Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) advocated for the Democrat Party to become even more extreme in order to implement her far-left agenda, according to a new interview.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came in a Politico article about the Democrats’ disastrous House races from last week’s election, which saw them lose seats when they were projected to gain them. The article specifically centered around how far-left Democrats claim that their agenda is not what cost moderate Democrats their House seats.
Politico reported that the far-left lawmakers argued that the Democrat Party “never formed an offensive strategy” on key issues like “racial justice.” Apparently, the political Left causing billions of dollars in damage from rioting, looting, calling the police “cancer,” and burning down cities does not count as an “offensive strategy.”
Ocasio-Cortez stressed to Politico that Democrats needed to focus on racism or else they will continue to play defense.
“It’s not just like some moral question about how you confront racism in elections, but it is now an existential crisis for the Democratic Party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. The problem, she said, is Democrats don’t want to talk about race. “Anti-racism plays zero percent of a role in Democratic electoral strategy — zero, explicitly, implicitly. I’m not telling people to virtue signal, but there’s just like no plan for it.”
Ocasio-Cortez said that it was time for Democrats to “take our gloves off with Republicans.”
“We’re always messaging around bipartisanship and how much we love working with Republicans all the time in a lot of these sensitive areas,” she said. “We need to have an unapologetic agenda, have an actual alternative and counter-messaging that is distinct from the Republican Party instead of trying to play to notions of civility. … I just really hope that it gets through to a lot of people that this idea that we can win over white voters on a civility argument is like not a reliable strategy.”
An article in The Week essentially argued the opposite of what Ocasio-Cortez claimed was the reason that Democrats lost in down ballot races:
So much for the Democratic fantasy — the one that seemingly never dies — of unobstructed rule. Democrats didn’t just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation’s fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College. Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation’s history, with white supremacy and racism placed “at the very center.” Ensure “equity” not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they’d even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.
No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.
Yes, Trump and the Republican cheerleading section online and on cable news and talk radio harped on every extreme proposal. But this wasn’t just a function of the fallacy of composition, where one loony activist says something off the wall and the GOP amplifies it far beyond reason in order to tar the opposition unfairly. These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn’t enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.
And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of “democracy” has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.
There will be no court packing. No added states. Nothing from the toxic progressive-fantasy wishlist will come anywhere close to passing. Instead, we will have grinding, obstructive gridlock. Some will demand that Biden push through progressive priorities by executive order. But every time he does — like every incident of urban rioting and looting, every effort to placate the left-wing “Squad” in the House, every micro-targeted identity-politics box-checking display of intersectional moral preening and finger-wagging — the country will move closer to witnessing a conservative backlash that results in Republicans taking control of the House and increasing their margin in the Senate in November 2022, rendering the Biden administration even more fully dead in the water.
Ocasio-Cortez said in a separate interview with The New York Times that Democrats needed to give white people “anti-racist” training because “if we keep losing white shares” of “the white electorate” that “there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.”
The far-left lawmaker sparked controversy last week when she suggested going after people in the future who supported President Donald Trump.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” she wrote. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”
Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future? I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) November 6, 2020