The Editors of New York Magazine - Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC

Take Up Space

The Unprecedented AOC

A VID R EADER P RESS

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ISBN 978-1-5011-6697-6

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Though barely five years into her public life, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an irresistible subject for a biography, which this is, but the book also takes a different form. It tells her personal story but is also a portrait of a nation changing fast enough to create the conditions for her rise. AOCs influence is revolutionary, both in terms of the agenda she is pushing, redefining and popularizing a kind of socialism for an America rarely hospitable to such ideas, and in the way she pushes it, inventing a new kind of political discoursecolloquial, brash, and direct, very much an outgrowth of her generations life on social media. As Rebecca Traister explains in her introduction to the book, this is Ocasio-Cortezs real contribution to American politics. She has transformed the way it is practiced, maybe forever.

To tell that story, this book proceeds along two paths. At its heart is Lisa Millers gripping account of AOCs life and her swift rise to power. This narrative is complete, but it is not exhaustive. Within her text, you will find numbers, much like footnotes, directing you to multiple types of stories by other authors: oral histories, essays interrogating her ideas, even a chapter rendered in graphic-novel style. Youll also find dissections of her political performances, including speeches, congressional testimony, and social media livestreams. This extended commentary starts on page 204, right after the biography.

We hope you will read the whole book, but it has been constructed so you dont have to. Read the biography, and then dig deeper into whatever else interests you. If weve done this right, whether you love her or loathe her (or are the rare person who falls in between), you will come to understand both Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the context in which the AOC phenomenon became possible.

AOC went into the game in the summer of 2019. We had 200 cards on our shortlist: She was No. 1. Everyone said, This is a killer card. Were looking for people who provoke strong emotional reactions. Early on, we put Steve Bannon in. But now you get that card and you think, This game is old and lame. AOC is not ephemeralten years from now, shes still going to be a political person of prominence.

D AVID M UNK, CO-CREATOR OF C ARDS

A GAINST H UMANITY

Politics can be divided into two eras.

By

R EBECCA T RAISTER

A t around 11 p.m., one week after a right-wing mob breached security at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, a ripple coursed through social media. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had taken to Instagram Live, her first major public statement since emerging from the bowels of the nations Capitol complex, where she had hidden as armed combatants roamed the halls with their zip-ties, guns, and Confederate flags in hand.

The insurrection had been a gleeful, feral power grab, an angry strafing against Donald Trumps loss and the victory of Democrats over the nations hard-right wing. Those armed insurgents had had their revanchist sights set on AOC herself, both metaphorically and physically, storming the Capitol fueled by rage at the leftist politics and broader representational shifts she has so swiftly come to embody. The nature of the onslaught also had put her in literal peril: Those who blitzed the Capitol did so with an energy that made clear they would have relished the opportunity to hurt or humiliate, dominate or punish, this woman, the young, hypercelebrated, beautifuland in that circumstance, vulnerablestand-in for everything they were there to repudiate.

Ocasio-Cortez had tweeted in the immediate aftermath of the attack that she was unhurt, but in the week following, her public voicetypically loud and steadily engagedhad gone unusually silent. Yet now here she was, closing in on midnight, very much herself, and very much online.

Within minutes of the start of her informal address, 110,000 people tuned in. As she spoke, Instagram hearts flew up the right side of the screen and comments flooded in front of her face: praise hands, thumbs-up emoji, Preach!, YES. Her speech was met with relief and adoration by some; derision, irritation, and fury by others. All of it was characteristic of how people interact with Ocasio-Cortez, whether warmly or aggressively: The communications were intimate, immediate, wholly unmediated.

Meanwhile, Ocasio-Cortez was just talking, speaking in what had, over the course of her time in politics, become her familiar conversational style, telling the still-incomplete story of what had happened to her. It is not an exaggeration to say that many, many members of the House were nearly assassinated, she said, making news by explaining that one encounter had made her feel that her life was endangered.

She spoke for an hour and two minutespart explainer on impeachment and the 25th Amendment, part history lesson about the first day the Capitol had been breached since 1814. There was poetic railing on the nihilism of the white-supremacist project, and the earnest vibe of a self-help session, rich in the language of trauma and self-care.

She offered the reassuring warmth of Oprah; the fire-and-brimstone of Jonathan Edwards; the inspiration of John F. Kennedy; the intimacy of an FDR fireside chat. It was exhausting and reassuring and scary and comforting and extremely weird. It was kind of wild, and actually there was no real, full precedent in American history for what it was or how it should be received.

Ocasio-Cortezs statement was the one that many Americans had been waiting through those hard days to hearwhether to cheer or to mock. But she wasnt the president, or the president-elect, or a former president, or the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. She wasnt the Speaker of the House. She wasnt even a martyred political legendnot Hillary Clinton or Shirley Chisholmwhose losses inspire sassy T-shirts and tears. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasnt yet lost anything, politically.