Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Archives

Politics

If Republicans Can’t Elect a Speaker, What Else Can’t They Do?

Kevin McCarthy’s epic fail reveals Nancy Pelosi’s legacy to the Democratic Party

January 10, 2023 • by Claire Potter

Nancy Pelosi’s greatest strength as a liberal was in her mastery of the possible while at the same time accommodating dissenters, idealists, and change-makers to this fact of life. This is what she taught her caucus....

If Republicans Can’t Elect a Speaker, What Else Can’t They Do?

Democracy

America’s Political Parties

The order shattering and the order affirming

March 17, 2021 • by Thomas Cobb

The oppositional leadership styles of Trump and Biden have proved the timelessness of the political scientist Stephen Skowronek’s position, outlined in the second chapter of his 1993 masterwork The Politics Presidents Make, that the American presidency displays competing instincts. Skowronek posited that the presidency contained the potential for “order shattering,” ...

North America

The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Past Present Podcast, Episode 254

November 10, 2020 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. is the President-Elect of the United States. Natalia mentioned this New York Times interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in reference to possible challenges within the Democratic coalition. In our regular closing feature, What’s Making ...

North America

After Trump

Towards democracy and social justice

October 23, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

That, of course, is the problem. And the problem is grave. In 2016, we were worried about what Trump’s victory might mean. Now we know that things have become much worse than most of us ever imagined, and not only for us in the United States. Trump has been a revolutionary—he ...

Migration

On the Uses and Disadvantages of Historical Comparisons for Life

(Vom Nutzen und Nachteil historischer Vergleiche für das Leben)

October 19, 2020 • by Marci Shore

In the ghetto there was only black and white. Seventy years later, Krystyna remembered looking down from the bridge and seeing brightly-colored flowers at a market on the Aryan Side. She remembered, too, the day that she and her mother escaped from the ghetto, and her stepfather’s aunt on the ...

Activism

When the Trump Circus Came to Town

The fallout from a 2019 visit to Greenville, North Carolina

June 18, 2020 • by Amanda Klein

Trump’s propaganda machine was running full tilt in the summer of 2019, in the weeks leading up to a rally Trump would hold in Greenville, North Carolina, the town where I live and work (teaching at Eastern Carolina University). The year before, the administration had abruptly implemented a brutal policy ...

Exiles on 12th Street

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Exiles on 12th Street, Episode Eight

May 10, 2020 • by Claire Potter

This is the eighth episode of Public Seminar’s podcast, Exiles on 12th Street. If you like it, go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Thanks to the bravery of several generations of activist women, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, finally granting women in the ...

North America

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

Why the Democratic Party Must Support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

April 22, 2020 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

Since Super Tuesday, it has been clear that the Democratic nominee will be Joe Biden. And in the past week, there has been an extraordinary public display of political unity behind the Biden campaign, with Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and then Elizabeth Warren issuing full-throated endorsements. The appeal to party unity in the face ...

Sustaining Democratic Opposition to Trumpism

Feature

I Want to Run for Office. Thank You, AOC.

A letter to Alexandira Ocasio-Cortez

September 22, 2019 • by Ayling Zulema Dominguez

Your Spanish is like mine; acquired in the streets, it sounds like it was put through a strainer, and I love it. You weren’t supposed to run for office. Mother from La Isla and dad from the South Bronx. Born in a place where zip code determines your destiny. Bearing a long, hyphenated ...

New York City’s Sunnyside Yards, and Our Urban Future

Citizens are challenging high-tech megaprojects

September 16, 2019 • by Joseph Heathcott

Welcome to contentious New York City, where real estate rules, but residents engage in feisty, concerted, and highly underfunded opposition. While real estate interests have long called the shots in this town, the reign of global finance and development capital over the urban landscape is a product of the near ...

Blue Monday

Putting Trump’s Racism in its Place

One More Reason Why AOC Should Be the Face of the Democratic Party’s Future

August 12, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

A naïve reader might read this and imagine that Hewitt’s point is obvious: the contrast between Presidential candidate Kennedy in 1968 and the current President, Donald Trump, in 2019. The contrast is more than obvious. It is glaring. And yet, of course, Hewitt has other purposes in mind. The first is ...

We Must Defeat Trump

This does not mean that “centrist” strategies ought to be embraced, but it does mean that Democrats need to argue with a sense of proportion and in a way that underscores their unity against Trump.

July 22, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

A wide range of people, ranging from Never Trump Republicans to Democrats right, center, and left, to self-described “Progressives” and democratic socialists, have long known this. Some of us, myself included, have been writing about this for years now (it sometimes seems like decades). I am sick of writing about this. For it ...