There are two indelible images of Ocasio-Cortez, neither of them flattering, that bookend her evolution. The first is the photo of her weeping outside of an immigration camp in Texas in 2018, before she had won election to Congress. Dressed all in white, she wails in protest of “kids in cages,” the phrase employed by activists to denounce Trump-era immigration policy. The protest itself wasn’t offensive; our treatment of migrants at the border is indeed indefensible. The trouble lies in what didn’t happen next. When Biden took office in 2020, American immigration policy did not meaningfully change. This is often chalked up to Covid-era restrictions, but those restrictions are long gone and Democrats have not made significant changes to Trump’s border policy. There are, literally, still kids in cages — so why isn’t Ocasio-Cortez at the border again, protesting her country’s president?
The second image of AOC is at the 2021 Met Gala — a who’s who of celebrity and wealth, a celebration of precisely the elitism that the left is meant to oppose. So it was a bit depressing, but not at all surprising, to see this champion of the working class at an event in which celebrities wandered around unmasked while their many servants dutifully wore masks to prevent the spread of Covid. Politicians, even lefty politicians, go to fancy events and hobnob with the ruling class; it’s a fact of life. But Ocasio-Cortez tried to have it both ways: she wore white again, this time a dress emblazoned with the words “Tax the Rich” in bright red. And this made her opportunity to rub shoulders with the 1% a matter of direct hypocrisy. It’s one thing to go to the party; it’s another to blare out a message that you disapprove of the party while you’re there.
If there is a key to AOC’s political persona, it lies between these two poles. The former betrays the fundamental moral corruption of partisanship: it compels people to care about political issues precisely to the degree that those issues are convenient for the party. Losing interest in our immoral immigration system after Biden’s election is exactly the sort of thing that AOC’s rabid fans once said she would never do. The latter not only sees AOC transported from outside the gates to inside the most elite of venues, it also showcases AOC’s increasingly half-hearted attempts to cover up her genuine predilections with the most superficial of symbolic acts.
Take, for example, the chronic mistreatment of workers in our railway system that contributed to the derailment and subsequent air crisis in East Palestine, Ohio. Ocasio-Cortez publicly castigated the railway companies and demanded better conditions for workers — then voted to forbid them from striking. It’s hard to imagine a clearer example of her overall political orientation, speaking up like a militant supporter of workers in the press then immediately betraying them with her vote. She would go on to claim that this was really a matter of supporting what the workers wanted, but Railroad Workers United quickly clarified that this defense was an act of remarkable dishonesty. Labor is the heart of the left and strikes are the sword of labor; to vote to forbid workers from striking, for a supposed socialist, amounts to an unforgivable betrayal of basic values.