some finance-industry professionals — orchestrated a pump-and-dump scheme that involved convincing a lot of financially inexpert (and/or politically disaffected) people that they could stick it to Wall Street’s largest money managers by … bidding up the price of an equity that is owned by Wall Street’s largest money managers. This generated enough momentum to trigger a “short squeeze,” and the price of GameStop shares shot to the moon. Wall-to-wall media coverage ensued. Inexperienced investors bought the hype, and began piling into what now resembled a Ponzi scheme: When the bubble finally burst, those who bought in early would have a chance to cash out before the stock fell beneath their break-even price; those who bought late would have little warning before the “dump” wiped them out. By late last week, so many people were buying GameStop shares over gamified phone apps that regulations aimed at ensuring the stability of financial markets kicked into gear. The stock market’s central clearing hub calculated that it faced a high risk in facilitating more GME buys, and demanded billions in collateral from brokerages ordering such trades. Lacking the funds necessary to meet this demand, Robinhood was compelled to restrict GameStop buying on its platform while it sought an infusion of liquidity. That pause hastened the inevitable end of the GameStop rally, which ultimately achieved little beyond popularizing participation in stock trading (a development that will enrich Wall Street at the expense of working-class people with gambling problems).
There is some truth to both these accounts. But to believe that the GameStop short squeeze was “an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street” — which is to say, a populist challenge to the tyranny of high finance that deserved the left’s avid support and attention — one had to accept the first summary as gospel, and dismiss all confounding details as apologetics for Big Hedge Fund.
Unfortunately, a number of influential progressives did precisely this. For a few days last week, amid mass hunger and unemployment, various left-wing Twitter influencers chose to focus their advocacy on the plight of small-time speculators who’d been barred from buying into a pump-and-dump scheme — while socialist congresswomen treated the right of amateur market manipulators to purchase whatever stocks they want, in whatever quantity they can afford, on the phone-based trading app of their choice, as a cause of national importance.
These actions weren’t cynical. At least, not typically. And in the context of the GameStop media firestorm, they may well have been reasonable. On one level, the GameStop story was an object lesson in the power of collective action and absurdity of market fundamentalism. By pooling their wits and capital, a large number of relatively low-wealth, low-clout individuals took money away from a hedge fund. What’s more, they did this in a manner that served to delegitimize financial markets as all-knowing arbiters of economic value: When the share price of a brick-and-mortar video-game retailer increases 20-fold in the course of a month, the notion that there is a tight correspondence between market prices and objective worth becomes difficult to sustain. And absent that premise, the case for entrusting our nation’s investment needs to unaccountable private actors becomes harder to make. The American left is in sore need of converts. When a story with this kind of radicalizing potential becomes national news, progressives may be well-advised to engage with it, so as to steer popular understanding of the event in an egalitarian direction.
But if the left can benefit from engaging trending news stories, so as to remake them in its own image, there is also a risk that chronic immersion in such stories will have the opposite effect: Instead of imbuing social-media uproars with the values of the left, the left may find itself imbued with the values of social media.
Platforms like Twitter and YouTube have democratized participation in public discourse. The range of people and ideological factions that can make their voices heard in America’s political debates is exponentially larger today than it was two decades ago. This has had many salutary effects on our politics. Dubious economic orthodoxies are harder to sustain — and sound heresies, harder to suppress — in an environment of unceasing, unfiltered public debate. The mainstream media’s conventional wisdom is no longer primarily shaped by the social world of Beltway cocktail parties, but by the more diverse and cantankerous chatter of their Twitter feeds. The left has exploited this openness in myriad ways — from influencing the technocratic details of Democratic policy proposals to crowdfunding socialist primary challenges to organizing mutual aid campaigns to bankrolling a vast network of alternative media outlets.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
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Nevertheless, the republic of tweets is no popular democracy. Twitter users are much younger, more educated, and wealthier than the American public as a whole. And those who tweet about politics are, by definition, far more interested in consuming news media than ordinary Americans. These biases shape Twitter discourse and the viral causes that arise from it. Like social media itself, meme-fueled populist uproars are liable to privilege spectacle over substance, the concerns of college-educated young people over those of those less online constituencies, and the hasty embrace of (ideologically affirming) conclusions over the exercise of epistemic humility.
All these distortions were present in last week’s GameStop discourse. As a substantive matter, it was never easy to explain how thousands of people overpaying for GME shares was supposed to threaten the capitalist order. Whatever utility the GameStop rally theoretically had as a spectacle, its first-order consequence was to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans to Robinhood and Wall Street market makers. But patient, careful reasoning about the relative merits of various causes do not drive Twitter engagement; spectacle does. And while the showdown between WallStreetBets and Melvin Capital was not a class war, it did play one on CNBC.
In a social-media discourse that was demographically representative of the nation as a whole, it seems unlikely that the phrase “working-class retail investors” would be spoken unironically. But on a platform that drastically underrepresents the supermajority of Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings, it was possible for some progressives to mistake the cause of recreational investors for that of the proletariat.
When Robinhood abruptly revoked its users’ capacity to buy GameStop shares, the narratively intuitive conclusion was that the Wall Street Establishment was striking back against the hoi polloi. The idea that the trading app was willfully restricting trading in GameStop arose so naturally out of the preceding discourse, some irresponsible columnists published Q&As that all but asserted as much despite the absence of confirmation (by which I mean, I did that). By contrast, the more likely motivation behind Robinhood’s decision — that its hand was forced by the collateral requirements imposed by a clearinghouse — was difficult for laypeople to comprehend, let alone integrate into a satisfying narrative. So a conspiratorial interpretation of events rapidly proliferated.
Put all this together, and you get some balefully misguided progressive discourse. The left-wing activist and Twitter influencer Jordan Uhl appeared to argue on Friday (1) that it is outrageous for the president to suggest that the plight of the unemployed is worthy of his attention but the plight of GameStop bulls somehow isn’t, (2) that restrictions on fee-free day-trading are a leading cause of wealth concentration in the United States, and (3) that it is insulting for the White House to suggest that it is the SEC’s job to regulate Wall Street.
Around the same time, Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Casino-like swings in stock prices of GameStop reflect wild levels of speculation that don’t help GameStop’s workers or customers and could lead to market instability,” and shared a letter she’d written to the SEC, calling on the regulator to investigate potential market manipulation by the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop, along with any (hypothetical) Reddit users who knowingly misled retail investors in order to pump up the stock.
This won the senator more than 7,000 vitriolic quote tweets and comments from leftists who’d apparently convinced themselves that defending speculators from regulatory scrutiny was a core socialist objective, so long as the speculators in question referred to chicken tenders as “tendies.”
The madness was not limited to Twitter personalities. In the fog of pseudo-class war, left-wing writers and lawmakers struggled to discern reactionaries from populists, and libertarian critiques of Wall Street from progressive ones. Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist who’s campaigning for governor of California on a platform of school vouchers and state income tax abolition. But he flustered a CNBC anchor by saying some populist-sounding things about GameStop. Which made him a Twitter folk hero for a day. Which got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to invite him onto a livestream (he ultimately did not appear).
Palihapitiya proceeded to use his enlarged spotlight to pitch a capital-gains tax cut.
Meanwhile, the leftist gadfly Matt Taibbi seems to have been too infatuated with the spectacle he saw playing out on CNBC to recognize that he was absorbing the network’s Hayekian economic assumptions. In a paean to WallStreetBets, Taibbi derided the Federal Reserve’s “zero-interest-rate policies” as “artificial stimulants” that are preventing “zombie companies” — which account for roughly 30 percent of all U.S. corporations — from going out of business. This argument implies that there is some “natural” benchmark interest rate that exists outside of politics and policy, and that the Fed is corruptly flouting this natural market law, just so it can prevent nearly one-third of America’s large employers from going bust. In other words: Taibbi is making a libertarian argument for central banks to tolerate deeper recessions and higher unemployment, so as to avoid corrupting natural market forces with “artificial stimulants.” It’s the kind of thing one might expect to find in a column by Taibbi’s archnemesis, Thomas Friedman; in fact, it is literally the argument of Friedman’s latest column.
These analytical errors matter. If the ethos of social media leads the left to prize populist sentiment over progressive substance, then its energies will be ripe for misdirection by reactionary forces. Condemnations of the Fed for bailing out corporate America with its easy money policies can sound populist. But their policy implications are brutally regressive. Rallying to the cause of Robinhood traders may feel righteous. But it also has led leftwing lawmakers to the precipice of endorsing deregulation to facilitate riskier recreational speculation.
In the hands of a well-organized progressive movement — one accountable to working-class constituencies, and tolerant of internal dissent — social media is a powerful weapon. In those of an agglomeration of progressive media addicts and creators — who are accountable primarily to their followers, employers’ traffic expectations, and Patreon subscribers — social media is a potent brain toxin that causes its victims to mistake spectacle for substance, anti-intellectualism for anti-elitism, conspiracy theorizing for critical thinking, and the interests of iconoclastic college graduates for those of working people writ large (in severe cases, it may even lead a supposed leftist to mistake Ted Cruz for an ally in the fight against high finance).
Extremely online progressives could have spent last week pressuring congressional Democrats to increase the value of the federal unemployment benefits in Joe Biden’s COVID-relief plan to $600; instead we successfully pressured them into demanding investigations into Robinhood’s treacherous abrogation of its users’ right to lose money to hedge funds.
The perverse incentives that produced this misallocation of memes and energy aren’t going away. And everyone who tries to effect change through posting is subject to them (the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites probably informed my decision to write a column on the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites rather than one on, say, the coup in Myanmar). But we all need to do our best to swim against the tide — because a left that is optimized for the production of social-media spectacles, instead of the passage of social democratic reforms, will be exactly as threatening to Wall Street’s rentiers as a brief spike in the price of GameStop shares.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
Nevertheless, the republic of tweets is no popular democracy. Twitter users are much younger, more educated, and wealthier than the American public as a whole. And those who tweet about politics are, by definition, far more interested in consuming news media than ordinary Americans. These biases shape Twitter discourse and the viral causes that arise from it. Like social media itself, meme-fueled populist uproars are liable to privilege spectacle over substance, the concerns of college-educated young people over those of those less online constituencies, and the hasty embrace of (ideologically affirming) conclusions over the exercise of epistemic humility.
All these distortions were present in last week’s GameStop discourse. As a substantive matter, it was never easy to explain how thousands of people overpaying for GME shares was supposed to threaten the capitalist order. Whatever utility the GameStop rally theoretically had as a spectacle, its first-order consequence was to transfer wealth from ordinary Americans to Robinhood and Wall Street market makers. But patient, careful reasoning about the relative merits of various causes do not drive Twitter engagement; spectacle does. And while the showdown between WallStreetBets and Melvin Capital was not a class war, it did play one on CNBC.
In a social-media discourse that was demographically representative of the nation as a whole, it seems unlikely that the phrase “working-class retail investors” would be spoken unironically. But on a platform that drastically underrepresents the supermajority of Americans who have less than $1,000 in savings, it was possible for some progressives to mistake the cause of recreational investors for that of the proletariat.
When Robinhood abruptly revoked its users’ capacity to buy GameStop shares, the narratively intuitive conclusion was that the Wall Street Establishment was striking back against the hoi polloi. The idea that the trading app was willfully restricting trading in GameStop arose so naturally out of the preceding discourse, some irresponsible columnists published Q&As that all but asserted as much despite the absence of confirmation (by which I mean, I did that). By contrast, the more likely motivation behind Robinhood’s decision — that its hand was forced by the collateral requirements imposed by a clearinghouse — was difficult for laypeople to comprehend, let alone integrate into a satisfying narrative. So a conspiratorial interpretation of events rapidly proliferated.
Put all this together, and you get some balefully misguided progressive discourse. The left-wing activist and Twitter influencer Jordan Uhl appeared to argue on Friday (1) that it is outrageous for the president to suggest that the plight of the unemployed is worthy of his attention but the plight of GameStop bulls somehow isn’t, (2) that restrictions on fee-free day-trading are a leading cause of wealth concentration in the United States, and (3) that it is insulting for the White House to suggest that it is the SEC’s job to regulate Wall Street.
Around the same time, Elizabeth Warren tweeted, “Casino-like swings in stock prices of GameStop reflect wild levels of speculation that don’t help GameStop’s workers or customers and could lead to market instability,” and shared a letter she’d written to the SEC, calling on the regulator to investigate potential market manipulation by the hedge funds that had shorted GameStop, along with any (hypothetical) Reddit users who knowingly misled retail investors in order to pump up the stock.
This won the senator more than 7,000 vitriolic quote tweets and comments from leftists who’d apparently convinced themselves that defending speculators from regulatory scrutiny was a core socialist objective, so long as the speculators in question referred to chicken tenders as “tendies.”
The madness was not limited to Twitter personalities. In the fog of pseudo-class war, left-wing writers and lawmakers struggled to discern reactionaries from populists, and libertarian critiques of Wall Street from progressive ones. Chamath Palihapitiya is a venture capitalist who’s campaigning for governor of California on a platform of school vouchers and state income tax abolition. But he flustered a CNBC anchor by saying some populist-sounding things about GameStop. Which made him a Twitter folk hero for a day. Which got Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to invite him onto a livestream (he ultimately did not appear).
Palihapitiya proceeded to use his enlarged spotlight to pitch a capital-gains tax cut.
Meanwhile, the leftist gadfly Matt Taibbi seems to have been too infatuated with the spectacle he saw playing out on CNBC to recognize that he was absorbing the network’s Hayekian economic assumptions. In a paean to WallStreetBets, Taibbi derided the Federal Reserve’s “zero-interest-rate policies” as “artificial stimulants” that are preventing “zombie companies” — which account for roughly 30 percent of all U.S. corporations — from going out of business. This argument implies that there is some “natural” benchmark interest rate that exists outside of politics and policy, and that the Fed is corruptly flouting this natural market law, just so it can prevent nearly one-third of America’s large employers from going bust. In other words: Taibbi is making a libertarian argument for central banks to tolerate deeper recessions and higher unemployment, so as to avoid corrupting natural market forces with “artificial stimulants.” It’s the kind of thing one might expect to find in a column by Taibbi’s archnemesis, Thomas Friedman; in fact, it is literally the argument of Friedman’s latest column.
These analytical errors matter. If the ethos of social media leads the left to prize populist sentiment over progressive substance, then its energies will be ripe for misdirection by reactionary forces. Condemnations of the Fed for bailing out corporate America with its easy money policies can sound populist. But their policy implications are brutally regressive. Rallying to the cause of Robinhood traders may feel righteous. But it also has led leftwing lawmakers to the precipice of endorsing deregulation to facilitate riskier recreational speculation.
In the hands of a well-organized progressive movement — one accountable to working-class constituencies, and tolerant of internal dissent — social media is a powerful weapon. In those of an agglomeration of progressive media addicts and creators — who are accountable primarily to their followers, employers’ traffic expectations, and Patreon subscribers — social media is a potent brain toxin that causes its victims to mistake spectacle for substance, anti-intellectualism for anti-elitism, conspiracy theorizing for critical thinking, and the interests of iconoclastic college graduates for those of working people writ large (in severe cases, it may even lead a supposed leftist to mistake Ted Cruz for an ally in the fight against high finance).
Extremely online progressives could have spent last week pressuring congressional Democrats to increase the value of the federal unemployment benefits in Joe Biden’s COVID-relief plan to $600; instead we successfully pressured them into demanding investigations into Robinhood’s treacherous abrogation of its users’ right to lose money to hedge funds.
The perverse incentives that produced this misallocation of memes and energy aren’t going away. And everyone who tries to effect change through posting is subject to them (the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites probably informed my decision to write a column on the incentive to cater to Twitter’s appetites rather than one on, say, the coup in Myanmar). But we all need to do our best to swim against the tide — because a left that is optimized for the production of social-media spectacles, instead of the passage of social democratic reforms, will be exactly as threatening to Wall Street’s rentiers as a brief spike in the price of GameStop shares.
@wire28 @Th3G3ntleman @ezrathegreat @Jello Biafra @humble forever @Dameon Farrow @Piff Perkins @Pressure @johnedwarduado @Armchair Militant @panopticon @Tres Leches @ADevilYouKhow @dtownreppin214
Piff Perkins
Veteran
The guy who started all this GameStop stuff is a capitalist who enjoys the market. Socialists jumping on the bandwagon was laughable to me. That being said I definitely agree the potential was there to do more damage than Occupy. A firm was indeed dissolved, after all.
This. It's illusory in a way - convincing people of change, when nothing under the hood has undergone reconfiguration.
They were there to watch large financial firms fail.
The absolute vast majority of people who were commenting on it had no idea what was going on, and were just enjoying the fukkery.
As a person who spent last week working with a local housing resource network and bailfund, this article was useless and about as deluded as your posts in this thread tend to be.
AquaCityBoy
Veteran
is this your king? 
The Cynical, Sexist Fantasy of AOC
The Cynical, Sexist Fantasy of AOC
Last week, journalist Glenn Greenwald appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show, the eponymous YouTube show hosted by the comedian turned online-left paragon,which has a following of over 800,000 subscribers thanks to Dore’s irreverent approach to leftist politics. Greenwald lamented that Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “ruined” an opportunity for the right and left to come together and fight income inequality. He noted that Americans of all political stripes have banded together in disgust toward Wall Street big wigs and hedge fund managers amidst the GameStop short squeeze.
The day before Greenwald’s appearance on Dore’s show, Ocasio-Cortez called for an investigation into trading platform Robinhood for its decision to“block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.” Republican Senator Ted Cruz retweeted Ocasio-Cortez, voicing his agreement. Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t interested. (This isn’t the first time that Cruz claimed to agree with Ocasio-Cortez. In 2019, he very disingenuously agreed with her that birth control should be obtainable without a prescription).
“I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out,” she replied on Twitter. “In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion that Cruz should resign was in reference to the pro-Trump insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. They were convinced that former president Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election and determined to “take back” the country while Joe Biden’s electoral votes were formalized. For months, Cruz peddled the lie of a stolen election. The lie proved dangerous, as armed protesters entered the Capitol by force, many looking for Ocasio-Cortez specifically.
She continued: “You haven’t even apologized for the serious physical + mental harm you contributed to from Capitol Police & custodial workers to your own fellow members of Congress. In the meantime, you can get off my timeline & stop clout-chasing. Thanks.”
To Greenwald, this was a petty snub. So he mocked her, putting on a childish, bratty voice while ridiculing her concerns over her personal safety:
Greenwald: Ted Cruz, whatever you think of him, reached out by saying, “I agree with AOC about this.” So that was an opportunity for right and left to join together to do something that supposedly her main reason for existing as a political figure which is fighting income inequality and instead she goes, turns around and says, fukk you, I don’t want to work with you, you guys got me murdered, you’re a white supremacist. And suddenly the two camps divide again, and over here you have the red team and over here you have the blue team cheering like morons at a fukking high school football game again because she ruined that movement because all she wants to do is attack Republicans and fortify the Democratic party. That is what the left has become, and they know it. And that’s why all that’s left for them to do is do things like talk about your personality and occasionally mine
Dore responded: “It is stunning to see AOC turning into Adam Schiff.” Yet the only thing more ridiculous than the idea that Ocasio-Cortez is morphing into an establishment figure like Adam Schiff is the idea that Cruz is an ally that the left should consider with any seriousness. For Greenwald to naively take Cruz’s tweet as a good-faith step toward meaningful change is deeply embarrassing considering Cruz’s track record, and only makes sense when one considers that, at this point, Ocasio-Cortez can do no right in his eyes. But it’s not just Greenwald. He’s just the loudest of a growing chorus of post-left cynics who have created a fantasy of Ocasio-Cortez to serve their needs. Here, she is petty, a narcissist, and a disingenuous con artist.
Unsurprisingly, the loudest voices appear to be men.
Dore’s snide remark reflects an entire class on the left who have soured on Ocasio-Cortez, most recently due to her rejection of Force the Vote, an effort to push the Democratic-majority House to vote on Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s Medicare-for-All bill. To prompt a vote, progressive lawmakers were urged to withhold the votes House Speaker Nancy Pelosi needed to reclaim her speakership until she agrees to hold a vote on the proposal. This provision was amplified by Dore and others like Secular Talk’s Kyle Kulinski as well as Krystal Ball, co-host of The Hill’s Rising.
The effort was DOA.
In December, Ocasio-Cortez explained her position in a tweet to football player Justin Jackson, who supported the Force the Vote initiative: “The Dem votes aren’t there yet, and with a razor-thin margin the Dem NOs are > margin. So you issue threats, hold your vote, and lose. Then what? If you want to know who’s opposed look @ cosponsor list.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s reasoning angered critics like Dore. As Eric Levitz noted at New York Magazine, Dore’s contempt for Ocasio-Cortez grew louder and louder:
Dore considers this course of action so self-evidently optimal that the only possible explanation for why Ocasio-Cortez declined to pursue it is that the congresswoman is a fraud who cares more about her career than the needs of her constituents. “She is standing between you and health care,” Dore told his viewers last week. Responding to Ocasio-Cortez’s argument that it takes years of organizing to lay the groundwork for seemingly spontaneous progressive breakthroughs, Dore exclaimed, “I figured this out in two weeks, AOC! You liar. You coward. You gaslighter.”
Having Medicare-for-All at a time when millions of Americans have lost their employer-based-health insurance due to the pandemic’s economic downturn undoubtedly makes sense. The architects of this proposal knew that the provision didn’t have the votes to pass, but hoped that the effort would at least push Medicare-for-All back to the forefront of the news cycle, winning over voters. While political theater has its place, this wouldn’t have been a particularly impactful use of it. And Dore’s suggestion that Ocasio-Cortez, a congresswoman only recently elected to her second term, is single-handedly standing in the way of Medicare-for-All is absurd. This isn’t brave truthtelling, it’s petulance. But this is the only way that men on the left with platforms and influence seem to be able to talk about Ocasio-Cortez now.
It’s easy to see why Ocasio-Cortez garners their attention: She is one of the most prominent leftists in the House, has a massive audience, and is palatable to normies who didn’t get the memo that it’s gauche to call yourself a “liberal” in some circles now. But most importantly, Ocasio-Cortez has an earnestness about her that is deeply “cringe” to the swaths of the online left which traffic in cynicism and irony. This was made abundantly clear following Ocasio-Cortez’s Instagram Live on Monday, in which she detailed her harrowing experience during the Capitol attack.
“I thought everything was over,” Ocasio-Cortez said. She later broke out into tears and said, “I felt that, if this was the journey my life was taking, I felt that things were going to be OK... And that, you know, I had fulfilled my purpose.”
Her alarm was understandable: She’s been the target of numerous death threats, including by those who stormed the Capitol that day. Many of the insurrectionists were armed, and they were egged on by her own colleagues. But Ocasio-Cortez’s solemn description of fearing for her life was deemed indulgent and self-serving by her loudest critics, who were particularly bothered by her admission that her response to the attack and its aftermath is informed by her perspective as a survivor of sexual assault.
“I haven’t told many people that in my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “But when we go through trauma, trauma compounds on each other.”
This was immediately pounced upon by swaths of irony-poisoned leftist Twitter that seems more interested in owning libs and seeking allyship with edgelordright-wingers than attaining a policy agenda that aids the marginalized and working class. Again, this conversation was largely driven by men, though there were women who offered pithy co-signs too.
The obsession with painting Ocasio-Cortez as a sell-out to the left has been churning for well over a year now. During the Democratic primary, the same cynics suspected she wouldn’t endorse Bernie Sanders for president (she did, arguably at the most decisive moment of his campaign). When Sanders’s campaign was petering out, she was criticized for not doing enough to save it. And when criticisms aren’t Sanders-centric, it’s her inability to change the will of Congress and the often feckless Democrats she calls colleagues with a single tweet or floor vote that flares tempers. The power they ascribe to her is so much larger than what she actually has, or what any left-leaning members of Congress have. That doesn’t mean she can’t be effective, or that she is above criticism—at the end of the day, a politician should never reach stan status. But legitimate critiques are lost to petty grievances: Oh no, she talked about being assaulted. God forbid, she used an emoji in a tweet, how cringe. fukk, she’s on Instagram Live again being relatable to the normies. Wow, she’s on the cover of a magazine wearing a designer suit? Agony.
The unmitigated ire against Ocasio-Cortez, above all else, is an overcorrection of the cynical ways in which celebrities, CEOs, and politicians have rendered identity-politics and marginalization for capitalistic and self-interested purposes. This corporate co-optation of emptied-out leftist values deserves pushback, but the left should be reminded that sexism and racism are part of what they claim to fight against. Repeating it here, with Ocasio-Cortez, serves the Ted Cruzes of the world. We need to be honest about whether these critiques against Ocasio-Cortez are plain old ugly sexism and racism hiding behind “anti-capitalism.” Attributing a jaded #Girlboss ethos to Ocasio-Cortez for being open about her sexual assault—for pointing to the subsequent trauma to explain her refusal to work with Cruz—does little more than easily minimize the real violence of sexual assault.
Given the ways in which people have weaponized their identities to justify cruelty, greed, and power—right-wing women co-opting quasi-feminist narratives, for example— it almost sounds simplistic to assert that the narrative surrounding Ocasio-Cortez from the left is just baldly misogynistic. But it’s hard to see it as anything else. Ocasio-Cortez inspires a kind of inexplicably fervent anger, a spirited vitriol that women have long known.
Ocasio-Cortez isn’t a socialist savior and never will be (the left’s work is rarely in the day to day of legislating). She doesn’t have the power to singlehandedly, as Greenwald suggested, end a movement of tepid left-right unity over a topic that is already last week’s news, or topple Nancy Pelosi with one vote. But reality is irrelevant here. The fantasy of Ocasio-Cortez—the narcissist, the con, the lib—is the only one that matters.