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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Left-wing scrutiny of the Squad and particularly Representative Ocasio-Cortez has steadily veered from constructive criticism and needed pressure to a kind of caricaturish vitriol.

    Jacobin is clearly panicked by the possibility that the Outsider Left might not actually inherit the Democratic Party’s mantle, but seems unwilling to ask why or to suggest a solution.

    This op-ed consists of hand-waving apologetics that glaze over AOC’s often neoliberal voting record with feel-good references to, for example, the legacy of the failed Green New Deal, and it reads like an excuse.

    Perhaps Jacobin is merely attempting to convince itself, but an injunction to think of “the health of the socialist and broader progressive movements” feels pathetic at the end of an article that’s largely failed to defend the socialist Wunderkinder against the leftist critique that they’re all just regular old Democrats now.

    It’s tough being a member of the “Squad” these days.

    Is it really, though? AOC and her ilk further their careers by happily selling their politically-profitable, “socialist” personas to a tragically hoodwinked outer-left constituency that’s just hopeful for meaningful change.

    See ya at the next Met Gala, AOC.















  • Ok, good for you, but that’s beside the point.

    This article is reactionary, leftist apologetics for yet another “socialist” politician who’s being publicly called out because her political actions don’t really line up with her professed progressive views.

    She’s clearly a decent enough politician, and yeah, she’s willing to compromise, but she’s also 1) disingenuously representing herself as something that she’s not, or 2) not self-aware enough to realize that she’s a social democrat and not a democratic socialist.

    Either way, her behavior doesn’t line up with her professed leftism, but does increasingly align neatly with standard, neoliberal Democratic policy. She’s become a part of the establishment, and got there by riding the anti-establishment, socialist sentiment in young people. Not sure how that could be considering anything but problematic.




  • It absolutely is hero worship any time someone is put on a pedestal and their flaws are ignored.

    That’s what the author of the linked article has explicitly done. He waves away the fact that she consistently defers to Democratic Party leadership—except for occasional, “token gestures of resistance to solidify the illusion” that she’s a hard-line leftist—and then holds her up as the face of progressivism.

    If that’s not hero worship idk what is.

    Edit: spelling