On Saturday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the Fresh Face™ of the Democratic Party, found herself on the wrong end of a rather damning expose from The New York Post. It turns out that the woman who has declared herself “the boss” of environmental policy thanks to her asinine Green New Deal proposal – a proposal for which she released a fact sheet so half-baked that her own team pretended it was an early draft and pulled it down – has now stumbled into a pothole of hypocrisy. It turns out that despite the fact that her campaign offices are located 138 feet from a subway station, she listed “1,049 transactions for Uber, Lyft, Juno and other car services, federal filings show. The campaign had 505 Uber expenses alone.” Overall, her campaign spent nearly $30,000 on ride-sharing, as opposed to just $8,335.41 on Metrocard transactions. Her campaign also logged over $25,000 worth of airline transactions and 66 flights despite taking Amtrak only 18 times. Her proposal famously called for an end to air travel and the use of carbon-based engines.
To this, AOC replied snippily that she was merely “living in the world”:
And others pulled up an old column about AOC’s hypocrisy from last year, by in-house democratic socialist Elizabeth Bruenig of The Washington Post:
[I]t’ll always be news if Bernie Sanders wears a $700 coat or buys a house by a lake, because his political position on inequality is so obviously moral that the only way to impeach it is to make him seem dishonest about it. The same goes, and will continue to go, for every other candidate who attempts to advance material equality. This stance is hard to supply a persuasive democratic alternative to, so critics instead claim that its standard-bearers don’t really mean it.
Now, there is a distinction to be made between failing to live up to your own standards and hypocrisy. We all fail to live up to our own standards. Hypocrisy is something different – the belief that the standard ought not apply to you. Thus, the man who commits adultery while opposing it may not be a hypocrite if he understands that he has sinned; the man who commits adultery and justifies it while condemning it for others is a hypocrite.
Into which category does AOC fall? The latter. She could simply have stated that she falls short of her own standards, but that she’s doing the best she can and will try to do better in the future. But she has no intention of doing better in the future. She would like to continue to experience the wonders of Uber and avoid subways while sucking taxpayer dollars out of others’ pockets for high-speed rail and regulating Uber. This is hypocrisy. It’s fully in line with the typical hypocrisy associated with leading socialists. This is the stuff about which Orwell wrote in Animal Farm:
“Comrades!” he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. I dislike them myself. Our sole object in taking these things is to preserve our health. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.”
Because here’s the thing: we all live in the world. And AOC has suggested that we are engaged in a collective moral failing if we fail to stop what we’re doing on a personal level – unless your name is AOC or you agree to her legislative agenda. Limousine liberalism isn’t merely about liberals failing to live up to their own standards; it’s about liberals not truly believing that the standards apply to them.
AOC is of this ilk. Here was her second attempt to broach the subject:
Use of paper isn’t like any of the other things she’s railed against – driving cars, eating hamburgers, taking planes. She’s deliberately conflating unobjectionable behavior with behavior that she herself has condemned for everyone else. She’s a hypocrite. And she’s a hypocrite because her standards aren’t good for anyone, even AOC, let alone everyone.