In an interview with the New York Times after the 2020 election, democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said she was surprised by the “share of white support for Trump.” Going forward, she said, Democrats would have to learn to “actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.”
There’s a clear sense in which her premise is correct. White voters who are primarily moved by fear of immigrants, for example, are going to vote for demagogues like Donald Trump. But that leaves open the question of how to disarm the Right’s appeal.
Given that AOC has been widely discussed as a possible candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination, it’s important to see how she addresses this core issue. If she’s going to be the Left’s standard-bearer, we need to know that she’ll offer a winning message.
Back in 2016, she’d gestured at one possible answer about how to disarm xenophobic appeals in her comments on Trump’s first win. While she “did not wish (nor vote) for this outcome,” she said back then, she did “seek to understand it.” And she said that the way to understand it starts with an acknowledgment that social instability “is a direct result of wealth inequality.”
In 2016, she even argued that “racism, sexism and xenophobia did not win last night.” She wasn’t denying that racism, sexism, and xenophobia were in the mix. But she said these prejudices were “attendants” to larger problems, and that the solution was to take “poverty and economic inequality seriously.”
This aligns with the historical view of the socialist left, which is that the most important way to blunt the appeal of social prejudices among the working class is to appeal to working people of all races on the basis of their shared material interests. Everyone needs health care, housing, higher wages, and more free time to spend with their loved ones. That appeal is “intersectional” in the truest sense. It intersects…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
