AOC's slow boring of hard boards

Politics is a vocation, even for leftists

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyn to see Dune Part 2, a small group of protesters yelled at her, complaining “you refuse to call it a genocide.”

She blew them off in an exchange that Palestinian nationalist Twitter feels reflects poorly on her, but that I think illustrates some of her admirable qualities as a politician — including, I think more than anything, that she is a politician.

AOC is to Joe Biden’s left on the Israel issue. But Biden is to Donald Trump’s left, and this is March of a presidential election year. Which is why AOC has done things this year like go on television and try to be helpful to Biden’s re-election campaign. That seems like a simple thing, but an incredible share of progressive influencers can’t seem to bring themselves to suck it up and respectfully disagree with the President of the United States while also enthusiastically backing his re-election.

That’s just the way politics works in a presidential system; basically everyone is voting for a presidential candidate they have some significant policy disagreements with. If the nature of those disagreements leaves you genuinely torn over who to support, that’s fine. But if there’s a clear better choice, you back that choice. That’s politics. That’s the strong and slow boring of hard boards. And that’s what AOC is doing in Washington.

Needless to say, a lot of people hate this!

Long before this Drafthouse blowup, Freddie de Boer denounced her as “just a regular old Democrat now” in a New York magazine piece. Lily Sánchez in Current Affairs detailed “How AOC Went From Influencer to Influenced.” And Ben Burgis in Jacobin specifically denounced her early and decisive endorsement of Biden. Like many leftists, he wants her and other likeminded people to threaten to deliberately sabotage Biden unless he makes various concessions to the left. What all these various critics keep saying, accurately, is that AOC is making decisions as if she were a normal politician pursuing normal political goals in a normal way. What they want, instead of her being “predictable” and “boring” I guess, is for her to ride into DC on the back of a sandworm and sweep away all obstacles to progress.

But that is not how politics in a democratic republic works. It’s not how it’s ever worked. And, crucially, it’s not how it could ever possibly work.

Politics as a vocation

Most people find this frustrating, but the way that the American constitutional order works is that to make durable progress on questions of national significance, you need to obtain majority support in congress. Most legislation actually requires sixty votes in the United States Senate. Of course, a lot of stuff can be done via executive action through the administrative state, but I think the majority threshold is important.

On the one hand, a determined majority could work around or scrap the filibuster. But on the other hand, executive action requires at least grudging acquiescence from congress to get officials confirmed and avoid policy riders during the appropriations process — Lina Khan wouldn’t be able to do anything at all if she hadn’t been confirmed. If you really want to get things done, you generally need to convince the members of congress who hold the pivotal seats. Alternatively, you need to recruit candidates who share your vision to win races in the pivotal seats. Or you can make things happen via bipartisan compromise and Secret Congress. But all these roads lead either to bipartisanship, or else to the sovereign power of the pivotal members. In a really profound and important way, performative position-taking by safe seat members is not the thing that matters in American politics. And when you act like the Freedom Caucus and engage in a lot of procedural brinksmanship, nine times out of ten it backfires and empowers the other party.

There’s just not that much that hinges on what an individual member of congress from a safe seat with relatively extreme views says or does at any given time.

That’s not a reason not to espouse extreme views if you genuinely think they are correct. On an issue like housing where I have very extreme views, I think it’s clearly the case that the presence of strong reform champions in a state legislature makes a big difference. But it’s not like there was ever a moment when Scott Wiener scored a knockout blow against the forces of NIMBYism and solved all of California’s housing problems. It’s good to have a champion there, but what he’s doing is still trying to find deals to cut or people to cosponsor legislation or coalitions to build or incremental changes that can maybe get passed.

That is, in a profound way, the essence of politics.

The timeline of politics

Federal politics is highly polarized and tends to feature a lot of swaps in majority control of the houses of congress and a lot of close presidential elections.

This creates a kind of natural ebb-and-flow to the logic of political events. Back in the winter of 2019-2020, Democrats were picking a presidential nominee, which is a consequential choice. On the menu were two different left-factionalist candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. AOC, naturally and quite rightly, tried to boost a left-factionalist nominee. She also perceptively noticed what a lot of people in my line of work missed, which is that even though (or in some ways precisely because) Warren is better-liked by hard-core Democrats, this makes her a less appealing electoral figure than Sanders. I think there was a chance that Sanders could have won, had he tried to be a little more reassuring in February 2020, but he didn’t. What he did try didn’t work out, and Biden became the nominee.

Much of the left-criticism of AOC has been that she hasn’t spent the past three years throwing a fit about this. But why should she? There will be other presidential primaries in the future. Meanwhile: Biden beat Trump, Democrats secured narrow congressional majorities, that gave them a window to pass some big progressive bills, and so they did that.

I think history will continue to debate whether Democrats struck the right balance between short-term and long-term spending and whether they prioritized the right issues in the IRA. But these are not questions with clear left/right answers, and any president would have ended up negotiating with the pivotal senators. When Republicans won the House in the midterms, that killed off any chance at progressive legislating and set up a phase where legislation that passes has to be bipartisan. I’m more moderate than AOC, so I thought the Fiscal Responsibility Act was fine and would have happily voted for it if I was a member of congress, but she’s more left-wing so she voted no.

Is she “just a regular old Democrat now?”

I’d say no, she is more left-wing than most Democrats, which is why she votes no on a lot of bipartisan bills that most Democrats vote for.

But is she “a predictable and boring politician?”

I mean, I guess she is. When Democrats work out a progressive bill like ARP or IRA, she predictably votes for it, and when they strike a deal with Republicans, she usually, as one might predict, doesn’t.

I think it’s totally fine to find this dull. But if you do find it dull, what you’re saying is that you find politics dull. Which, again, is a totally fine opinion to have. When I first got into politics as a teen in the late-1990s, voter turnout and engagement were low, and it was considered quite eccentric to care about something as dull as electoral politics. I think the more contemporary idea that politics should be exciting and flash is unhealthy, because fundamentally, the work of politics is kind of boring. I’m thrilled if people get passionate about policy issues and want to understand them and understand the process, but it really is a kind of annoying slog without much drama. But that’s life. An effective leftist politician is going to be boring hard boards as much as anyone else. If you just want to do clownish takes from the sidelines, you’d make more money as a YouTuber than as a House member.

Factional politics is also boring

This, again, isn’t to say that there are no real differences between different kinds of competent, responsible politicians.

When AOC won her primary challenge in 2018, AIPAC made significant overtures to her, which she turned down because she disagrees with them. In the wake of 10/7 and many related controversies, several Squad members are facing significant primary challenges backed by pro-Israel money. AOC is not facing a challenger, but she is trying to help her Squadmates win, just as when the Squad was on offense in a previous cycle of primaries, she helped raise money and awareness for like-minded candidates.

This is the essence of factional politics. There are lots and lots of safe seats all around America in which people from the same party with different ideas fight it out over who holds the seats. If you can grow your faction in Congress, you can accomplish things.

But this kind of work is also fundamentally boring. A guy named Don Samuels is running against Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and clearly Omar’s stance on Israel is something that motivates many of Samuels’ key supporters. But he’s not an idiot who’s running some kind of single-issue pro-Israel campaign; he’s talking about the things voters in the district care about. And Omar also isn’t an idiot, and she’s going to respond in kind with her own messages about things voters in the district care about.

There’s a bunch of stuff AOC could do that would be helpful to Omar — and whether Omar wins or loses has some stakes for American politics — but doing what the protestors want and going on national television to undermine Biden’s reelection campaign by saying Israel is doing genocide isn’t helpful to any of those goals. On the other hand, going to movie theaters and recording yourself yelling at members of congress might be a good way to go viral on social media. And that’s what some people care about more than they care about the tedious business of politics.

What’s next

Whatever happens this fall, I have to think AOC would be a serious presidential contender in 2028, either in an open field or as a progressive alternative to quasi-incumbent Kamala Harris.

I probably won’t vote for her in a primary, because I’d prefer someone less left-wing. But I think she’d be a perfectly good president for all the reason I’ve been talking about here. She knows how to count. She knows what the constitutional system is and how the separation of powers works. I’m sure that in office she would make some choices I disagree with, but every president of my lifetime has made some bad choices and some good ones — and even some choices that I agreed with at the time but that turned out to be bad in retrospect.

Given the rising ratio of liberals to moderates among rank-and-file Democrats, it’s probably inevitable that a left-factional candidate will win the nomination at some point in the next few cycles.

And I think that might even be a healthy development. The best candidates for Democrats to run are outsiders who aren’t radicals — people in the Kennedy/Clinton/Obama mode of young fresh-faced reformers whose actual policy ideas are kind of banal. The tendency recently, though, has been to go with establishment warhorses who’ve secured wins by making a lot of policy concessions to the left that nevertheless don’t win them the trust of the left. You may ultimately just need to pick a person with roots on the left who is trusted by the left and who then just tries their best to win. That could easily be a massive failure à la Goldwater or McGovern, but at the end of the day, reading polls, testing messages, and playing to win is something that people from all factions are capable of.

One key to the conservative movement’s success consolidating power inside the Republican Party was proving under Reagan and after that they could actually do politics. Because fundamentally, if you want to win majorities and wield power, you need to win races, and there are limits to what you can and can’t win with. I don’t know if AOC could be the person who does that for the left, but reading her critics, it seems to me that they fear she just might be — that she’s someone who knows that whatever your views on the merits of various policy questions, the political system has certain properties, and the job of a politician is to try to deal with that.