Historian Rick Perlstein has an interesting theory about why AOC is so courageous in taking on Republicans and so successful in doing so. In short, it’s because she is from a new generation not weighed down by the trauma of Republican dominance since Reagan.
I remember the 80s. Dems campaigned on social security and tried to look more like Rs. Jesse Jackson scared the shit out of moderates. Congress stood up to Reagan on some things, but we had 12 years of Republican rule until 1992. Then two years of moderate left government followed by triangulation. Bush’s wars and tax cuts followed.
Obama recognized this when he hoped to change the discourse from the Reagan anti-government years. But he was not completely successful.
AOC does not have all of that baggage. The future of this nation and our political party is in people like AOC, Rashida Tlaib and others who don’t have that baggage of fear and deference to Rs.
And, suddenly, someone emerges who seems to be listening to all this, who is probably part of those conversations. And, suddenly, she has the power to actually act in a way that the Party hasn’t—a party that, almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan. It’s a profoundly generational phenomenon, and, clearly, it’s scary.
snip
I think psychologically there’s a lot of, shall we say, neurosis. Again, going back to this trauma of the Reagan victory, the Gingrich victory, the Bush victories—it’s people who built their political identities around a neurotic response to trauma. It’s, We gotta build a protective shell around ourselves because, if we show our egos, our egos will be destroyed, to put it in psychoanalytic terms.
To have this young person who hasn’t experienced this trauma . . . and one of the things that’s fascinating about this—I’ll call it an often-used word—authenticity that she has is that you see her, in very interesting ways, going back to modes of rhetoric and modes of political communication that you associate with lots of pre-Reagan figures. Although I’ll also say figures like Reagan. It’s like Harry Truman.
What are examples of that?
I don’t know if she sits around and reads political history or looks at old political videos. But I see, on the “60 Minutes” interview, Anderson Cooper throws a question to her that for just about any traditional, old-generation Democrat is a stumper—Oh, the other side says you’re radical. And she had this ready-made answer in the hopper, which was to deploy these very powerful symbols from the American civic religion, and I’m going to quote: “Abraham Lincoln made the radical decision to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the radical decision to embark on establishing programs like social security. . . . If that’s what radical means, call me a radical.”
Now, immediately, when I heard her say that, I heard a very famous quote from J.F.K., who was asked if he was a liberal in the same kind of accusatory tone, and he said, “If by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties—someone who believes that we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say that I’m a liberal.”
I see her Reagan-like brilliance when she comes up with a phrase, like I heard her do in an interview on the shutdown, which she immediately took to a much higher level. She said the people at the border trying to get in “are acting more American than any person who seeks to keep them out will ever be.” I mean, she mentions that the kids who died in custody—she mentioned that it was Christmastime, which was just so Reagan, to use this resonant emotional symbol. She mentions people coming to the country just with the shirt on their back. She says that the people trying to keep them out are “anti-American.” This is the American civil religion. This is playing the game in a way that a pre-traumatized generation of Democrats was able to play the game.
New Yorker: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Takes the Democrats Back to the Future: An Interview with the Historian Rick Perlstein
There’s much more at the link Makes a lot of sense. The future takes the best from our past and creates something new. AOC will not be intimidated by the losses of our past.
People like this:
Some men [and women] see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.
Robert F. Kennedy
She has the same charisma.
Update I: Added the first paragraph to the block quote. The one about “a party that, almost forty years later, is still traumatized by the success of Ronald Reagan.” It sets up the rest well.