It takes the gumption of a hero to identify as a socialist in the United States, and something of a miracle to get elected to public office under a red banner. But that is what 29-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did when she pulled off a massive upset in the 2018 midterm elections, beating incumbent Joe Crawley in the primaries and thus ejecting the chair of the Democratic Caucus from the House of Representatives.

As she forced an end to Mr Crawley’s long political career, and received 78% of the vote in New York’s fourteenth congressional district, Ms Ocasio-Cortez also became the youngest-ever woman to take a seat in the US House of Representatives where she arrived atop a wave of both popular discontent and great expectation.

Though very much the new kid on the block, Ms Ocasio-Cortez is not one to keep quiet or defer to colleagues with more Washington-time under their belt. Even before being sworn in she gave a taste of what was to come, tearing mercilessly into the Harvard orientation session traditionally organised for freshman lawmakers – an event which she branded ‘biased’ and called a ‘pro-corporate lobbyist project’. Point taken.

As it happens, Ms Ocasio-Cortez is not overly enamoured of corporate America or the way politics is conducted in the nation’s capital and elsewhere in the country. She was one of the first to question the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks awarded to Amazon which enticed the online retailer to build one of its three corporate headquarters in New York City. Arguing that the money could be much better spend on the city’s crumbling subway network, or its disadvantaged boroughs, Ms Ocasio-Cortez led a groundswell of protests against Amazon’s plans.

She has taken her conservative critics to task and seems wholly unafraid to push back – hard – to the point of trolling her assailants and exposing their faux pas such as the embarrassing moment lived by representative Steve King (R-Iowa) who during a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee grilled Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the obscenities he found on his daughter’s iPhone, waving the offending device for all to see and prompting the executive to sigh and point out with admirable calm that the iPhone is made by a different company.

Taking Pot Shots

Ms Ocasio-Cortez enjoys taking pot shots – with commendable accuracy – against habitual peddlers of fake news such as Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s former campaign manager and current adviser, pointing out that the attacks helped her defeat a ‘multi-generation, multi-million dollar political machine’ – in other words: please, keep it coming.

Belittling the new congresswoman has now become a dangerous proposition since Ms Ocasio-Cortez has at least as much political venom to dole out as her conservative opponents do. Venturing out of her self-imposed Alaskan exile, Sarah Palin got promptly served with reminders of her exceptional vision (she famously claimed to be able to see Russia from Alaska), her mixing up of North and South Korea and picking the wrong one as an ally, and her geographical gaffe when she called Afghanistan ‘our neighbouring country’. Mrs Palin has since retreated back to the wilderness, wisely leaving Ms Ocasio-Cortez alone.

The young congresswoman ticks all the boxes that make Republicans see red: she is pro-gun control and pro-choice, supports universal healthcare, free tertiary education, and an end to mass incarceration policies. Ms Ocasio-Cortez also demands the US government take climate action seriously, describing global warming as the ‘single biggest national security threat’ facing the country. She also is an advocate of immigration reform and would like to see a ‘path to citizenship’ opened for undocumented immigrants.

Well aware that she’s in the national spotlight, Ms Ocasio-Cortez has so far leveraged her political stardom to withstand the considerable pressure exercised by her Democratic peers to fall in line, behave nicely, and follow convention. She is, as some pundits have remarked, a replica of the 2010 class of Republican congressional freshmen and women who used their Tea Party credentials to challenge the Republican leadership.

Whilst ideological opposites, both share a certain revolutionary zeal that, if anything, reinvigorates the goings-on in a city that thrives on maintaining the status quo – the very one Ms Ocasio-Cortez was elected to upset.

Cover photo: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delivering a rousing speech at the 2019 Women’s March in New York City.

© 2019 Photo by Dimitri Rodriguez