“I have a local city councilman that uh has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” AOC says in a recent viral video clip, stretching a massive smile like she’d been practicing Mamdani in the mirror, then cackling, “HAHAHAHAHAHA!” in a cringey way that kind of reminds me of Kamala Harris screaming “JOY!!!” at people.
Just a few banger Darlializa Avila Chevalier quotes:
"Yes, it means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever."
"Yes, literally, abolish the border."
“A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward."
Lefties can deploy the word salad about how "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" AKSHUALLY means increasing funding to those institutions, but no one is forgetting the fever dream that created by an army neurotic women and far-left lunatics, including AOC. It's never too late to admit you were wrong.
As I note in my post, the other side elevated the dumbest most extreme people as avatars of the movement, not people like Alex Vitale, or people like me who've been doing criminal justice reporting for years and know what prisons are like.
I admit that the slogans were dumb and easy targets to trigger backlash. But the policy content is not. Borders, prisons, and police (and ICE) as they exist now cause a LOT of needless human suffering that actually ends up being totally counterproductive if the goal is public safety.
If the goal is to elect more fascists, then sure, go ahead and tell me the biggest danger to me is someone crosses the border to make a better life or someone who sold weed 25 years ago not dying in prison. The Dems' problem is that they help define completely insane, right-wing policies as "moderate." Really sick stuff.
That is a much more sober and reasonable stance on those issues than Woke 1.0 presented those issues. I would just ask that you don't attack AOC for moderating on those extreme expressions, while sincere, radical zealots like DAC are being elevated within the Democratic Party by Democratic voters.
Yeah I'm not a purist, obviously I'd want AOC in 2028 rather than JD Vance or Marco Rubio for heaven's sake.
I've just noticed that Mamdani, who's arguably the most talented politician in generations, always very politely, but sternly, sticks to core principles.
I think AOC is really talented. I also just think instead of "HAHAHAHAHAing" at a movement that may have been misguided in messaging, but tried to address actual atrocities, shouldn't be laughed off the way that, say, we can laugh off how for a while you had to say "Latinx" online when most Latinos had no idea what this was. Defund and abolish were about life and death, not trendy virtue signaling.
The ongoing fued in my head of “la-teenks” vs “latin-eckys” is the hill I choose to die on. But it is never, ever “latin-x” which makes zero sense in English or Spanish
I don’t understand then why there’s SO much resistance to just… changing the slogan?
Reform the police, not defund the police. Humane borders not abolish borders.
It’s very, very obviously predictable that the maximalist rhetoric is going to create that backlash and attract the stupidest literalists who defend it verbatim. So since that’s so obviously predictable… why do it?
I am pretty sure you’d agree about the opposite positions. If somebody said “remove all the Mexicans” and then said “oh well actually I meant a nuanced take about slowing illegal immigration. I don’t actually believe people should be automatically deported for being mexican”. Like… would you really respect their strategy to emphasize the issue? You’d say that the actual verbatim words don’t matter, it’s the most well thought out policy behind them that does?
Because "reform" is toothless when the institutions have no incentive to reform and lawmakers have no incentive to pursue policies that can be spun by their opponents as soft-on-crime. "Reform" looks like a federal MOU that no one bothers following and lets local politicians off the hook (and at this point I don't even know if they do them). The idea behind defund was, tell a police department, "No BearCat for you if you keep killing people and also maybe fire that one dude that's cost the city millions in lawsuits." I admit -- the rhetoric was a mistake, we should have predicted it would be spun and cause a backlash--but the idea of tying behavior to financial incentive seems pretty ....reasonable to me? I get why rightwingers did it but I want to wring the necks of "contrarian brand Leftists" that also shit on it until it became toxic and died.
I STILL can’t tell if you consider it a bad slogan or not. Like you’re saying the rhetoric was a mistake… yet everything else in your comment strongly suggests you WOULDNT pick another slogan over it (despite thinking it doesn’t work?)
Like is this just a case of wanting to eat your cake (have people understand your nuanced desires) and have it too (say something very simple and provocative that is so strong people have to engage with it)?
Frankly, I think the reason it “worked” in drawing attention is *because* it was so, so easy for opponents to dunk on and make look stupid. Like the reason you seem to cling to it (it draws attention) is actively bad for the ideologies you support no?
(Or the incentives to signal what your tribe requires you to signal are stronger than the incentives to use words in a manner that might actually get sane reforms to happen? Couldn’t be that.)
Slogans shouldn’t be motte and baileys. (Look up that fallacy if you haven’t heard of it).
We shouldn’t have to say, actually we don’t agree with what the slogan says either we were just talking about X much more reasonable claim.
Meanwhile there were a significant amount of people who actually did want to do the full slogan claim, and if you don’t want to do that you have no way of differentiating yourself from them.
The rational response of a voter is to just reject what you’re pitching because it sounds like weasel words to them and they have no idea what you’re actually trying to do.
There’s a reason that this era of left wing messaging was horribly unpopular with the public.
These are all reasonable positions lmao, politics is not defined by American electoralism. Though yes anyone trying to get elected in the U.S. on those policies is a raving lunatic political theory has been considering whether carceral justice is necessary for centuries.
You are one of those deranged progressives who is still living in 2021, and that's ok. Down here on planet earth, everyone knows those are insane political positions to hold and that's why every left-of-center politician is running away from them as fast as humanly possible.
But it doesn't mean increasing funding it means completely changing what those institutions exist for. The American economy runs on the exploitation of workers without citizenship they'll never actually end illegal immigration because its too profitable (trump has actually even said this), the prison system exists to ruin the lives of millions of poor people for petty crimes. The people who suffer under these systems are not represented by anyone in American politics and now it's being depicted as insane to even try and discuss them as problems. This is how fascism works, huge sections of society are criminalised and dehumanised so any attempt to humanise or represent their interests politically becomes seen as far left radical extremism. ICE is extremist, mass incarcercation is extremist, police being a corrupt mafia who's role is to terrorise the poor is extremist. But in the USA supporting these rotten institutions is now seen as sensible centrism (because the people who vote aren't affected by them or profit off them)
Also even from a pragmatic political perspective supporting these movements helped the Democrats win in 2020. We now have this ludicrous situation where people are saying the Democrats need to shift away from the platform that actually last got them elected and double down on the platform that Harris lost on. It's so fucking stupid, AOC gained all her initial support in the 2010s BY FULLY EMBRACING ALL THESE WOKE POSITIONS. Biden lost the support of every demographic except wealthy white people because he u-turned on all of them and HARRIS LOST. American political discourse is all just wealthy people arguing about how the Democrats need to appeal to their interests and not the interests of Labour or the poor. THEYRE ALREADY DOING THAT AND THEY KEEP LOSING
Imagine getting your ass kicked coast-to-coast after nominating the second most progressive Senator (and VP to the self-described most progressive president in history) then deciding “not far left enough, let’s go with actual communists”.
That's not what actually happened though is it, Harris did not embrace any progressive positions and spent her entire campaign cosying up to the billionaire class. Biden disavowed every single progressive platform he was elected to pursue such as ending student loan debt, universal healthcare, police and prison reform etc etc etc. They also carried out an unbelievably unpopular war in the middle east and refused point blank to disavow militarism or imperialism. It doesn't matter if Biden said he was progressive while refusing to pursue any progressive policies, Kamala Harris also pretended to be progressive in 2019 and disavowed all of it by the time of her campaign.
Why did Biden win while doing performative Black Lives Matter stuff and promising progressive policies and why did Kamala lose while disavowing progressive policies and trying to appeal to the right wing? Can you try and do some actual political analysis rooted in what actually happened?
Now AOC is trying to present herself as a viable candidate by doing the exact same thing and completely moving away from all the positions that actually gained her support and popularity.
Bury your head in the sand, I don't care. We are done letting far left losers gaslight us into voting for socialists like AOC and Jihadists like Abdul El Sayed. Have a nice day.
Ah so you can't answer a single thing I've said and you're just stubbornly sticking to the fairy tale in your head. Just vote for the republicans man theres a whole party for right wing people who don't understand politics and hate muslims right there.
I'm a supporter of neither policing nor corrections as we (in Canada and the US) conceive of and practice them, but I also think your piece demonstrates quite clearly why the "defund" tag was mostly a waste of energy and wilfully misdirected, even at working class racialized communities. For the moment here, I'm not concerned with your take on AOC. But the fact that you need to translate and reframe the best demands and intentions of "defund" kind of says it all. The branding, the hashtag, carried its own, undeniable connotations and rhetorical position. Advocacy for prison and policing reform (that is, the demand for more community based and non-violent law enforcement, and for legitimately humane and rehabilitative prisons) is quite old, and the "defund" movement can be reasonably seen, I think, as both an extension of that history of advocacy, but also as a scuttling of it. AOC could have done a better job of responding to be sure, but saying so submits her to the same kind of analysis (which you engage in, I think) that would argue that "defund" should have picked a better hashtag, and maybe even lost an opportunity.
Yeah the slogan was a mistake. But we live in an attention economy and "reform" is boring. What to do then?
Again, don't want to unfairly attack her, I sure as hell can't think on my feet, but laughing about it like it was "Latinx" and then the garbled word salad falsely blaming the pandemic gave me major Kamala vibes, and I do NOT want Peter Thiels towel boy in 2028, so I just worry about her on a national level
I hear you, but the desire to boil down policy agendas, theoretical positions or revolutionary agendas to hashtags for the sake of an attention economy is probably a huge part of the left’s weakness these days (though it’s good to see the DSA lay out consistently identifiable, multiple and interrelated policy planks on ballot choices). The desire to escape short form, attention economy politics is probably why we’re chatting on Substack instead of Twitter. The technological determinist in me is inclined to say that the effects of social media political discourse are available for examination on both ends of the ideological spectrum, and the “defund” movement is possibly an example of that truth, notwithstanding the legitimate, urgent and critical calls it was making to question and, yes, reform policing and a carceral state apparatus. I draw the same conclusions looking at #occupy, namely that the mobilizing around legitmate grievance and outrage is only ever the first step, which must always follow with a plan that holds up under extended scrutiny and attack from one’s predictable opponents. Ultimately, I think that #defund invited short form reactionary politics, since that was the field onto which the oppressors were called by the tag.
Except Biden won the election in 2020 and then lost all his support among racialised communities after he spent four years disavowing all of the issues they cared about. Youre talking about wealthy people hwo like the police state, you're not actually making a political argument rooted in real socioeconomic analysis
Yes a lot of Woke 1 was dumb and insane. We all grumbled about it in private group chats. I #MeToo'd an old boss with a group of women, and I still think #MeToo went off the rails in many ways, caused a massive backlash, and now people are like, "Women shouldn't work or vote."
BUT the one issue I do not bend on is criminal justice because I've been talking to prisoners and former prisoners and the families of killed prisoners for more than a decade and most US jails and prisons and many police forces should not exist in their current form.
Again--I admit the slogans were a mistake, my problem is with AOC laughing it off as if she's talking about "Latinx" when it's a life and death issue. Further, I think it was a trap. The interviewer could have brought up the actually silly stuff, but opted for police abuse, an actually very serious issue "Woke 1" did get right. This makes me question her political talent -- this has been going viral nonstop.
Metoo caused a massive backlash because it was effective, it wouldn't have provoked a backlash if it wasn't actually a threat. How would a polite metoo have worked? You genuinely think the American far right which has been trying to erode women's rights for decades woukd have treated metoo as a legitimate movement if they'd just gotten the messaging right? These people aren't making good faith criticisms, they want sex slaves.
You're literally just conceding so much ground to the fascists in the interest of appealing to bullshit artist centrists in the media it's pathetic
Tana, you and other principled leftists have known the truth about AOC from the beginning, you just didn’t want to accept that it was true.
She is not a true believer at all in progressivism.
She is just another politician out for herself. She will take the same path to corporatism and self-enrichment that Obama did. Few can ever resist this temptation to trade conviction for cash.
Principled Democrats who care about people more than money are rare. And that’s why the party is in such terrible shape.
Yeah I loved her when she won and during "Woke 1.0". But she seems like an Obama type. Which, whatever, I would certainly prefer her to JD Vance. But will it work the way it did for Obama? I actually don't think so, because of the difference in media landscape. I actually think -- not out of stubborn, dumb ethical principle -- but just even cynically, the media landscape now is such that no matter how much she throws progressive policies and ideas under the bus, influencers and the algorithm will dredge up on repeat her past statements, in a way that just didn't happen in the mid-aughts, when the narrative was under more control (like the Beer Summit, etc.), and it will just make her look like a Clintonian hypocrite "I'll say anything to win" type.
I just very much dislike the political consultant class, which operates always from 10-15 years ago. "Move center! Disavow the over-wokeness!" OK that's not going to make the Right go, "OK, we like her now, no more bad-faith attacks." Better to stick to your principles.
She isn't moderating for the right. She's moderating because Democrats need people who aren't on the far left to vote for them. Principled goals can still be achieved without the unachievable, extreme rhetoric
I don't think this is the key lens we need right now for evaluating how our political culture is mutating. The generational one is. We need to really start understanding what it will do to our politics as Gen-Z starts aging into the electorate and then Gen Alpha. The oldest members of Gen Alpha -- I guess they'll be called the "geriatric Gen-Alphas" at some point, right? -- will be able to vote in 2028.
To understand the politics of 2028 and then anticipate the presidential cycles of 2032 and 2036, we have to look to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha's culture and worldviews now. That is the ideological apocalpyse really coming. And it won't break at all in progressives' favor like many of you want to hope. Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are not more progressive, they're just more extreme. You'll get more leftists among them, but you'll get more fascists too. Fucking Nick Fuentes will be able to run for president in 2036 -- his "groypers" are already infiltrating the GOP and keeping their mouths shut to hide what they really believe. That's the future of what Gen-Z politics is going to be like. And Gen-Alpha is going to be even worse.
These are feral generations, raised in the wilds of the internet, who can barely read, let alone think.
Progressives' continued earnest dreams of a better world through growing the size of the welfare state are not going to come. Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha can't even read Chomsky and Zinn. Look at what the K-12 teachers and professors are saying about trying to educate these lost generations. Look at what employers are saying about trying to work with this new generation.
Now extrapolate that to our politics over the next decade.
The culture you see today is the politics you will see tomorrow. We are on the road to Idiocracy now, Tana. And there's no turning back. I'm so sorry.
This is a crucible for AOC and as much as I appreciate her intention and energy, she is proving she is no Mamdani. It happens to the best of them. She survived the Pelosi reign, learned to temper her progressive platform and has now attached herself to Bernie, I suppose hoping to ride his resolve. It is time to inspect her record in Congress, both accomplishments - which I think are few and her votes to fund illegal and illicit actions by our government and other governments. It seems to me the GOP would love her to run for President. The smile and HAHAHAHA are telling and a bad sign of things to come.
I didn't watch the entirety of the interview. Did I miss something? Like ... when she says, "I shouldn't have laughed about "defund" because police reform is a matter of life-and-death."
She didn't laugh at "defund." She was asked about Francesca Hong's "cancel Thanksgiving" tweets, so she quoted Chi Osse, who laughed off his dumb tweets that only POC can be in congressional leadership by saying, "Woke 1 was crazy." She told the audience to forget about dumb tweets and focus on what Francesca Hong is saying now.
You wrote an entire article about a 20-minute interview you were too lazy to watch. If you'd watched the interview, you would know she didn't laugh at defund, police reform, or the state-forced suicide of a young Black man. None of that happened. You just made it up to get attention online. So maybe pump the brakes on the snark.
Brandon Johnson cut unfilled positions in the police department that were sorely needed, if that’s not defunding the cops then I don’t know what is. All my lefty friends who volunteered for police abolition and DSA nonsense were all college educated and were very explicit; they meant no more cops. All the politicians in the Chicago area put all their political will into passing a “no-bond” act which all it seems to do is left violent criminals back on the street (Lawerence Reed, Alphanso Talley)
Don't say "abolish" if you don't mean "abolish". If you want reform then say "reform". Yeah, you will get yelled at by the cool kids on Twitter who never have to accomplish anything real so they can just shit on everyone else for not being pure enough. You just have to ignore them.
So much of left politics is just insisting on the right to redefine words at will, and getting angry when everyone else doesn't automatically go along. Like I'm the asshole for insisting that words have meanings, and that "abolish prisons" is a fundamentally different policy from "make prisons more humane, like Scandinavia". One is not a "less artful" way of stating the other. You have to say what you actually mean, and you have to be able to defend it to people who don't already agree. The hegemony of leftism within certain areas like academia has been TERRIBLE for their ability to actually make an argument. It is much easier to just cry bias and harm, and bully people into silence, but it doesn't work when you don't already control the discourse.
imo the use of "abolition" in this context is a cheap and disrespectful way to borrow the moral urgency of the fight against slavery, ignoring the fact that while there is no justification for enslaving human beings, there IS a justification to enforce laws and sometimes to isolate people from society for a period of time. It's unjust to lock people up for decades for selling weed, but it's also unjust to let rapists and murderers go free. Not every criminal is a harmless, down on his luck guy stealing bread to feed his family. And just because someone has experienced some form of deprivation or injustice in their past, does not remove their moral responsibility for their own acts. Until the left can speak clearly about these basic facts, voters will continue to trust Republicans more on crime and justice issues — despite the rampant criminality of Trump and his cronies.
I’m really disappointed in this interview with her. She lost me now. I can’t stand turn coats. Fuck the dinosaur Democratic Party. I won’t stand with anyone endorsing the establishment and will vote Mickey Mouse for anyone who’s not Progressive at this point. And anyone who enslaves themselves to Isreal is not even a remote consideration at this point. Israel is NOT America or American. They can pay for their own shit.
I'm not sure you were paying attention during the last ten years, especially during Covid, with the astroturfed BLM Antifa backed protests that killed over thirty innocent people and destroyed $2B in property damage, but leftists were definitely calling for the end of all policing, not to mention the vilification of anyone who wouldn't take an umtested vaccine which turned out to be a disaster for the world. It wasn't just a few dumb people.
It doesn't matter what the official Democrat party line was, the violent rhetoric coming out of Congressmen and Democrat politicians was to literally attack all those Nazis and get rid of those authoritarian police. There are plenty of compilations of it, you can find anywhere. It was a requirement. The number of Blacks and Spanish Americans leaving the Democrat party to vote Republican and bleeding of support left the only viable voter base to become illegal aliens through either amnesty or social security fraud, and have them not be deported. This is where all the anti white rhetoric came from as well. Traditional America had to be destroyed.
I actually have no problem with defunding of police, and the private prison industrial complex. The government is finished. There is no representation anymore on either side. Just get rid of all gun control as well so that the people can take care of business when their wives and daughters are raped and murdered by the new criminal inhabitants of a once great country.
She is trying to actually turn her agenda into something real that has enough appeal to pass into law and the people trying to fight her on that are wild, man. It’s almost like they don’t really believe what they’re saying and have just made being outrageous a hobby to make their Republican dads angry.
It was just so unsmooth. I think it was a trap too, the interviewer could have cited many things many people secretly thought were silly (Latinx, etc.) but he picked the strain of the movement stemming from a police murder and at a time when ICE is even more brutal than normal cops.
I think this is just half the picture. People don't really care about "dumb" ideas but people didnt like that you would get canceled if you're not up to date on every "correct" woke take. Then media got "woke/political". Like if we just had good star wars movies and big boob anime girls in video games, the chuds would be less radicalized.
Just a few banger Darlializa Avila Chevalier quotes:
"Yes, it means ending policing full stop. Period. No more police at all ever."
"Yes, literally, abolish the border."
“A world without borders—just like a world without prisons or police—is possible, necessary, and the only moral way forward."
Lefties can deploy the word salad about how "defund the police" and "abolish prisons" AKSHUALLY means increasing funding to those institutions, but no one is forgetting the fever dream that created by an army neurotic women and far-left lunatics, including AOC. It's never too late to admit you were wrong.
As I note in my post, the other side elevated the dumbest most extreme people as avatars of the movement, not people like Alex Vitale, or people like me who've been doing criminal justice reporting for years and know what prisons are like.
I admit that the slogans were dumb and easy targets to trigger backlash. But the policy content is not. Borders, prisons, and police (and ICE) as they exist now cause a LOT of needless human suffering that actually ends up being totally counterproductive if the goal is public safety.
If the goal is to elect more fascists, then sure, go ahead and tell me the biggest danger to me is someone crosses the border to make a better life or someone who sold weed 25 years ago not dying in prison. The Dems' problem is that they help define completely insane, right-wing policies as "moderate." Really sick stuff.
That is a much more sober and reasonable stance on those issues than Woke 1.0 presented those issues. I would just ask that you don't attack AOC for moderating on those extreme expressions, while sincere, radical zealots like DAC are being elevated within the Democratic Party by Democratic voters.
Yeah I'm not a purist, obviously I'd want AOC in 2028 rather than JD Vance or Marco Rubio for heaven's sake.
I've just noticed that Mamdani, who's arguably the most talented politician in generations, always very politely, but sternly, sticks to core principles.
I think AOC is really talented. I also just think instead of "HAHAHAHAHAing" at a movement that may have been misguided in messaging, but tried to address actual atrocities, shouldn't be laughed off the way that, say, we can laugh off how for a while you had to say "Latinx" online when most Latinos had no idea what this was. Defund and abolish were about life and death, not trendy virtue signaling.
The ongoing fued in my head of “la-teenks” vs “latin-eckys” is the hill I choose to die on. But it is never, ever “latin-x” which makes zero sense in English or Spanish
I don’t understand then why there’s SO much resistance to just… changing the slogan?
Reform the police, not defund the police. Humane borders not abolish borders.
It’s very, very obviously predictable that the maximalist rhetoric is going to create that backlash and attract the stupidest literalists who defend it verbatim. So since that’s so obviously predictable… why do it?
I am pretty sure you’d agree about the opposite positions. If somebody said “remove all the Mexicans” and then said “oh well actually I meant a nuanced take about slowing illegal immigration. I don’t actually believe people should be automatically deported for being mexican”. Like… would you really respect their strategy to emphasize the issue? You’d say that the actual verbatim words don’t matter, it’s the most well thought out policy behind them that does?
Because "reform" is toothless when the institutions have no incentive to reform and lawmakers have no incentive to pursue policies that can be spun by their opponents as soft-on-crime. "Reform" looks like a federal MOU that no one bothers following and lets local politicians off the hook (and at this point I don't even know if they do them). The idea behind defund was, tell a police department, "No BearCat for you if you keep killing people and also maybe fire that one dude that's cost the city millions in lawsuits." I admit -- the rhetoric was a mistake, we should have predicted it would be spun and cause a backlash--but the idea of tying behavior to financial incentive seems pretty ....reasonable to me? I get why rightwingers did it but I want to wring the necks of "contrarian brand Leftists" that also shit on it until it became toxic and died.
I STILL can’t tell if you consider it a bad slogan or not. Like you’re saying the rhetoric was a mistake… yet everything else in your comment strongly suggests you WOULDNT pick another slogan over it (despite thinking it doesn’t work?)
Like is this just a case of wanting to eat your cake (have people understand your nuanced desires) and have it too (say something very simple and provocative that is so strong people have to engage with it)?
Frankly, I think the reason it “worked” in drawing attention is *because* it was so, so easy for opponents to dunk on and make look stupid. Like the reason you seem to cling to it (it draws attention) is actively bad for the ideologies you support no?
(Or the incentives to signal what your tribe requires you to signal are stronger than the incentives to use words in a manner that might actually get sane reforms to happen? Couldn’t be that.)
Slogans shouldn’t be motte and baileys. (Look up that fallacy if you haven’t heard of it).
We shouldn’t have to say, actually we don’t agree with what the slogan says either we were just talking about X much more reasonable claim.
Meanwhile there were a significant amount of people who actually did want to do the full slogan claim, and if you don’t want to do that you have no way of differentiating yourself from them.
The rational response of a voter is to just reject what you’re pitching because it sounds like weasel words to them and they have no idea what you’re actually trying to do.
There’s a reason that this era of left wing messaging was horribly unpopular with the public.
These are all reasonable positions lmao, politics is not defined by American electoralism. Though yes anyone trying to get elected in the U.S. on those policies is a raving lunatic political theory has been considering whether carceral justice is necessary for centuries.
You are one of those deranged progressives who is still living in 2021, and that's ok. Down here on planet earth, everyone knows those are insane political positions to hold and that's why every left-of-center politician is running away from them as fast as humanly possible.
And you’re a deranged Zionist. Your hunger for genocide will keep losing at the ballot box until you finally abandon it
But it doesn't mean increasing funding it means completely changing what those institutions exist for. The American economy runs on the exploitation of workers without citizenship they'll never actually end illegal immigration because its too profitable (trump has actually even said this), the prison system exists to ruin the lives of millions of poor people for petty crimes. The people who suffer under these systems are not represented by anyone in American politics and now it's being depicted as insane to even try and discuss them as problems. This is how fascism works, huge sections of society are criminalised and dehumanised so any attempt to humanise or represent their interests politically becomes seen as far left radical extremism. ICE is extremist, mass incarcercation is extremist, police being a corrupt mafia who's role is to terrorise the poor is extremist. But in the USA supporting these rotten institutions is now seen as sensible centrism (because the people who vote aren't affected by them or profit off them)
Also even from a pragmatic political perspective supporting these movements helped the Democrats win in 2020. We now have this ludicrous situation where people are saying the Democrats need to shift away from the platform that actually last got them elected and double down on the platform that Harris lost on. It's so fucking stupid, AOC gained all her initial support in the 2010s BY FULLY EMBRACING ALL THESE WOKE POSITIONS. Biden lost the support of every demographic except wealthy white people because he u-turned on all of them and HARRIS LOST. American political discourse is all just wealthy people arguing about how the Democrats need to appeal to their interests and not the interests of Labour or the poor. THEYRE ALREADY DOING THAT AND THEY KEEP LOSING
Imagine getting your ass kicked coast-to-coast after nominating the second most progressive Senator (and VP to the self-described most progressive president in history) then deciding “not far left enough, let’s go with actual communists”.
That's not what actually happened though is it, Harris did not embrace any progressive positions and spent her entire campaign cosying up to the billionaire class. Biden disavowed every single progressive platform he was elected to pursue such as ending student loan debt, universal healthcare, police and prison reform etc etc etc. They also carried out an unbelievably unpopular war in the middle east and refused point blank to disavow militarism or imperialism. It doesn't matter if Biden said he was progressive while refusing to pursue any progressive policies, Kamala Harris also pretended to be progressive in 2019 and disavowed all of it by the time of her campaign.
Why did Biden win while doing performative Black Lives Matter stuff and promising progressive policies and why did Kamala lose while disavowing progressive policies and trying to appeal to the right wing? Can you try and do some actual political analysis rooted in what actually happened?
Now AOC is trying to present herself as a viable candidate by doing the exact same thing and completely moving away from all the positions that actually gained her support and popularity.
Bury your head in the sand, I don't care. We are done letting far left losers gaslight us into voting for socialists like AOC and Jihadists like Abdul El Sayed. Have a nice day.
Ah so you can't answer a single thing I've said and you're just stubbornly sticking to the fairy tale in your head. Just vote for the republicans man theres a whole party for right wing people who don't understand politics and hate muslims right there.
Also can you define communism because it just sounds like you have no understanding of what any of these words mean
I'm a supporter of neither policing nor corrections as we (in Canada and the US) conceive of and practice them, but I also think your piece demonstrates quite clearly why the "defund" tag was mostly a waste of energy and wilfully misdirected, even at working class racialized communities. For the moment here, I'm not concerned with your take on AOC. But the fact that you need to translate and reframe the best demands and intentions of "defund" kind of says it all. The branding, the hashtag, carried its own, undeniable connotations and rhetorical position. Advocacy for prison and policing reform (that is, the demand for more community based and non-violent law enforcement, and for legitimately humane and rehabilitative prisons) is quite old, and the "defund" movement can be reasonably seen, I think, as both an extension of that history of advocacy, but also as a scuttling of it. AOC could have done a better job of responding to be sure, but saying so submits her to the same kind of analysis (which you engage in, I think) that would argue that "defund" should have picked a better hashtag, and maybe even lost an opportunity.
Yeah the slogan was a mistake. But we live in an attention economy and "reform" is boring. What to do then?
Again, don't want to unfairly attack her, I sure as hell can't think on my feet, but laughing about it like it was "Latinx" and then the garbled word salad falsely blaming the pandemic gave me major Kamala vibes, and I do NOT want Peter Thiels towel boy in 2028, so I just worry about her on a national level
I hear you, but the desire to boil down policy agendas, theoretical positions or revolutionary agendas to hashtags for the sake of an attention economy is probably a huge part of the left’s weakness these days (though it’s good to see the DSA lay out consistently identifiable, multiple and interrelated policy planks on ballot choices). The desire to escape short form, attention economy politics is probably why we’re chatting on Substack instead of Twitter. The technological determinist in me is inclined to say that the effects of social media political discourse are available for examination on both ends of the ideological spectrum, and the “defund” movement is possibly an example of that truth, notwithstanding the legitimate, urgent and critical calls it was making to question and, yes, reform policing and a carceral state apparatus. I draw the same conclusions looking at #occupy, namely that the mobilizing around legitmate grievance and outrage is only ever the first step, which must always follow with a plan that holds up under extended scrutiny and attack from one’s predictable opponents. Ultimately, I think that #defund invited short form reactionary politics, since that was the field onto which the oppressors were called by the tag.
Who, with any actual integrity, could trust it?
Except Biden won the election in 2020 and then lost all his support among racialised communities after he spent four years disavowing all of the issues they cared about. Youre talking about wealthy people hwo like the police state, you're not actually making a political argument rooted in real socioeconomic analysis
It’s a big test for the online left — do they want to wield political power, or do they just want to posture as revolutionaries on the internet?
Accepting that a good chunk of “Woke 1” looked and sounded crazy as hell is, in fact, a prerequisite for the former.
At least the pandemic ending means the bored PhD students are back to classrooms & not spewing every take online
Yes a lot of Woke 1 was dumb and insane. We all grumbled about it in private group chats. I #MeToo'd an old boss with a group of women, and I still think #MeToo went off the rails in many ways, caused a massive backlash, and now people are like, "Women shouldn't work or vote."
BUT the one issue I do not bend on is criminal justice because I've been talking to prisoners and former prisoners and the families of killed prisoners for more than a decade and most US jails and prisons and many police forces should not exist in their current form.
Again--I admit the slogans were a mistake, my problem is with AOC laughing it off as if she's talking about "Latinx" when it's a life and death issue. Further, I think it was a trap. The interviewer could have brought up the actually silly stuff, but opted for police abuse, an actually very serious issue "Woke 1" did get right. This makes me question her political talent -- this has been going viral nonstop.
Metoo caused a massive backlash because it was effective, it wouldn't have provoked a backlash if it wasn't actually a threat. How would a polite metoo have worked? You genuinely think the American far right which has been trying to erode women's rights for decades woukd have treated metoo as a legitimate movement if they'd just gotten the messaging right? These people aren't making good faith criticisms, they want sex slaves.
You're literally just conceding so much ground to the fascists in the interest of appealing to bullshit artist centrists in the media it's pathetic
Tana, you and other principled leftists have known the truth about AOC from the beginning, you just didn’t want to accept that it was true.
She is not a true believer at all in progressivism.
She is just another politician out for herself. She will take the same path to corporatism and self-enrichment that Obama did. Few can ever resist this temptation to trade conviction for cash.
Principled Democrats who care about people more than money are rare. And that’s why the party is in such terrible shape.
Yeah I loved her when she won and during "Woke 1.0". But she seems like an Obama type. Which, whatever, I would certainly prefer her to JD Vance. But will it work the way it did for Obama? I actually don't think so, because of the difference in media landscape. I actually think -- not out of stubborn, dumb ethical principle -- but just even cynically, the media landscape now is such that no matter how much she throws progressive policies and ideas under the bus, influencers and the algorithm will dredge up on repeat her past statements, in a way that just didn't happen in the mid-aughts, when the narrative was under more control (like the Beer Summit, etc.), and it will just make her look like a Clintonian hypocrite "I'll say anything to win" type.
I just very much dislike the political consultant class, which operates always from 10-15 years ago. "Move center! Disavow the over-wokeness!" OK that's not going to make the Right go, "OK, we like her now, no more bad-faith attacks." Better to stick to your principles.
She isn't moderating for the right. She's moderating because Democrats need people who aren't on the far left to vote for them. Principled goals can still be achieved without the unachievable, extreme rhetoric
"the difference in media landscape"
I don't think this is the key lens we need right now for evaluating how our political culture is mutating. The generational one is. We need to really start understanding what it will do to our politics as Gen-Z starts aging into the electorate and then Gen Alpha. The oldest members of Gen Alpha -- I guess they'll be called the "geriatric Gen-Alphas" at some point, right? -- will be able to vote in 2028.
To understand the politics of 2028 and then anticipate the presidential cycles of 2032 and 2036, we have to look to Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha's culture and worldviews now. That is the ideological apocalpyse really coming. And it won't break at all in progressives' favor like many of you want to hope. Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha are not more progressive, they're just more extreme. You'll get more leftists among them, but you'll get more fascists too. Fucking Nick Fuentes will be able to run for president in 2036 -- his "groypers" are already infiltrating the GOP and keeping their mouths shut to hide what they really believe. That's the future of what Gen-Z politics is going to be like. And Gen-Alpha is going to be even worse.
These are feral generations, raised in the wilds of the internet, who can barely read, let alone think.
Progressives' continued earnest dreams of a better world through growing the size of the welfare state are not going to come. Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha can't even read Chomsky and Zinn. Look at what the K-12 teachers and professors are saying about trying to educate these lost generations. Look at what employers are saying about trying to work with this new generation.
Now extrapolate that to our politics over the next decade.
The culture you see today is the politics you will see tomorrow. We are on the road to Idiocracy now, Tana. And there's no turning back. I'm so sorry.
This is a crucible for AOC and as much as I appreciate her intention and energy, she is proving she is no Mamdani. It happens to the best of them. She survived the Pelosi reign, learned to temper her progressive platform and has now attached herself to Bernie, I suppose hoping to ride his resolve. It is time to inspect her record in Congress, both accomplishments - which I think are few and her votes to fund illegal and illicit actions by our government and other governments. It seems to me the GOP would love her to run for President. The smile and HAHAHAHA are telling and a bad sign of things to come.
Tana, did you watch AOC’s full interview?
I didn't watch the entirety of the interview. Did I miss something? Like ... when she says, "I shouldn't have laughed about "defund" because police reform is a matter of life-and-death."
She didn't laugh at "defund." She was asked about Francesca Hong's "cancel Thanksgiving" tweets, so she quoted Chi Osse, who laughed off his dumb tweets that only POC can be in congressional leadership by saying, "Woke 1 was crazy." She told the audience to forget about dumb tweets and focus on what Francesca Hong is saying now.
You wrote an entire article about a 20-minute interview you were too lazy to watch. If you'd watched the interview, you would know she didn't laugh at defund, police reform, or the state-forced suicide of a young Black man. None of that happened. You just made it up to get attention online. So maybe pump the brakes on the snark.
“It’s not happening, but it’s good that it is”
Brandon Johnson cut unfilled positions in the police department that were sorely needed, if that’s not defunding the cops then I don’t know what is. All my lefty friends who volunteered for police abolition and DSA nonsense were all college educated and were very explicit; they meant no more cops. All the politicians in the Chicago area put all their political will into passing a “no-bond” act which all it seems to do is left violent criminals back on the street (Lawerence Reed, Alphanso Talley)
Don't say "abolish" if you don't mean "abolish". If you want reform then say "reform". Yeah, you will get yelled at by the cool kids on Twitter who never have to accomplish anything real so they can just shit on everyone else for not being pure enough. You just have to ignore them.
So much of left politics is just insisting on the right to redefine words at will, and getting angry when everyone else doesn't automatically go along. Like I'm the asshole for insisting that words have meanings, and that "abolish prisons" is a fundamentally different policy from "make prisons more humane, like Scandinavia". One is not a "less artful" way of stating the other. You have to say what you actually mean, and you have to be able to defend it to people who don't already agree. The hegemony of leftism within certain areas like academia has been TERRIBLE for their ability to actually make an argument. It is much easier to just cry bias and harm, and bully people into silence, but it doesn't work when you don't already control the discourse.
imo the use of "abolition" in this context is a cheap and disrespectful way to borrow the moral urgency of the fight against slavery, ignoring the fact that while there is no justification for enslaving human beings, there IS a justification to enforce laws and sometimes to isolate people from society for a period of time. It's unjust to lock people up for decades for selling weed, but it's also unjust to let rapists and murderers go free. Not every criminal is a harmless, down on his luck guy stealing bread to feed his family. And just because someone has experienced some form of deprivation or injustice in their past, does not remove their moral responsibility for their own acts. Until the left can speak clearly about these basic facts, voters will continue to trust Republicans more on crime and justice issues — despite the rampant criminality of Trump and his cronies.
I’m really disappointed in this interview with her. She lost me now. I can’t stand turn coats. Fuck the dinosaur Democratic Party. I won’t stand with anyone endorsing the establishment and will vote Mickey Mouse for anyone who’s not Progressive at this point. And anyone who enslaves themselves to Isreal is not even a remote consideration at this point. Israel is NOT America or American. They can pay for their own shit.
I'm not sure you were paying attention during the last ten years, especially during Covid, with the astroturfed BLM Antifa backed protests that killed over thirty innocent people and destroyed $2B in property damage, but leftists were definitely calling for the end of all policing, not to mention the vilification of anyone who wouldn't take an umtested vaccine which turned out to be a disaster for the world. It wasn't just a few dumb people.
It doesn't matter what the official Democrat party line was, the violent rhetoric coming out of Congressmen and Democrat politicians was to literally attack all those Nazis and get rid of those authoritarian police. There are plenty of compilations of it, you can find anywhere. It was a requirement. The number of Blacks and Spanish Americans leaving the Democrat party to vote Republican and bleeding of support left the only viable voter base to become illegal aliens through either amnesty or social security fraud, and have them not be deported. This is where all the anti white rhetoric came from as well. Traditional America had to be destroyed.
I actually have no problem with defunding of police, and the private prison industrial complex. The government is finished. There is no representation anymore on either side. Just get rid of all gun control as well so that the people can take care of business when their wives and daughters are raped and murdered by the new criminal inhabitants of a once great country.
She is trying to actually turn her agenda into something real that has enough appeal to pass into law and the people trying to fight her on that are wild, man. It’s almost like they don’t really believe what they’re saying and have just made being outrageous a hobby to make their Republican dads angry.
Silly stuff comes back eventually and bites people on the ass.
How anyone can trust this kinda drivel with the cringe dollop of vacuous laughter is beyond me.
It was just so unsmooth. I think it was a trap too, the interviewer could have cited many things many people secretly thought were silly (Latinx, etc.) but he picked the strain of the movement stemming from a police murder and at a time when ICE is even more brutal than normal cops.
Exactly.
Sorry but AOC is trying to serve two masters and it’s been obvious for awhile now. Will not vote for her atp
AOC is almost as stupid as Kamala Harris, which is saying something.
I think this is just half the picture. People don't really care about "dumb" ideas but people didnt like that you would get canceled if you're not up to date on every "correct" woke take. Then media got "woke/political". Like if we just had good star wars movies and big boob anime girls in video games, the chuds would be less radicalized.
😎🤘