Ocasio-Cortez has centered her campaign on the need to “acknowledge that not all Democrats are the same,” attacking Crowley on the basis that he is part of the Democratic Party machine. She has also criticized Crowley for being disconnected from working class and Hispanic residents in the 14th District, which includes parts of the boroughs of Queens and the Bronx in New York City, separated by the East River and connected only by the Bronx/Whitestone Bridge.
The race between Ocasio-Cortez and Crowley to some extent echoes the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, with Ocasio-Cortez, who worked as an organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign, seeking to channel mass opposition to Trump and American capitalism back into the two-party system. She is sowing illusions that the Democratic Party can be transformed either through “progressive” Democratic candidates winning primaries or by pushing their opponents (in this case Crowley rather than Hillary Clinton) to the left. As with the Sanders campaign, a wide range of liberal publications and pseudo-left organizations have thrown their weight behind Ocasio-Cortez.
So far her campaign has been endorsed by Sanders’ Our Revolution, Brand New Congress and Justice Democrats, as well as the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA, to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, has organized phone banks, canvassed for her and produced her campaign video. Curiously however, despite publicly endorsing her, the DSA has made no further comment on her campaign and its affiliated publication Jacobin has remained quiet. A search of the websites of both the DSA and Jacobin for “Ocasio” yields the response “no result.”
This reflects an apparent agreement between the DSA and the Democratic Party establishment, at least as far as recent elections are concerned: DSA candidates may run for local and state legislative seats, as they did last year in Virginia and this year in Pennsylvania, California and other states, but they will not interfere in the central concern of the Democratic Party leadership, [...]
The DSA is not backing any “left” candidates for Congress in districts targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee as potential takeovers from the Republicans. In the case of Ocasio-Cortez, whether she wins or loses in the primary, there is no chance that the Democrats would lose the seat, since the Republican Party is virtually moribund in 14th Congressional District. Its token candidate in 2016 took 17 percent of the vote against Crowley.
The last thing on Ocasio-Cortez’s agenda is any break with the Democratic Party. She has spent her entire adult life in or around it. She first worked as an intern for Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, while attending college at Boston University. After graduating she joined the publishing house Brook Avenue Press and in 2012 shared a platform with New York Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, where she endorsed the senator’s bill for tax breaks for new businesses. After a four-year hiatus from politics, she joined the Sanders campaign.
Ocasio-Cortez was recruited by Brand New Congress, a political action committee (PAC) established by former Sanders campaign staff, to run against Crowley. [...]
As she said in an interview with the online news website Splinter, “When you look at what we’ve got in the Democratic Party, the people who have these safe seats are centrist, corporatist Democrats. If we have to have centrist Democrats in the party, let those Democrats come from swing districts. But in districts that are very highly Democratic, we should be advancing the national conversation on prison abolition, on student debt cancelation [sic], on Puerto Rico, on a Marshall Plan, on 100% renewable energy in ten years.”
What her position translates to is that she is perfectly fine with the Democratic Party running pro-corporate politicians—and advocating and carrying out such policies—as long as it makes room for its “left” supporters in districts like the 14th CD in New York, where they can blather on about policies that the Democratic Party leadership flatly opposes, in order to provide a left cover.
The not for real "socialism," like us bit, in noting that in a clearly safe Dem district progressivism is less a boat-rocking than running progressive in swing districts; my
The two party system sucks, but it is what we have, and the worse of the trainwrecks happen when Republicans predominate. Yet trying to flip a safe Dem district to a more progressive outlook is a good aim, and more practical than funding Laura Moser's Houston attempt. That one had to be funded to face-slap the rudeness of the DCCC in its figurative shooting at Moser pre-primary. Yet it was contribution money with more of a risk of being in vain. The more one looks at politics in our nation the more sadness settles in. Sell me a little CHANGE and HOPE. Manipulation rules given that those who can fund "news" want to minipulate so as to keep all real money and power within a small number of hands, but aristocracies are not new and actual peasant rebellions have been put down with great brutality. The history books are written by the winners of wars; published by the owners of presses.
UPDATE: At a guess Crowley will prosper much as the Clintons did after Bubba left office with the couple allegedly then "dead broke."
Lesser evil does get stale. Perhaps Crowley ran a low energy Jeb!-like campaign, for the greater good, so we could be stronger together.