We have Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez … but she is not really that dangerous.
There is always the temptation within American politics to follow a political figure because of the issues to which he or she subscribes. For example, the popular American political philosopher Noam Chomsky has, for many decades, basically instructed us to analyze the content of a given political message against the various filters put in place by mechanisms of power to obscure it. I am much more tempted to follow the advice of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan who maintained that any political message is quite incidental when compared to the formal environment within which it is transmitted. It therefore doesn’t matter what is written in a newspaper since what really matters concerns the way in which newspapers form our political imaginations.
This is how we should assess Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s role within the American political scene. On the one hand, there is always the temptation to see in her public statements about climate change, gender, police violence, and so on, something of value in the ‘war of position’ against American capitalism. On the other hand, the form of her political engagement seems nonetheless determined by the overarching political environment: she remains radically pragmatic, constantly displaying negotiations with her environment.
The controversy surrounding AOC is introduced by diverse political commentators. American conservatives strive to read her politics as exemplary of the entire democratic party. Their reading is strictly metonymic: they elevate her to the unacknowledged truth of the democratic party under President Biden. A recent story on Fox News reasoned that “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is touting the president’s ‘progressive’ credentials.”[1] There is no doubt some truth in this statement since she has on a number of occasions defended the Biden administration by counterposing it to the evils of the Trump administration.
At a recent Town Hall meeting she claimed that “[t]he Biden administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.”[2] And, on the question of the treatment of immigrant children at the Mexican-United States border she urged her followers not to draw “false equivalences” between the Biden and Trump administrations: “what is happening here is not the same as what happened during the Trump administration where they took babies out of the arms of mothers and deported their families and permanently traumatized these children.”[3] Yet she has simultaneously come out against the Biden administration on many of those same issues. For example, on the question of the treatment of immigrant children at the border she has also claimed that “the fact that this keeps happening is a political failure of both parties.”[4]
How to reconcile these apparently contradictory positions then?
It is clear that the conservative vision of AOC as the authentic voice of the democratic party is mistaken and naive. But, at the opposite end of the political spectrum there are radical socialists of the World Socialists Web who have been making the same claim about not only AOC but the democratic socialist orientation more generally. Indeed, AOC is described by the World Socialists Web as a politician absolutely complicit in American imperialist capitalism: “Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America are carrying forward their pro-imperialist, anti-communist traditions into the 21st century. Their main role […] is to serve as gatekeepers of the bourgeois political left, channeling social opposition into the Democratic Party and placing its left opponents beyond the pale.”[5] We should be cautious about drawing a strict equivalency between conservatives and radical socialists on AOC: something new is added by the radical socialists, which is, finally, a desire to preserve the communist impulse against the looming threat of what Guy Debord once called ‘recuperation.’
Finally, there is the third and apparently much more nuanced position which concerns my ongoing debate with Slavoj Zizek. Proponents of this position claim that AOC should be defended precisely because she maintains pressure on the Biden establishment. Slavoj remarked: “[m]y position is the one of AOC: she said, ‘Trump is a catastrophe, so we need Biden,’ but then immediately after Biden’s victory, she said ‘now we start our fight again.’”[6] For Slavoj, it is about maintaining this space of pressure upon the Biden establishment, but, it seems to me that this is a very dangerous game because it ultimately confuses the content for the environment: it is precisely this pragmatic attempt to remain relevant, to maintain a sphere of influence within the democratic party, that we should question.
The problem is not one of establishment versus anti-establishment, since both positions operate within a political environment of pragmatism; hence why the Trump establishment could not sustain itself without recourse to conspiracy theory. Pragmatism, like capitalism itself, justifies itself precisely as the alternative to more fundamentalist or authoritarian environments. This is why we should proclaim that the success of capitalism is precisely that it has offered itself as the alternative to other more authoritarian or fundamentalist political systems. Establishment positions cannot be sustained except paradoxically today — this is why even the most ruthless authoritarian tendencies rely upon superstition and conspiracy theory: there is no longer a coherent epistemology capable of rationalizing power. The only choice we have today is choice itself: and this comes pre-packaged in the form of pragmatism.
What AOC exemplifies therefore is complicity not with Biden but with the pragmatism that defines the Biden establishment. While it may seem as though she is wedged between the democratic party and antagonizing leftist social movements it also implies that she is in fact part of the same logic that defines them. Her function is rather that of a ‘safety valve’ for those in power: take, for example, the curious fact that Biden claimed recently to be capable to seeing the inhumanity of Putin — calling him a ‘killer’ — simply by looking into his eyes.[7] Similarly, AOC continuously claims to be capable of discerning ‘good’ from ‘bad faith’ discussions in her ideological allies and opponents. These twin discursive moves demonstrate something about the way in which Biden and AOC both believe themselves capable of already knowing everything there is to know about anybody who critiques them. This is why Putin is correct to claim that what Biden actually saw was not Putin’s evil, but his own soul reflecting back at him.
Indeed, any critique of AOC already implies that there is some inherent ‘evil,’ ‘bad faith,’ or ‘privilege’ which neutralizes the opponent in advance. Who needs actual diversity in political opinion when you can construct one for yourself? The political opponent becomes reduced to a piñata AOC and the democrats can hoist onto a tree and smack around at whim. Unfortunately, it is often the American right who demonstrate a formal concern with communicative diversity (e.g., Ben Shapiro and others pride themselves on engaging in honest political debates, and the only popular commentator of the American left to do so is the highly controversial Bill Maher).
What I do not understand, then, is why my friend Slavoj continues to defend (or else remain silent about) AOC. He should follow through on his statements made last year in his critique of Noam Chomsky. Whereas Chomsky believes that AOC functions to radicalize the democratic establishment — a bit like the New Democratic Party once did in Canada — by ‘pushing them further to the left through activism,’ Slavoj seemed much more suspicious and warned: “[i]f you make too many compromises here, the establishment democrats will notice and use us as a ‘collaborative group,’ they will know that they can always count on us.”[8] He went on to say that we need to take more risks: “we need to take more risks here so that [when people visit American we do not hear:] ‘ah, you see we also have these left-wing dissidents over there, but they are not really dangerous … !”
I am tempted — in good fun, since Slavoj is one of my closest political allies — to say: “in America we have this left-wing dissent named Slavoj Zizek, but, on the question of AOC, is he really the most dangerous philosopher in the West?”
[3] https://people.com/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-says-border-conditions-barbaric-and-wrong/
[4] https://nypost.com/2021/03/31/aoc-slams-barbaric-us-border-conditions-under-biden/
[5] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/26/aoc-m26.html
[6] As retrieved on April 29th, 2021 from <http://youtube.com/watch?v=ak1FVqREodw>
[7] https://www.rt.com/op-ed/519507-slavoj-zizek-biden-putin/
[8] As retrieved on April 29th, 2021 from <http://youtube.com/watch?v=ak1FVqREodw>
