Sebastian Gorka, late of the Trump Administration, stood before the annual gathering of the Conservative Political Action Conference last week and made plain the inner frenzy of a party that must place its hopes for 2020 on a President who had just been described before a congressional committee as “a racist,” “a con man,” and “a cheat.” Hence the rhetorical smoke bombs. Wild-eyed Democrats are coming! Gorka declared, “They want to take your pickup truck! They want to rebuild your home! They want to take away your hamburgers! This is what Stalin dreamt about but never achieved!”
The Stalinist nightmare that Gorka had on his mind is the Green New Deal, a still rough proposal that calls on the U.S. government to come to the belated rescue of the planet with the same sense of urgency that it displayed in rescuing the economy during the Great Depression. To Gorka, such a proposal is a communist “watermelon”: “green on the outside, deep, deep red communist on the inside.”
The President, who dismisses climate change as “a Chinese hoax,” also waxed derisive at cpac. “New Green Deal or whatever they hell they call it . . . I encourage it,” he said caustically, in a sweaty, two-hour rant on Saturday. “I think it’s really something Democrats should promote. . . . No planes! No energy! When the wind stops blowing, that’s the end of your electric. ‘Darling, is the wind blowing today? I’d like to watch television, darling.’ ”
The focus of this fear campaign, the nexus of all danger, is a member of Congress who has been in office for two months: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, at twenty-nine, represents parts of the Bronx and Queens. With Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, she is a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal. Because she questions our habits of fossil-fuel consumption and industrial agriculture, her opponents reason, she can’t possibly be trying to head off global catastrophe. She just wants to steal your Chevy Colorado and your Big Mac.
“Apparently, I am a cow dictator,” Ocasio-Cortez told me. “What’s humorous to me is that we’re finally proposing a clear, ambitious, but necessary and grounded policy on the scale of the problem. And so it’s hard for the Republicans to refute the actual policy on its substance. They resort to mythologizing it on a ludicrous level. Ted Cruz says we want to ‘kill all the cows.’ How far have we slid in our discourse? But that’s what half our political representation is up to.”
Ocasio-Cortez upset a veteran of her own party in a primary race, and came to office as an unabashed idealist. The mocking attacks have been a constant on the right ever since. There are phony memes about her clothes, her makeup, her intellect, her boyfriend, her apartment building, her childhood, her high school, her relatives, her old nickname, her dance routine from her days at Boston University. There is a creepy dimension to some of them. A nude selfie made its way through social media—until it was unmasked as a fraud.
Members of the Republican caucus have been no more welcoming. As Ocasio-Cortez rose to cast her vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker, Republicans booed. In the cartoon being painted of her, Ocasio-Cortez is both ideologically monstrous and intellectually limited. “Every time she opens her mouth, I think she’s kidding,” Jerry Falwell, Jr., the evangelical leader and president of Liberty University, told the delegates at cpac. Ed Rollins, an old Reagan adviser who appears frequently on Fox News, referred to her as a “little girl.” On Fox, mispronouncing “Ocasio-Cortez” is considered hilarious.
“It feels like an extra job,” she said of the attacks. “I’ve got a full-time job in Congress and then I moonlight as America’s greatest villain, or as the new hope. And it’s pretty tiring. I’m just a normal person. I knew that I was not going to be liked. I’m a Democrat. I’m a woman. I’m a young woman. A Latina. And I’m a liberal, a D.S.A. member,” she said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America. “I believe health care is a right and people should be paid enough to live. Those are offensive values to them. But this ravenous hysteria—it’s really getting to a level that is kind of out of control. It’s dangerous and even scary. I have days when it seems some people want to stoke just enough of it to have just enough plausible deniability if something happens to me.”
The Trump family has attacked her from the start. Because she had the D.S.A.’s endorsement, last December, Donald Trump, Jr., posted a joke on Instagram about how in socialist countries people eat their dogs rather than walk them. (“It’s funny cuz it’s true!!!” he wrote.) Ocasio-Cortez’s office had no comment, but she did, tweeting, “Please, keep it coming Jr—it’s definitely a ‘very, very large brain’ idea to troll a member of a body that will have subpoena power in a month.”
In fact, last week, in her first major appearance as a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Ocasio-Cortez approached the job of interrogating Michael Cohen with care. Republicans have accused her of being a knowledge-lite performer whose only talent is a mastery of Twitter. But, while most of the Republican committee members and even a few Democrats put on laughably self-regarding performances, Ocasio-Cortez followed a line of questioning that helped tease out important facts and responses from Cohen. Thanks in part to that exchange, we can expect to hear from some essential characters from Trump Tower, Misters Weisselberg and Calamari.
Ocasio-Cortez says that she has tried to keep her focus partly by avoiding watching Trump on television: “He relies and thrives on attention, and so the less attention he’s given, even if it’s just one set of eyeballs, the weaker he is.” She said that watching Trump in the House chamber at the State of the Union address made her feel “sick” and “underwhelmed.”
“He is such a small, mediocre person,” she told me. “I grew up with a real romanticism about America. I grew up in a first-generation household where your parents give up everything, and for me America was the greatest thing ever to exist. To be there on the floor of the House was beyond anything my parents would have ever dreamed of. But the person behind the podium was so unskilled. It was kind of sad.”
Ocasio-Cortez has proposed a set of left-leaning ideas: Medicare for All, a seventy-per-cent tax rate on income above ten million dollars, a guaranteed living wage. At first, she seemed to unnerve Democratic leaders. She supported and appeared at a sit-in outside Nancy Pelosi’s office with an environmental group, the Sunrise Movement. Pelosi was unamused and later referred dismissively to the Green New Deal as a “dream.”
But that was weeks ago. Pelosi has found a modus operandi with Ocasio-Cortez, and posed with her (along with Representives Jahana Hayes and Ilhan Omar) for the cover of Rolling Stone. The idea of a Green New Deal has won endorsement from Democratic Presidential candidates (Harris, Warren, Sanders, Booker, Klobuchar, Gillibrand, Inslee) and a growing number of senators and congressmen. Of course, it is not entirely clear, in detailed legislative terms, what exactly they are endorsing. In general, the idea is to pour government money into transforming the economy in ways that might head off the worst of climate change. At this point, the most salient feature of the proposal is a sense of urgency, its conversation-changing radicalism.
There is enormous value in that. So far, moderation has done nothing to override denialism. In an interview after her primary win, Ocasio-Cortez told me that one of the books she read in college that influenced her most was Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s “Why We Can’t Wait,” which includes his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” There King wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”
“I think King had a point,” she told me.
Moderation, to say nothing of science denial on the right, has certainly done far too little to head off the catastrophic effects promised by climate change in our time. Just before Ocasio-Cortez won her seat, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that, if carbon emissions continue to rise as they are, the world will soon experience immense destabilization, with cities and regions with intolerable temperatures creating tens of millions of “climate refugees” forced to escape spreading deserts. Unique ecosystems and entire species will vanish. The Great Barrier Reef, already in dire condition, will die. Whole industries, like fishing, will diminish enormously. We have already seen the rise of extreme storms, floods, heat waves, wildfires. The window for meaningful change is closing. “The next few years are probably the most important in our history,” Debra Roberts, the co-chair of one of the I.P.C.C.’s three working groups, has said.
There is no question that the Green New Deal is more substantial in its sense of urgency and ambition than it is in its fine-grained detail. But what has the Republican Party offered, other than a phony restitution of a coal economy and a withdrawal from the Paris climate accord? The recent spectacle of a powerful Democrat like Dianne Feinstein dismissing a group of earnest schoolchildren and students imploring her to support a Green New Deal was maddening to watch. “I know what I’m doing!” she told the kids.
Agree with Ocasio-Cortez’s solutions or not, it’s to her credit that, in such a short time, she has helped change the terms of the debate. “Radicalism pushes the bonds of what liberals will jump on board with,” Saikat Chakrabarti, the representative’s chief of staff, said. “Every major social movement has worked that way.”
The Republican strategy—to brand the Democratic Party and its 2020 nominee, no matter who it is, a harebrained revolutionary—comes from a familiar playbook. Obama was routinely branded a socialist, even a Kenyan socialist, by the far-right opposition. This time around, Donald Trump, as he made clear in his State of the Union Address, will try to hang “socialism” around the neck of the Democratic Party and describe the Democratic candidate as the second coming of Kim Jong Un. But wait! The President “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un. Whatever. That will surely be the move, and Ocasio-Cortez, who is six years short of eligibility for the Presidency, will surely be a focal point of Trump’s tantrums.
Why? Well, first of all, she comes from New York, but not Trump’s New York. She grew up without great privilege. She is a person of color. And she is a woman. And, “In politics,” as Ashley Reese wrote for Jezebel, “women are often either characterized as hideous harpies like Hillary Clinton or pretty idiots whose ‘craziness’ is bound up with their sex appeal. . . . To her critics, Ocasio-Cortez is firmly in the pretty idiot category.”
When I read that to Ocasio-Cortez, she could only agree. “I feel like I predicted it from day one,” she told me. “The idea that a woman can be as powerful as a man is something that our society can’t deal with. But I am as powerful as a man and it drives them crazy.”
Was that the case with Trump? I asked.
“I can see Trump being enormously upset that a twenty-nine-year-old Latina, who is the daughter of a domestic worker, is helping to build the case to get his financial records. I think that adds insult to injury to him.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s staff members say that they often debate whether she is overexposed—if she is taking on too much or getting too far out ahead of the debate. So far, despite the occasional stumble and the endless attacks, she’s decided that the time demands a headlong direction. “When there is a fire, there are the people who run toward the fire and people who run away,” she told me last year. “I want to be with the people who run toward it.”
When I recalled that line, Ocasio-Cortez said, “It still feels terrifying every time. I am trying to pick my battles, but, until there are more people running toward the fire, it’s hard to take a break. The good news is that there seems like more people are running toward the fire. It’s scary running into a burning building. But what is the choice? It can’t be understated how imperilled our democracy is right now.”
