Where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Parts Ways With Bernie Sanders

Here are a few things I have noticed about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s exceptionally disciplined congressional campaign, which will surely make her a folk hero on the left. First, my impression is that she had strikingly little to say about Russian interference in the 2016 election, nor did she spend her time litigating the question of whether James Comey’s blundering interventions cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. In my experience, those are fixations of Democrats who are more partisan than ideological, and for whom Clinton’s defeat is a lingering wound. Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is an avowed democratic socialist who organized for Bernie Sanders, a man who stubbornly continues to insist on identifying as an independent. It is not at all clear that loyalty to the Democratic Party per se is one of her chief motivations.

Further, you won’t find the third-generation Bronxite braying against Donald Trump’s supposed transgressions against the postwar liberal international order. This is perfectly in keeping with the fact, she poured scorn on centrist Democrats who believe “we’re going to austerity our way into prosperity,” attributing their aversion to deficits to an excessive deference to Wall Street con artists. And why wouldn’t she? Sanders and his devotees are enthralled by the heterodox economist Stephanie Kelton, who has risen to intellectual celebrity by that the only real constraint on federal spending is inflation, and that alarm over deficits is, in short, nonsensical.