Recently a Facebook friend of mine—whom I’ve actually known since before Mark Zuckerberg started at Harvard, and whose political activism I hold in high regard—surprised me by posting an article entitled “AOC is a genocidal con artist.” I can’t tell you what the article said because I’d be as likely to read an article proclaiming that “AOC is a lying communist child-murderer” as I would that one.
And really, the particulars of the article concern me less than the spectacularly myopic political stance on display. Political [perfectionism]—allowing smaller or infrequent differences to outweigh broader agreement on larger issues—is always going to be a hazard for a group of intensely committed people whose concern with an issue extends down to the smallest detail. It is, however, a tendency we really can’t afford to fall into if we aspire to actually achieve goals like winding down the nation’s war machine or supplanting our corporate-dominated economy with a democratically controlled one.
The concern here is both general and specific. General, in that this type of short-sightedness diminishes the effectiveness of all of us who share the above-mentioned goals. Specifically, in that I consider attacks upon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) particularly wrong-headed and damaging. And while few approach the level of absurdity of the above-mentioned article, claims that she’s only a “so-called progressive” can too often be found coming from people who really might benefit from taking a moment to consider things from a broader perspective.
When Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) authored a letter to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio declaring that the Israeli government food “blockade is starving Palestinian civilians in violation of international law, and the militarization of food will not help,” and going on to “demand an immediate end to the blockade, an immediate resumption of unfettered humanitarian aid entry into Gaza , the restoration of U.S. funding to UNRWA, and an immediate and lasting ceasefire,” she was joined by only 18 other members of Congress—Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and 17 Democratic members of the House. This did two things: it told us just how insensitive to the devastation of Gaza the U.S. Congress actually is and it provided a marker of just who constituted its anti-Gaza war hardcore. Ocasio-Cortez was one of those 19.
On the domestic front, the April 16, 2025 New York Times headline said it all: “Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Electrify Democrats Who Want to Fight Trump.” It referred to their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour which has taken the pair before crowds of 36,000 people in Los Angeles; 34,000 in Denver; 30,000 in Folsom, California, where the line to get in was three miles long and thousands more watched through the fence and from the surrounding hills; 20,000 in Salt Lake City; 20,000 in Tucson, Arizona; 15,000 in Tempe, Arizona, with another thousand outside; 12,500 in Nampa, Idaho; 10,000 in Greeley, Colorado, with an overflow crowd said to be of equal number; 7,500 in Missoula, Montana, with another 1,000 listening outside; 4,000 in Bakersfield, California; and 1,000 in North Las Vegas. Additionally, AOC held a rally with New York Representative Paul Tonko in the district of Elise Stefanik, Trump’s one-time nominee for ambassador to the United Nations.
In short, the claim that Ocasio-Cortez is something less than a “real progressive” is preposterous. If someone were to take such an assertion to court they would have to hope for a Trump-appointed judge to have any hope of winning their case. The only political figure to have done more to rally opposition to the Trump regime than Ocasio-Cortez is Sanders himself. So whence this recent flurry of muttering that she’s not the real deal?
Much of the current discontent concerns a failed amendment to H.R.4016, the Department of Defense Appropriations Act for 2026. The amendment in question would have eliminated funding for Israel’s so-called “Iron Dome,” a missile system designed to intercept incoming missiles. It was offered by one of the most Trumpist members of the House, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and received only six votes—that of Greene, one other Republican, and four of the 18 hard-core opponents of Israel’s Gaza devastation. Ocasio-Cortez was not one of the four.
Members of legislative bodies may opt to deal with various amendments to bills in a variety of ways. For one thing, they are obviously taken more seriously if one intends to vote for, rather than against the final bill, as well as if or when the amendment is deemed to have a chance of passing. In a situation such as the one involving this Greene amendment, other considerations may come into play. In this case, for instance, one might imagine some deciding to vote against an amendment with no chance of passage out of disdain for the overall political stance of its author. (The vote in question occurred before the shocker of Greene becoming the first Republican in Congress to call the Israel assault on Gaza genocide.)
I am in no position to speculate as to the reasons that the majority of the Tlaib-letter signatories voted against it, but Ocasio-Cortez actually articulated hers: “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s amendment does nothing to cut off offensive aid to Israel nor end the flow of U.S. munitions being used in Gaza. Of course, I voted against it. What it does do is cut off defensive Iron Dome capacities while allowing the actual bombs killing Palestinians to continue. I have long stated that I do not believe that adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war is constructive to its end. That is a simple and clear difference of opinion that has long been established. I remain focused on cutting the flow of U.S. munitions that are being used to perpetuate the genocide in Gaza.”
The counter-argument to this is that to the extent that the Iron Dome is effective—in itself a disputed matter—it allows Israel to act with impunity, inflicting damage on others without fear of retribution. I share this take on the issue, in fact. At the current moment I’d vote against sending aid of any kind to Israel. However, I do not consider the Ocasio-Cortez viewpoint to be beyond the pale, and I also view her vote in the context of the ongoing necessity of clarity on the point that we opponents of Israel’s military operations oppose both Israeli and Hamas attacks upon civilians. Hopefully, all of us who hope to convince an ever greater sector of our population to oppose the Israeli onslaught recognize that necessity. And the possibility of erring in that direction should by no means be seen as treason to the cause on the part of one of the staunchest congressional opponents of Israel’s effort to destroy Gaza.
To take the question from a different angle, let’s consider the Israelis who are currently publicly demonstrating against this extermination campaign. Surely we’d have to count them among the most courageous and impactful protestors against their government’s actions to be found anywhere in the world. While I personally don’t know any of them, I strongly suspect that there are some among their number who support the Iron Dome system because they believe that it does offer some protection to them and their neighbors in the case of attack—a real possibility in their lives. If that were to be the case, would we deem their opposition to the war as insufficient, or less than genuine? Arguing and debating every fine point regarding the current horrific situation is in many ways an admirable thing; it’s a facet of commitment. But when it creates needless divisions or even turns friends into foes, it ceases to be admirable. And certainly, on this question, Ocasio-Cortez’s stance does not justify articles with absurd titles like the one cited above.
Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to Ocasio-Cortez. Bernie Sanders too is lately under attack by some adherents to what we might characterize as a crossword-puzzle approach to politics—that is to say, if you don’t use the right word, it doesn’t count. The word in question here is “genocide.” Many, perhaps most opponents of Israel’s actions believe they meet the definition of genocide created by the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. But there are also equally staunch opponents who—because they think Israel’s devastation of Gaza, although abominable, doesn’t fit that definition; or because they adhere to a different definition of the word; or for some other reason – choose not to use the word. Sanders is one of those, which has resulted in some people going to far as to argue that the fact that the word “genocide” does not appear in his statements actually outweighs, for instance, the importance of his authoring the Senate resolution that for the first time drew a majority of that body’s Democrats into public opposition to what Sanders characterized as “an all-out, illegal, immoral and horrific war of annihilation against the Palestinian people.” I even recently ran across someone who called him “a coward” on those grounds. Bernie Sanders—a coward! (He has, by the way, recently extended his Fighting Oligarchy tour to West Virginia and North Carolina and is headed there this weekend.)
Nor is this sort of thing new. Before she even took office, comedian and YouTube program host Jimmy Dore was denouncing Ocasio-Cortez as a “liar ... coward ... gaslighter” for refusing to make her first vote for Speaker of the House contingent on Nancy Pelosi’s agreement to schedule a full House vote on Medicare for All legislation. Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of progressive members of the House ultimately decided against the tactic. Perhaps Dore’s Force-the-Vote advocacy was right, perhaps it was wrong, but one thing the subsequent five and a half years have clearly demonstrated is that he was wrong in his name-calling.
In a sense, these outbursts of political myopia—“I don’t care about what you’ve done or think about anything else, if you disagree with me on this, you’re a (pick one) coward/genocide-supporter/gaslighter/so-called progressive/con-artist/liar—are actually a-political. The decision to be political involves commitment to overcoming the well-known fact that no two people will agree on everything, in the interest of finding areas of agreement to act upon. The Internet does wonders in allowing people to share their ideas—including their differences—but it can unfortunately also make it too easy to forget that commitment.
I stated above that I considered misguided attacks on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to be particularly damaging. The reason is 2028 and the next presidential election. Bernie Sanders’s decision to enter the 2016 presidential race was a game changer—his ultimate failure to win the nomination notwithstanding—as it belatedly brought American politics into the 21st Century by introducing working class-oriented democratic socialist ideas into millions of living rooms during the Democratic primary debates. Likewise in 2020. But not so in 2024, when the only candidates in the limelight, Donald Trump , Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris , vied to be Bibi Netanyahu’s best friend, and all opposed Medicare for All.
Assuming that Bernie Sanders will not make another run, we find ourselves very much in need of a candidate who will carry the banner he ran on—one who will reject a minimalist “At least we’re better than Trump” message instead calling for turning away from the disastrous endless-war foreign policy that has reigned supreme for decades and against economic policies that favor the interest of the few who are fabulously wealthy over the interests of the many who are not. It is certainly not too soon to consider this question, as we know all too well how prepared the other side is.
To my eye, at this point the obvious choice would seem to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, should she be interested. Perhaps the reader sees it differently or has another candidate in mind. Nevertheless, we should all be able to agree that it’s imperative not to lose sight of the broader goals because we have obsessed over differences on lesser matters. We should not do the billionaires’ work of dividing us. They have enough money to do it for themselves.
