AOC ’28 Starts Now

Donald Trump is being inaugurated as president again Monday. A few years ago, I would have felt comfortable saying “for the final time,” but the Republican Supreme Court has turned the Constitution into a suggestion box. Either way, it’s happening again, which means Tuesday is just as good a time as any for Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez to start running for 2028. Or this afternoon, if she’s not busy.

The millenarian psycho-dunce contingent has their godhead, and now it’s time for the rest of us — you know, the 80% supermajority of citizens whose moral universes aren’t best depicted as the interior of a sackful of rats — to be represented by a normal person. And the fact is, we aren’t.

Irrespective of how many Democrats no-show Monday’s proceedings at the Capitol, the nation will bear witness to two leadership groups: Donald Trump, and all the infected members of his hive mind, in the form of six justices of the Supreme Court and the congressional GOP caucus — and, well, nobody you know. Bernie Sanders and the remaining members of the Squad may be up there, but Democrats have taken great pains to indicate that they don’t represent the party. Nancy Pelosi has arrogated to herself the hiring-and-firing perquisites of a party leader while disclaiming responsibility for the day-to-day. Chuck Schumer long ago ceded his decision-making abilities to operating as a medium for a Long Island family obsessed with gas prices. After that, good luck. What’s left is less a political group than a bunch of irritable gestures about norms.

There is no opposition party in Washington. Having spent the election cycle depicting Trump as an existential threat to democracy, the bulk of Democrats have spent the pre-Inauguration period announcing their flirtations with accommodating him, like a coastal town with a civil-defense alarm blaring that it intends to work with the tsunami. Almost every Democrat who has opened his or her mouth owns a particular embarrassment in this regard. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis thinks Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — lifelong advocate of mass death through preventable illness — has some ideas worthy enough to overlook mass death. On that note, the fact that Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman thinks acquiring Greenland is a capital notion only reduces the likelihood that he’ll appear on the dais wearing a cloak of Palestinian skins, face ”Braveheart”–painted in the Israeli flag colors, and kachunking his chair rightward to be closer to his ideological kinfolk.

In short, someone should say something. And not only should it be AOC, she should say it early and often. There are a lot of reasons why she makes an ideal candidate. For one, she’s extremely talented at using new media to talk to normal people while acting like a normal person. For another, Democratic leadership has so publicly held its nose while shaking her hand for the past six years that she’s one of the few nationally recognized Democratic figures who doesn’t reek of the taint of indifference and feckless lack of urgency that’s settled on the bulk of the party. There’s also literally no one else.

Of course, saying “I’m running” is unwise. It smacks a little of arrogance and over-eagerness and threatens to burn out whatever exciting momentum her candidacy would gather for simply existing. Instead, she should steadfastly refuse to commit one way or another until at least after the midterms. 

The advantages of committing to noncommitment should be obvious: Terminally beige Beltway thinkspeak drones can be economical with their takes. No one in journalism wants to write the same column twice if they can split a take on any given phenomenon into two half-thoughts, and the powder necessary for a fusillade of cheerleading or outrage attending her candidacy can be saved for a couple years in favor of firing off speculative cheerleading or outrage. The world of hypotheticals is boundless, and a mainstream narrative machine already unbounded by too much adherence to fact can daydream and confabulate to its heart’s content about her actual motives and what she’s actually doing. A candidacy is just one thing to panel shout about; a hypothetical candidacy provides innumerable things for shouting about.

In the meantime, AOC should tour the country repeatedly, under whatever pretext is most convenient, and conduct activism teach-ins, in partnership with whatever local groups seem viable for vastly expanding their numbers and absorbing the energies of people showing up for the first time and learning how to do something. The Democratic Party’s post-Reagan dependency on high-dollar donors and a professionalized political apparatus has denied most citizens a place for articulating and driving policy and starved them of nourishing support and instruction in how to be political beings. We have a nation of people despairing and afraid; they need to be shown where to go to learn that they already possess agency and strength.

The benefits to an AOC candidacy and Americans here are threefold. First, since the Democratic Party itself evinces no interest in actively opposing Trump’s agenda, this lends a recognizable and charismatic face to grassroots organizations already seeking people power to fuel an opposition, endorsing them as places the average frustrated or anxious person can direct their energies. It starts a movement by teaching it where and how to scream the “no” already on its lips.

Second, building an opposition lays the foundation for building a campaign apparatus. The politics of being an Ivy grad with Hillary for America on the résumé  have failed. The politics of perpetually moving toward a center being pulled rightward by a conservatism sprinting headlong at fascism have failed. The politics of showing up every four years with a new volunteer app designed during a sabbatical from a job at Uber managing distribution of condom catheters so “contractors” can urinate in their cars has failed. The only thing left is the thing that terrifies the Democratic Party enough that they will never build it: empowering people.

Third, and most importantly, committing now to building this kind of movement means creating the sort of grassroots organizations that exert pressure from the ground up to realize whatever goals a future AOC administration proposes. The best way to highlight Barack Obama’s failure of creating and decommissioning a nationwide quadrennial army is to start building one four years early, and telling it that you want to hear more from it, every day, starting tomorrow.

That such a movement will surely gall the Democratic establishment is its own dividend. Trump wound up at the center of the stage of each 2015 and 2016 debate because everyone else was turning their head at him to yell. He made himself the center of the conversation because he asked for neither permission nor forgiveness. His instincts were right even if everything else about him was wrong. Eventually, just doing the damn thing — because fuck you, that’s why — does the damn thing. It is that it is. Or, in less biblical terms: The Road Runner can sprint across the gorge because he doesn’t look down.

How this gets funded is a problem only for people looking for a way to justify hearing “no” before trying. Tom Steyer spent — this is an estimate — $400 trillion for two votes from people who pulled a lever by mistake. Maybe the next person looking to drop $100 million on a new journalism startup that will deliver fresh exciting essential journalism tackling urgent must-read issues on the left and the right and then shutting down within nine months could just hand it to AOC instead and disappear. If nothing else, if Bernie could figure it out, someone else can. There’s money everywhere in the system because that’s the only thing anyone’s bothered putting into it for nearly 45 years.

Just four years ago, I would have been a little nauseated at the crassness of launching a run for president on Inauguration Day, but Trump’s clearing the “can a 34-time convicted felon get elected president” hurdle has given me a cast-iron stomach for all nonsense about norms. At this point, worrying about whether AOC ’28 beginning on Jan. 21, 2025, is “a bad look” is like going to a nuclear bomb site and handing out homeowners association citations for improperly stored garbage cans. 

The Democratic Party leadership can declaim its commitment to losing pretty, and everyone else can get busy winning messy. Their first opportunity to get on a bandwagon headed away from a perpetual state of impotence and failure will be Feb. 1, when the Democratic National Committee elects a new chair. The race between upper Midwesterners Ben Wikler and Ken Martin, villain-from-”The Wire” Martin O’Malley and last-minute “Make 2028 2016 Again” Faiz Shakir could be an opportunity for institutionalizing this kind of grassroots approach, if the party rank-and-file decide not to shoot themselves in the collective dick. 

Until then, any time they weigh in on the problems they see with a campaign approach, they’re baiting an old internet comeback: That’s a mirror. Until they decide to move, it’s time to look past them. On Inauguration Day, they’re all in the wrong place anyway: They’re sitting behind Trump.