AOC’s Disgraceful Priorities: A Postscript to My Kamala Harris Piece

A textbook example of exactly the kind of amoral thinking that the left must avoid…

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

A few days ago I implored the left not to abandon their support for Gaza and the Palestinians merely because Joe Biden has been disappeared and replaced with a more popular (somewhat inexplicably, given her awful record) candidate. I noted that we cannot be fooled into believing – there is no evidence for it anyway – that Kamala Harris will be any different in her subservience to the Israeli death machine. I specifically warned that the left has a very bad habit of equating “people from marginalized groups” with “progressive policies,” that this is a mistake that has cost them dearly in the past, and that they cannot afford to make it anymore, given the stakes.

But I wasn’t hopeless, and I’m still not, since plenty of organizers are still committed – the by-now memeified moment of Kamala Harris’s speech being disrupted by pro-Palestine demonstrators showed that these groups are not about to give up.

Sadly, Harris’s response confirms my argument that she’ll be no different. Further, the disgraceful reaction of the crowd, who mindlessly cheered Harris’s heartless dismissal of those concerned about the slaughter of innocents, shows that milquetoast liberal Democratic Party loyalists – useless, self-righteous types whose contributions to society have never gone any further than putting rainbow flags out their windows or “in this house we believe in science” signs on their lawns – shows that liberal America is totally unreliable. They might be reasoned with or won over, but they cannot be counted on. It’s up to the grassroots left. What else is new?

I bring this up again because an extremely telling interview from a few days ago of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez being asked to comment on these issues has just been brought to my attention. AOC’s reasoning in the interview is a textbook example of the kind of anti-critical “thinking” that liberals embrace, and that the left must avoid at all costs.

AOC, it should be noted, has had a spectacular fall from grace. Her embarrassing transformation from promising leftist firebrand to shamelessly capitulatory Democratic Party apparatchik has been painful for those of us who once admired her to witness. A few months ago I mentioned her name in the company of a friend from Democratic Socialists of America, and she instantly admonished me not to talk about “the fallen” in her presence. As one Marxist-y writer persuasively argued last year, “AOC is just a regular democrat now.” Even previously supportive outlets have soured on the once-promising Congresswoman, complaining that she went “from influencer to influenced.”

So her recent comments are of a piece with her overall trajectory, with which I’m very familiar. Even so, I was amazed at how cavalier and unconcerned AOC appeared when asked about Palestine:

In the above interview, AOC and the CBS panelists are discussing the momentum the Harris-Walz campaign has been experiencing, and the content of its messaging thus far. One host asked, “there is no mention of the war in Israel and Gaza right now. Do think that was deliberate, do you think that should have been mentioned or come up in some way?”

Good question – in fact, it’s the most important question: why the hell is the campaign not talking about this?

AOC’s response:

Well, you know, I think that this is certainly an issue that’s important to many Americans; they’re going to want to ensure that we continue our efforts towards a ceasefire in the region, and I’m sure that this discussion will come up between now and November. But we also have a wide scope of issues that [Kamala Harris] has to address…including…issues like IVF and choice as well as many other issues that are at the top of people’s minds right now.”

This is an admirably candid admission of how AOC and her Democratic colleagues are ordering their priorities: they’ll ensure that the whole “ongoing mass-slaughter of innocents” thing “will come up between now and November,” so long as it doesn’t get in the way of conversations around “IVF and choice.”

Look: when Christian extremists – increasingly the Republican Party’s primary voter base – announced their intention to do away with IVF, I was among the loudest to object. I called them “medically illiterate, prudish, unwitting products of a racist campaign to subsidize segregationist schools” (if you know the history of anti-abortion politics in the U.S., that comment will make sense). I recommended (and still recommend) that anti-abortion crusaders be unsparingly confronted with the idiocy and cruelty of their stupid, anti-woman ideas.

With that out of the way, I must be very, very clear here: AOC’s implication that “IVF and choice” are on the same level of importance as (let alone more important than) an active, US-supported campaign to exterminate an entire population, is one of the most callous, ignorant, twisted, morally repugnant things it is possible for a person to say. It reflects a complete inability to put priorities in any kind of ethically coherent sequence. It is completely unacceptable that anyone in politics is capable of thinking this way, let alone a self-styled democratic socialist.

Yes, both abortion and genocide fall under the vast umbrella of “important issues.” But to think that they are of equal importance indicates a breathtaking inability to perform the most elementary moral arithmetic. And to think that “IVF and choice” are more important than halting a genocide indicates that one is a monster, plain and simple.

And yet, I know why a lot of people who tuned in to CBS for that interview probably didn’t perceive what she said to be objectionable. We live in what Christopher Lasch once called “the culture of narcissism.” We are rarely if ever encouraged to think of the needs of others before our own, let alone actually put others’ needs first in any kind of concrete, material way. It takes a triumph of organizing and activism to get large numbers of ordinary people to overcome this moral sluggishness.

This is one of the reasons why the protests against the Vietnam War continue to be so noteworthy – because for a moment there, people did manage to overcome it. The revulsion at what the US was doing to Vietnam “reflected a growing American empathy for Vietnamese civilian victims, a remarkable degree of emotional identification coming from a people [Americans] that had never experienced the sustained bombing of its own homeland,” the historian Christian Appy notes.¹ It was extremely significant that so many Americans were able to overcome what I call the “empathy gap.” In the past year, large numbers of mainly younger people managed to achieve the same feat, decades later, in the face of U.S. support for Israeli criminality.

This is why many of us don’t perceive the drivel being put forward by AOC for what it is. Most Americans, certainly women, have real experience with important issues around reproductive health, among other “bread and butter,” domestic concerns. By contrast, matters of foreign policy often seem, well, foreign to many people. They’re thought of as vague happenings going on somewhere far away, unrelated to most people’s lives. This is why it is hard to overcome the “empathy gap” – along with, in this case, ample US and Israeli propaganda that attempts to convince people that up is down, 2+2=5, and that what Israel is doing is humane and justified.

But plenty of people do know the truth. AOC is certainly one of them. They know what Israel is doing with our support, they know that it is intimately connected to our lives in all sorts of ways (to take just one: Israel trains many of the police forces that routinely gun down African Americans), and they know how easily it could be stopped. There’s no excuse for people who know the truth to obscure it. There’s no excuse for them to cheer for “girlboss” Kamala Harris as she “shuts down” people of conscience. And there’s certainly no excuse for them to pretend that all the issues we face are on the same order of magnitude.

There’s a vibrant debate to be had around the most effective means of forcing the current administration, as well as a potential future Harris administration, to cut off support to the ethno-supremacist Israeli state. Do we publicly refuse to vote for them unless they give us what we want? That’s certainly Jill Stein’s argument, and the longer the Democrats continue to spit in the face of the overwhelming majority of Americans who want the conflict over now, it looks more and more compelling. But, goes the retort, this would likely mean a victory for Trump, who is known to be worse regarding support for Israel (as well as on every other issue). That’s a compelling counterargument, although there are coherent replies to it. And it leaves us trapped forever within the two-party duopoly. Surely there must be some way out? We should have that conversation. It’s ongoing within progressive circles. Maybe I’ll hash it out here at Cut the Cord at some point.

But if we adopt AOC’s prioritization scheme – which apparently aligns with the thinking of the Democratic Party establishment and its worthless mainstream liberal fans – it means that we’ve given up before we’ve even started. If we adopt this reprehensible attitude that genocide is an issue which might be worth maybe possibly getting to at some point between now and November if it’s not too inconvenient, what does that say about us?

Or, look at it this way. Imagine that you encounter a Palestinian-American who has lost hundreds of her family members to the Israeli mass murder campaign (this is barely a hypothetical – such people exist, including at my own university). Consider that this violence could be stopped at any time if the US government would simply cut off the flow of weapons, along with economic and diplomatic support. And remember that the only reason that it does not do so is because the president and his hand-picked successor, who head the political party which styles itself the more humane of the two, do not want to. Would you feel comfortable looking this person in the eye and informing them that “sorry, the survival of the rest of your family, if there are even any left, will have to wait until November,” and be able to live with yourself?

Let’s find a better way.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

1. Appy, Christian. American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity. New York: Viking, 2015, 157.