AOC: The Next Pelosi? The Next President?

In Full Service of the US Oligarchy

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was born in 1989 in New York to an ethnic Puerto Rican father who was an architect and a Puerto Rican mother who was a house cleaner and school bus driver. When she was five, the family moved from an apartment in the Bronx to a house in Yorktown Heights; which is two thirds non-hispanic white and one third hispanic (minimal Black population), with a median household income in 2022 of US$138,750 and with only 4.52% of the residents being foreign born. It also has a large, and vibrant, Jewish population. This is the house in which she lived from the age of 5, in the very nice Yorktown Heights area, not exactly palatial but certainly not poverty in the Bronx.

After attending Yorktown High School in 2007, she studied international relations and economics at the prestigious Boston University where she graduated from in 2011. While there she interned for US Senator Ted Kennedy. Her father died whilst she was in college and she moved to the Bronx(?) to help her mother out, working as a bar tender and waitress as well as an educational director at the National Hispanic Institute. The AOC mythology very much mentions the first two jobs, but much less the latter one. Where she lived after university is a bit blurry, as wikipedia and many articles say “she returned to the Bronx”, but she also fought the foreclosure of the family home - which was in Yorktown Heights. So, she may have in fact returned to Yorktown Heights. Such blurring is notable in her own accounts of her life, where she refers to her childhood in the Bronx, when in fact the vast majority of her childhood was in Yorktown Heights.

In 2016, she worked as an organizer for the Bernie Sanders organization and then afterwards she visited Flint, Michigan (home to the water crisis that President Obama did not fix) and Standing Rock. She was then contacted by Brand New Congress (BNC), a political action community (PAC) formed by ex-Bernie Sanders campaign staffers, to stand as candidate. BNC joined up with the Justice Democrats, formed by two leaders of Sander’s campaign in 2017 (Saikat Chakrabarty an ex investment banker and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who for a while became AOC’s chief of staff, and Zack Exley a political operative who worked for the John Kerry, and Tony Blair campaigns) together with Kyle Kulinski and Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks. Connecting AOC with the bourgeois progressive fake “left”, including the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) which she joined.

In 2018 she won the Democratic primary for New York’s 14th congressional district, and then won the general election for the district in late 2018, standing on a highly progressive “socialist” electoral platform. She was re-elected in 2020 and 2022 while building a large social media following. In 2024, the DSA debated whether to support her given how much she had become a Democratic Party careerist (see below), but in the end decided to endorse her. That position was reversed after AOC’s participation in a panel that conflated anti-Zionism with anti-semitism, her support for a resolution that conflated opposition to the existence of the state of Israel with anti-semitism, and her co-signing of a press release in support of Israel’s Iron Dome missile defence system. She had made the surrender to the Zionist lobby and US foreign policy establishment required for advancement in US politics; one surrender of many to facilitate her career advancement. She was successfully re-elected in 2024, opposed by an investment banker in the Democratic primary.

At the beginning of her career as a US House Representative, AOC made a lot of noise about being against the Democratic National Convention (DNC) establishment but this was quite quickly turned into performative-only acts as she came to understand what was required for career advancement. After being an “enemy” of Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat Speaker of the House, she made her peace with one of the central leaders of the oligarch-serving DNC, and could now be considered to be following a path to one day be a “Nancy Pelosi”. Comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore noted AOC’s early disciplining by the DNC and then her surrender to the DNC establishment.

From this AOC:

To this AOC:

As with Bernie Sanders, she carries out a performance about being progressive (the fake “socialist” part became non-tenable long ago) while fully supporting the DNC establishment and disciplining any progressive voices. As Jimmy Dore so well states, they are a “pretend opposition”, fulfilling the sheep dog role of gathering all those wanting real change and nullifying their influence. In no way will she “fight oligarchy”, she has become a willing servant of that oligarchy. That is what it takes to advance within the Democratic Party and why “change from within” will always be a losing strategy. One commentator quite correctly stated that the “fight oligarchy” tour should be renamed as the “How Stupid Are You?” tour, yet another Democratic Party attempt to hoodwink the US people in the service of the US oligarchy.

All of this careerist surrendering has worked well for AOC, who is now even considered as a possibility for the presidential candidacy in 2028! Perhaps a female “hopey changey” Obama “progressive” to help consolidate the oligarch-serving policies of Trump, while making some performative changes in the cultural arena. Since the Clinton administration that spent eight years embedding neoliberalism within the US, the role of the Democratic presidents (Obama, Biden) has been to both consolidate and extend the changes made by the Republicans while covering this reality with a performance of being progressive. Could the US oligarchy pull off this con one more time, eschewing the need for an explicit move toward fascism? Perhaps a gay Pete Buttigieg instead of a female AOC; the Democrats love to play such identitarian games.

Or perhaps an Indian-American Muslim with a Syrian-American wife who may become New York Mayor later this year? As I put forward in a note, a quick research of Zohran Mamdani’s background points to the son of a very upper middle class / lower upper class family that attended private school and a very expensive elite liberal college who put in a short time as a local activist (a la Obama) before getting elected to the New York State Assembly only 5.5 years out of university. Perhaps a run for the US Senate in 2028 before the presidency in 2032? And Jimmy Dore may once again have his early optimism crushed, as with AOC. The Democratic Party will keep playing the same game until it doesn’t work anymore. Like good liberals, if manufactured consent stops working they will easily move on to greater authoritarianism and even fascism if that is what is required to maintain economic liberalism (as against political liberalism). Let’s remember that it was a Democratic president, Wilson, who brought fascism to the US to drag the US population into a war that they did not want to fight.