Checkpoint: Attacking AOC is the Wrong Way to Jumpstart the Left Tea Party
Bloomberg
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has refuted calls for her to stonewall Nancy Pelosi’s nomination as Speaker of the House through forcing a Medicare for All vote. Even if AOC were to apply this pressure, the outcome would be myopic, with essentially no chance of the legislation passing through the Senate. Since the legislation is impassable, the primary goal of these calls is to unify Left politicians into a political block similar to the Tea Party which pressured the Republican Party in the 2010s towards a populist shift.
The modern American Left is a kaleidoscope, composed of a variety of fractured movements that coalesce to create a multifaceted whole. Invoking the left-wing of the Democratic Party references a multitude of different organizations, all with distinct priorities, from BLM and the Defund the Police Movement, to the DSA, to even Democratic Party loyalists that consider themselves to be part of the left flank of the party. It’s for this reason, that whenever ink begins to spill discussing a fracture within the American Left, or even a major conflict, skepticism is justified. As the Left seeks to mirror the Tea Party in leveraging an antagonistic relationship with the Democratic Party, there are lessons to be learned from what worked for the Tea Party in cementing its brand within the American political imagination.
The most recent online drama involves renewed pressure from a spattering of left-wing activists seeking to push Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to pressure Nancy Pelosi to place Medicare for All at the top of the Democratic agenda. AOC and the Justice Democrats, or The Squad, are an isolated group of politicians that have increased power going into 2021 due to the narrowing of the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives. A growing group of political activists and newsmakers have criticized inaction following this shift in power by labeling The Squad as turncoats, more invested in a long political career than the actual betterment of their constituents. At the end of the day, despite both this shift in power and rhetoric, Nancy Pelosi will remain the primary power broker in the House and Medicare for All will continue to be a lofty goal.
Over the holiday season, a handful of online personalities applied this new pressure to AOC, arguing that her new position in a tightened House gives AOC the leverage to force Nancy Pelosi to hold a vote on Medicare for All. As in order for Pelosi to retain her speakership she needs support from the Justice Democrats. In the best-case scenario, this symbolic vote is held, passes in the house, and dies on Mitch McConnell’s desk. In the worst-case scenario, the Democratic party claps back against this internal tension, and Medicare for All is shot down in the House as yet another progressive pipe dream.
The logic for this political theater happening is threefold. First, it has the opportunity to further popularise Medicare for All. Second, it will out the enemies to the Left within the Democratic Party through an easy to read list of “no” votes. Most importantly it has the opportunity to jump-start a new relationship for the Left within the Democratic Party as a force akin to the Tea Party. Unfortunately, this bit of political theater has little in common with tactics that were successful during the rise of the Tea Party.
To start, political reform, from suffrage movements to labor reforms, requires mass mobilization and popular support. Power doesn’t bend towards the people otherwise. In the case of Medicare for All, popular support exists. A Hill-HarrisX poll from April shows that 87% of Democrats support the potential legislation. However, at the moment, the groups currently lobbying AOC to force the Medicare for All vote are not proportionate to the popularity of the legislation, meaning that the extant support for the movement has not been fully mobilized.
The genesis of the idea came from a handful of online personalities and YouTube shows, including Jimmy Dore, Crystal Ball on The Hill’s Rising, and Kyle Kulinski. While all of these shows provide routinely excellent or at least thought-provoking analysis, they also do not have the reach to rival the power of a mass labor protest, sanitation worker strike, or even a popular evening news segment. Even if you assume they have no repeat subscribers, the total sum of YouTube subscribers to this newly anti-AOC faction doesn’t even break 3 million. This isn’t to minimize the value of their reporting but to highlight the insular nature of digital left-wing media.
The Tea Party cut their teeth through a series of astroturfed protests against individual taxes in individual states, battles which were proportionate in scope to the number of people the movement could realistically get to protest. In comparison, the current “Left Tea Party,” as it is affectionately referred to by Kyle Kalinski on the excellent Bad Faith podcast hosted by Briahna Joy Gray & Virgil Texas, consists of largely passive viewership and a handful of angry tweets fighting for the largest policy reform of the modern moment. The construction of a Left Tea Party and a Democrat-antagonistic political strategy is undeniably important for fomenting a more powerful Left, however, a largely symbolic scrum over one of the most important pieces of legislative reform in recent memory has only the potential to end in defeat at the hands of either the Republican-held Senate or even more disastrously within the Democratic House.
Overall, while the strategy is sound in reference to the success of the Tea Party, Medicare for All is a poor choice in legislation for a sacrificial ox, while other more attainable legislative goals would add to the image of the Left as an autonomous political organ within the Democratic Party.
The current power in the American left-wing is centered around the concept of the bully pulpit. The bully pulpit is a concept typically attributed to the innate presidential power to reach a massive number of viewers and legislate without legislation by generating mass consensus. The most profound recent example of this is Donald Trump tweeting a ban on transgender service people within the military, an edict which the military scrambled to meet as confusion rose over whether the President’s tweet counted as genuine policy.
As an occupier of a bully pulpit herself, AOC is an invaluable ally to the Left, as one of the most popular politicians in office, as well as one of the most widely viewed online. Isolating her as an enemy to the Left is a political blunder as it limits the amount of reach the Left has. Rather than riding on the power of political personality, the political strategy of forcing a Medicare for All vote relies on the number of Americans that are paying close attention to legislation.
This is a classic mire for political insiders, mirrored by the recent fight for $2000 stimulus checks, where forcing Mitch McConnell to act as the gravedigger for a massively popular piece of legislation should have had profound reverberations in the upcoming Senate elections in Georgia. As Fivethirtyeight recently reported, this connection between legislation and popular support is often tenuous at best, with people often paying greater attention to personality rather than policy. For this reason, AOC’s recent interview positioning herself against Pelosi could have a larger effect on mass consensus than the entire vote surrounding Medicare for All.
The Tea Party has a playbook for this as well, going as far as to adopt a literal flag to rally around with members of congress flying the Gadsden flag at protests, causing a massive spike in sales. Following this exceptional branding campaign, Senator Ted Cruz would begin his meteoric ascension to a household name and one of the most powerful men in the country. Here repeated iconography, a massive media circus, and the visible support of political personalities began to propel the Tea Party into a position of genuine political power as outsiders within the Republican Party. In contrast, the current Democratic conflict over Medicare for All, even if executed flawlessly, would likely be ignored as the type of politics most people don’t pay attention to.
While there is little to indicate that forcing a vote on Medicare for All over the threat of Nancy Pelosi’s speakership will result in a successful push for that legislation, there are myriad ways that the Left can begin to emulate the success of the Tea Party. First, the left-wing of the Democratic Party lacks a clear unifying brand. Similarly, there is no distinct caucus within the Democratic Left that works as an autonomous body by threatening to hamstring legislation and propel unknown candidates in state and local government, with the Justice Democrats currently forming a largely informal coalition. Finally, the Tea Party relied heavily upon funding from the Koch funded Americans for Prosperity, a political advocacy group that was able to directly support and fund the protests that galvanized Americans around seemingly esoteric issues such as obesity taxes. The result of the combination of these elements was a movement that was most importantly, highly readable. Rather than news items reporting on internal conflicts and complex political gamesmanship, reporters were able to focus on highly digestible images, such as protestors in Binghamton, NY emptying bottles of soda into the river in a pantomime of the original Boston Tea Party.
There is much to be gained in pressuring Pelosi from the perspective of a political insider, yet there is little reason to believe that this piece of political theater would be digestible for the public and lead to a separation of support for the Democratic establishment. Similarly, the debate threatens to be more divisive for the Left itself than the greater Democratic Party, at a time period when the Left needs to begin the process of unification and coalition behind a collection of outspoken personalities and strategically unified legislators.
