discussion AOC addresses attacks from leftists, clocks them for being ineffective

[Komet]

 

Why do leftists attack you despite multiple Palestinian rights groups ranking U as 1 of Congress's best?

 

This is understandably a very challenging time for a lot of people. And there are a likely a few reasons (probably more than I can list here!):

 

1. I am an elected official in the US government. That is a fact. No matter how opposed I am to what is happening, criticism will be there. I get that. But you are correct. I have one of the strongest vote records in Congress on Palestinian human rights and voting against bloated US military budgets (both overall and against unconditional military aid to the Israeli gov).

And in a time when AIPAC dedicated $100 million to booting out members of Congress who stood for Palestinian human rights this year and successfully unseated two, that matters. We need to grow and defend our ranks to do more.

 

2. There is a LOT of disinformation going around. A LOT of people are getting "news" from random viral social media posts (which given how censored this issue has been in mainstream media for so long, I understand, but not all of it is legit). Please understand that there is a lot of nefarious stuff getting amplified along with the legitimate stuff too.

When I was in Chicago this protestor broke into a restaurant I was eating at and demanded to know when I would call it a genocide. I actually did so months ago in a high- profile House floor speech that was covered a lot in the news. This kind of thing happens a lot. Disinformation hurts movements from the inside and discredits them from the outside. It's important to check. It's everywhere.

 

3. Repair is hard! It is so easy in the short term to dispose of people and toss them in the trash the moment you don't like something. We are all human. It's easier to be pissed off on the internet than actually build community and power around a just cause. But if we actually want to change things, we need to get real about building power. And you can't build power by recreating the punitive, angry, expulsion-focused cultures that we seek to replace. It will require NEW SKILLS from us. It's not enough to be right. We need to be right and WIN. I believe that we have a moral obligation to be EFFECTIVE in addition to having a just stance, otherwise who are we doing this for?

We must ACCOMPLISH, BUILD, STRENGTHEN, REPAIR, GROW, WIN, SURVIVE, and that is HARD HARD HARD WORK. And we are going to disagree on the way. If we can't learn to handle that in good faith, we will stay small. And we owe the people we are fighting for way more than that.

 

Do you agree with miss NY congresswoman, heroine of the progressives?

 

[family.guy123]

Well yes. #2 is the civics section in a nutshell 

[Armani?]

AOC is usually extremely calculated & pragmatic only to her own values which is needed to survive in Congress

 

Her political instincts were very off for getting Biden to not dropout though

 

[shyboi]

she thought she ate 

[on the line]

She's speaking directly to the misguided Only-Palestine (non) voters in the Official Election thread.

 

Love to see a reasonable, informed progressive. 

[Sprite]

2 minutes ago, Armani? said:

Her political instincts were very off for getting Biden to not dropout though

Yes, definitely. Republicans were right about him all along, huh?

[Cesar]

oh brother

[khalyan]

she ate 

[Virgos Groove]

Leftists: We want our presidential candidate to support an arms embargo. Supporting a genocide is morally abhorrent and most Americans don't want arms sent to Israel. It is an electorally sound position.

 

AOC: No, wanting your party to support popular policies is dumb!!!! Stop demanding anything out of your politicians!!1!

 

The state of the Western left...

 

Edited August 30 by Virgos Groove

[on the line]

15 minutes ago, khalyan said:

she ate 

It's almost as if a morally-just progressive who has been in DC for years and has seen how things work and get done might have better insight than some ATRL armchair politicians who downvotes anyone who doesn't agree with them.

 

Who woulda thunk.

[Rabbit]

I believe that we have a moral obligation to be EFFECTIVE in addition to having a just stance, otherwise who are we doing this for?

 

[réveuse]

41 minutes ago, on the line said:

She's speaking directly to the misguided Only-Palestine (non) voters in the Official Election thread.

 

Love to see a reasonable, informed progressive. 

"Only Palestine voters" and there is a genocide going on.

[on the line]

2 minutes ago, réveuse said:

"Only Palestine voters" and there is a genocide going on.

You have to win first to be effective. Listen to what she's saying. It's not nefarious. 

[Communion]

She's largely getting laughed at from the responses online. To write a mini essay about why you defended and lied about Biden working towards the end of a genocide that's still happening is deeply self-serving and unserious no matter her actual record. 

 

The elephant in the room is that her new reformed theory of change just...hasn't proven effective. 

 

What has she achieved? Her own self stated goals are farther away from being enacted than when she entered Congress. 

Edited August 30 by Communion

[Bloo]

The problem with Leftism is not that it's critical of AOC. The problem with much of the American Left is that we are overly reliant on elected officials to push change through. AOC gets a lot of flak because online leftists often get upset because she hasn't passed the Green New Deal or any of the big progressive ideas she ran on back in 2018. But, that's not possible in a Congress where the vast majority are funded by billionaires. It cannot be done. We need organization that isn't constrained by the death grip that is electoral politics. AOC is never above criticism or reproach. I lost of a faith and trust in her for many of her political blunders which reflect her lack of political strategy.

 

AOC deserves all the criticism in the world for:

• Trying to give small dollar donor money to a corporate Democrat (only to be turned away because the centrist Dems hate her).
• Lying to the American people that Kamala and Joe are working tirelessly for a ceasefire while they send billions to fund the genocide in Gaza.
• Not being able to see the sky is blue and join the crowd of Biden Dead Enders that said our best shot to beating Trump is sticking with Biden.
• Voting "present" for Israel's Iron Dome in 2021 while people were calling out for the plight of Palestinians.
• Etc.

 

Her greatest strength is speaking on progressive policies and making them mainstream like in the beginnings of her political career, but she's become more mute with time. So I don't know what her role is supposed to be in politics. But, it's nice to have someone more on the left in the Democratic Party. But, there's no grand plan. She's not going to overthrow the Democratic Party and get it to be more left. She cannot do that from within the system. Massive change can only come from the outside.

 

So, sure, is it productive to overly criticize AOC? Not really. But ever believing AOC was going to change much of anything was misguided to start with. We can elect people like her, Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, etc. to be more moldable and sympathetic to leftist causes. But, we cannot exclusively rely on them to force through change that is desperately needed. We need organization outside of electoral politics.

[ctlp27]

1 hour ago, Armani? said:

AOC is usually extremely calculated & pragmatic only to her own values which is needed to survive in Congress

 

Her political instincts were very off for getting Biden to not dropout though

 

As for Biden, she didn't really support him staying, but mostly criticised the leadership's efforts to work on BTS (which was a valid point) and the chaos that could ensue (which was kind of negated by Biden's direct support for Harris in his letter to cut off efforts for an open convention).

Edited August 30 by ctlp27

[Communion]

17 minutes ago, on the line said:

You have to win first to be effective

Rich people don't have a material understanding of the problems in which progressive policies aim to fix so this is why we see users like you continually claim things that exarbate these.problems are somehow effective. 

 

What has she achieved?

 

She wants M4A. The admin she supported has helped further privatize Medicare more than ever before. 

 

She did a photoshoot crying at the botder. The Dem nominee for president she's supporting is now calling for the most conservative immigration bill in 30 years that calls for mass detention of families and mass expulsions of undocumented people in just mere hours of arrest with little legal recourse. 

 

She's essentially achieved nothing in the progress to her claimed goals. 

[Communion]

1 minute ago, ctlp27 said:

As for Biden, she didn't really support him staying

No, she quite literally called the calls for him to step down a secret coup by elite donors. 

[Bloo]

1 minute ago, Communion said:

She wants M4A. The admin she supported has helped further privatize Medicare more than ever before. 

M4A truly is the seminal example of why simply electing progressives does nothing. Electoralism on its own is broken. You cannot have a representative government when billionaires exist and they're able to legally finance politicians. Despite M4A being super popular and being a mainstream issue going into 2020, even with the Squad, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris (lol) advocating for it, it's now never even mentioned. I don't even really hear AOC talk about it much anymore. 

 

If we're relying on politicians to push through meaningful change, we may as well roll over. 

 

I'm not saying everyone should stop voting. I think voting is important, but we have to do more than that and we need to have more realistic expectations of politicians. They're not going to think to fix our problems without us bullying the hell out of them. That's how the Civil Rights Act got passed. It wasn't because LBJ was just feeling nice that morning. He was scared to death of the Civil Rights Movement.

[2NE1]

Really trying to understand how anyone would have anything negative to say about this post? Or is it just me?

[DAP]

Yes we do need to organize power and it's a good thing we are doing that through a labor movement, something neither Another Ordinary C-nt or the other jesters in Congress could be assed with. 

 

Edited August 30 by DAP

[BOOMBAYAH]

There's some truth to what she's saying, but ultimately I think she's just an ambitious politician. I don't believe you can fix a broken system by working within it—at least not to the extent of completely reforming it—so all this talk of compromise in politics always falls flat for me. I still like AOC and think she's one of the best politicians in America right now, but it's important not to be manipulated. Politicians are not always 100% genuine, and they will lie to you.

Edited August 30 by BOOMBAYAH

[on the line]

4 minutes ago, 2NE1 said:

Really trying to understand how anyone would have anything negative to say about this post? Or is it just me?

It's not just you, but there's a minority of extremely loud and aggressive posters with unrealistic expectations for Harris and this extremely close election. Keep doing you.

[Mornings]

6 minutes ago, 2NE1 said:

Really trying to understand how anyone would have anything negative to say about this post? Or is it just me?

From what I'm gathering in here, it's fine but her actions contradict what she's saying. She's also not actually saying why people dislike her but deflecting onto how pro Palestinian American voters are misinformed and not doing anything except being loud on socials.

 

ive always found AOC to have a really ineffective use of social media. She's like a real housewife who joins the cast and pretends she hates designer clothes. 

[Communion]

19 minutes ago, Bloo said:

M4A truly is the seminal example of why simply electing progressives does nothing. Electoralism on its own is broken. You cannot have a representative government when billionaires exist and they're able to legally finance politicians. Despite M4A being super popular and being a mainstream issue going into 2020, even with the Squad, Bernie, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris (lol) advocating for it, it's now never even mentioned. I don't even really hear AOC talk about it much anymore. 

 

If we're relying on politicians to push through meaningful change, we may as well roll over. 

 

I'm not saying everyone should stop voting. I think voting is important, but we have to do more than that and we need to have more realistic expectations of politicians. They're not going to think to fix our problems without us bullying the hell out of them. That's how the Civil Rights Act got passed. It wasn't because LBJ was just feeling nice that morning. He was scared to death of the Civil Rights Movement.

I agree totally. 

 

I think this is why AOC runs into criticism because she has largely benefitted from activist energy and support, claiming she can move the party and yet she largely has nothing to show for it.

 

Of course she has a good voting record. But there are a notable amount of Dems with a progressive voting record who don't get major national backing as a movement figurehead  because they don't claim their votes are part of some greater progressive project. 

 

Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley are somewhat progressive, but you don't see them get as much pressure to hold the line on progressive values as Sanders, Warren, and Markey do because they don't fashion themselves as heads of a movement like the latter. 

 

(Cory Booker has a similar voting record as Wyden and trying to run nationally as a progressive during the 2020 presidential primary made people go ???? because he then took that step to rally progressives nationally behind him without any credibility or work,)

 

(The backlash to Warren in 2020 trying to moderate her policies and claim she is just a cog in the machine is another example of this.)

 

You have people like Nydia Velazquez or Yvette Clark or Bonnie Watson Coleman who are some of the most progressive Dems in the House behind the Squad yet people don't as closely monitor their votes because they didn't try to gain a national platform off the claim that they could lead a progressive project to fundamentally shift the Democratic party to the left. 

 

The value, like you said, of AOC is her platform and how she can help market and promote progressive policies. But now she argues she can't really push for these policies if the party is at odds with them because she doesn't want to hurt the party. So what shift is she actually achieving in the party?

 

She came into power on the claim of being an insurgency to move the party to the left. She's now arguing she doesn't want to do that and her power that she wants activists to believe she has is being a left wing vote within a right wing party. And most progressives are clearly not happy with that, and have never been happy with that as a proposed achievement that no matter who makes that argument. It's not a vendetta against her as she's seemingly fallen into believing after once saying she'd happily serve just one term if she could achieve radical change. 

Edited August 30 by Communion