The article <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/let-me-reiterate-the-questions-i" author="Freddie de Boer" source="SubStack">Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay</a> writes <bq>Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, <b>a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior.</b> I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.</bq> <img attachment="aoc_bernie.jpeg" align="right">This is a not unusual idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of the issues she's claimed to care for, and how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted. There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, in any way whatsoever. Somehow, she has achieved a sort of reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be a rabble-rouser---when she had no power to change anything---will shake people's faith that she actually <i>is</i> that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite, in fact, the large amount of evidence to the contrary. The article <a href="https://jacobin.com/2023/08/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-aoc-the-squad-left-criticism-policy-accomplishments/" author="Branko Marcetic" source="Jacobin">AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long</a> is one of those articles, chiding us all for our lack of faith. <bq>Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are elected officials. There’s any number of criticisms of their time in Congress that are fair, reasonable, and necessary, including over key votes they’ve been on the wrong side on, times they’ve failed to stand with unions, and their failure to, as promised, fully take advantage of the leverage they had under the Democrats’ formerly slim House majority.</bq> Bla, bla, bla. This is a really long article that emphasizes a handful of mostly incidental legislative improvements while ignoring the fact that AOC has voted on the wrong side of all of the large, important issues. Tlaib has been better, but she, too, seems to sometimes be more interested in remaining elected than in actually taking a stand that will risk her electability. As Marcetic points out, this is not surprising ... but it doesn't make it <i>admirable</i>. It's not the low bar to which we should aspire. The only end to that sort of legislating is to end up constantly conceding on principle simply in order to remain elected so that we have someone in office with those principles that we admire---but who never acts on them. It's a catch-22, all right. You can only get re-elected when you don't act on the principles for which you were elected. I haven't seen any American politician who's ever decided to stand for a principle that would endanger their re-electability. AOC is no different. It makes her effectively useless. It also makes her annoying because she's constantly going on and on about the principles she constantly fails to enforce. I have no use for a legislator who is so dedicated to her party that she won't fight the military budget or the re-election campaign of a geriatric Alzheimer's patient. It's ridiculous to even talk about any other minor details of her legislative record, honestly, unless Marcetic is trying to get with her. Who knows? He goes on, <bq>The left pessimism embodied by New York magazine’s profile — which argues explicitly that socialists have nothing to show for five years of electoral victories and that the whole experiment should be abandoned — is a recipe for despair, apathy, and in the end, demobilization, which may already be having a trickle-down effect. It’s a self-defeating, possibly self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens to undermine socialist gains.</bq> Bullshit. Take your lesser-evil horseshit and stuff it. AOC doesn't stand for socialism in any real way. Bernie Sanders has capitulated so many times that he's also useless. It pains me to say it, but it's true. I like him more, it's true. But, we have no use for socialists who promote war and the military and who capitulate to state demands for strike-breaking. None of these people is willing to put their political necks on the line for our principles. Why should we continue to waste time with them? I just don't understand how you can make that argument. I just opened the article <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/08/18/the-uselessness-of-bernie-sanders/" author="Peter Bolton" source="CounterPunch">The Uselessness of Bernie Sanders</a>, which, as I noted above, is a hard thing to read---but it's true. He says the right things, but he can't. Get. It. Done. He ends up voting for the exact opposite of the thing he was saying---for ... reasons. Always the wrong reasons. Just vote against it, Bernie. Make a statement. What have you got to lose? You've been a senator for fifty years. You're over 80 years old. You've got literally nothing to lose.