David Freedlander - The AOC Generation: How Millennials Are Seizing Power and Rewriting the Rules of American Politics

For my girls:
Lily, Claribel, and Rosa

Summer was nearly over, there was a slight chill in the air portending the coming of fall, and New York City had begun to empty out for the Labor Day 2017 weekend. But one bar, just below ground level on a side street in the citys East Village, was packed, as it was most Thursday evenings. Thats where a couple of dozen leftist political organizers and advocates started routinely gathering at a happy hour hosted by Sean McElwee.

McElwee, then just twenty-four, looked like a twelve-year-old inflated to adult-size, dressed in a too-small T-shirt with a baseball cap askew atop his head. But his weekly happy hours at the dingy divehe asked that the name of the bar not be used because right-wing protesters might crash itquickly became an essential stop for the citys activist class in the months after Donald Trumps surprise win in November 2016. Gathered most Thursday nights at the bar were newly minted socialists, tired campaign workers, government staffers, think-tank types, and others devoted to a wide variety of progressive and leftist causes. To be there and to be over thirty would be considered ancient.

McElwee could often be found at a table in the back, where a steady stream of friends, well-wishers, and journalists stopped by. When I met him that evening, he berated me for not using his quotes in a story I had written. He also predicted that one day his own children would find him to be a moral degenerate for eating meat and said that he was working on building a world where ecoterrorists could receive veterans benefits.

On the night at Augusts end, one of the people who swung by was a little-known long-shot congressional candidate named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, looking impossibly put together in a black dress with a white quilted blazer and more than a little out-of-place in a neon-lit bar that hadnt changed its decor in forty-five years.

She was there at the invitation of McElwee, who had been hyping online the slew of left-leaning challengers running for offices up and down the slate, and inviting most of them to come drink with him and his pals, part of a renewed interest in electoral politics by a mostly younger generation horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency. He direct-messaged her on Twitter at a time when Ocasio-Cortez had only a few hundred followers and invited her to come by.

At the bar, she put Led Zeppelin on the jukebox and lamented how New Yorks notoriously closed electoral system was making it nearly impossible for a candidate like her, a young Latina from the Bronx, to compete, especially against the behemoth she was running against, Joe Crowley. He was not just the likely next Speaker of the House of Representatives but also the head of the Queens County Democratic Party, which meant there was a whole apparatus of election lawyers and judges in his thrall and that the entire citys political class was in his corner.

People who were there that night remember Ocasio-Cortez as being, for a politician, unusually interested in hearing about what the different activists had done in their various lines of work.

What I remember is that she just kind of lit up the room, said Matthew Miles Goodrich, an environmental organizer who had just begun to work with the Sunrise Movement, a youth-led organization founded in 2017 and dedicated to slowing climate change and making issues of environmental justice central to the US political debate after decades of neglect. I went to Seans happy hour every week, and there were a lot of candidates coming through, and it was just immediately clear that this person was pretty fantastic.

While most candidates who came through seemed to do a quick appraisal of who would be helpful to them and who wouldnt be, Ocasio-Cortez seemed genuinely excited to be surrounded by organizers working to build political and social movements, according to those who were there, and she pelted people with questions about the details of their work.

By that summer night, it was already clear that something was afoot in America. This book is the story of that something. It is the story, in part, of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, of how she rose from the life of an adrift twenty-something making her way in New York to an overnight sensation, the likes of which the political world had never seen, becoming an icon of pop culture in the process. But no person, no matter how dynamic, is the product only of their own will and talent. All of us are pushed quietly along by thousands of unseen hands, are the product of society and circumstance, the place we were born into and the people we come to know. And so this isnt just the story of Ocasio-Cortez, it is the story of the people who powered her rise, and the circumstances in the city and in the nation that made her rise possible.

Ocasio-Cortez was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, and her appearance on Capitol Hill was seen correctly as a harbinger of a new, ascendant generation, one pulling the nation leftward, fed up with politics as usual, and fearful of a future in which ecological catastrophe, widening inequality, and the rise of illiberal populism threatened life as they had come to know it. They were the best educated and most diverse generation in the nations history, and in the wake of the election of Donald Trump many of them decided that if anything was going to change, they would have to do it themselves. Ocasio-Cortez was one of those young people who faced that choice, and she was the beneficiary of similar choices thousands of young people made who decided that if anything was ever going to change, they would have to change it themselves. This story is the story of both them, and of her.

It is not an endorsement of their tactics or their ideology. I am a political reporter, and so it is rather an examination of a new force that looks set to have a large role in our politics for decades to come, and a look at how Ocasio-Cortez stepped into a moment that was waiting for her to seize it. I live in Ocasio-Cortezs district, and watched as her long-shot campaign pulled off one of the upsets of the century, and I interviewed her when she was campaigning and desperate for any kind of coverage. Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor her office participated in this book. I interviewed her twice while she was in Congress for a story for New York Magazine and her comments to me in this book come from that conversation. I interviewed dozens of people who knew her at various times in her life and who were willing to share their memories of her, and dozens and dozens more who got engaged in politics around 2016 and helped make this moment, the Ocasio-Cortez moment, possible.

The biggest single force that helped make AOC possible was Bernie Sanders. Without Sanders, there would almost certainly be no Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. An avowed democratic socialist, he ran one of the most vocally left-wing campaigns in US political history. More surprising, it nearly worked. Sanders, a senator from Vermont, almost won the Democratic primary, despite running against an opponent, Hillary Clinton, with vastly more resources and almost the entire Democratic Party supporting her. Sanders won more than two million votes from eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds in the 2016 primary, more than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump combined.