Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“"No matter where you are on the political spectrum, the moral of coalition building is this idea that we need each other, especially when it comes to organizing around social change," she told me. ”

“Organizing, she notes, is about persuasion, and bringing people—all kinds—closer to supporting your goals... "How are we going to achieve the things that we want to achieve if your [average] young, upwardly mobile professional woman doesn't realize that she's part of a class struggle, too?" she continues. It's crucial for the movement "to build power everywhere." (Raina Lipsitz)”

“She thought of herself as power mapping on the inside but not for the inside's sake, in the way of the old boys' club. She was mapping the inside for those on the outside. She was walking the isthmus.”

“What she was teaching was what she had mastered herself—the building of a direct and loyal and constantly watered connection to one's followers, so as to create a power base that no one could take away. To achieve this was a mark of independence in this time, not only in politics, but also in media...”

“The society rewarded the establishmentarians who stuck to the inside game and clung to their civility and never changed much but leavened stasis with a smile lavishing them with money and power and office. In a different way, it rewarded the purists, the callers out, the activists who never backed down, with respect, with devoted fan bases, and, more and more, with audiences who would crowdfund...their...living.”

“The isthmus she was walking was narrow: to the establishment on her right, she was at constant risk of being an outcast; to the avid base on her left, she was at constant risk of being a sellout. She was treading carefully. It was grueling and of risk.”

“ "Part of the responsibility—if we're doing the job right—is to translate public will into the actual law of the land but who shapes and directs and moves that public will is writers, journalists, activists, and artists. They shape the public will and bring it to a point where we can take it and translate it into policy. Without that public will existing first, it's very difficult to move the nation forward." ”

“she wanted to use the media against itself, play the pop culture games in order to make the boring interesting and the ignored un-ignorable. She knew the system was broken, as he did. But she identified as a woman of color who couldn't afford to yell, over and over, that the system was broken. Instead, she would find the cracks and work inside them. She couldn't afford to wait for people to come to her...”

“The media is ratings obsessed. It needs drama. That is what it is. You can turn away as a result, in the way that Sanders tended to. Or, in the way Ocasio-Cortez was now practicing, you could harness everything that was wrong with the media to hijack it to advance your broader goals.”

“ “Media, for the most part, is a for-profit engine and relies on profits in making editorial decisions. That's why, for example, climate change never got covered in a serious way. Because it wasn't profitable. They couldn't figure out a way to tell this story that would drive ratings they could sell ad revenue on. "It's not the fault of journalists," she went on. "It's just the business structure. " ”

“ "For me, where I've landed so far, at least at this moment," she said, "is that I don't compromise on my values, but I'm willing to compromise in how we get there, how we talk about them, if it doesn't undermine the ultimate value and the ultimate goal. I think that's very different than saying it's my way or the highway." ”

“ "...when I clap back, it's not just reflexive, self-defense. I'm trying to dismantle some of the frames of misogyny, classism, racism that we've just allowed to go on. And I wish I didn't have to do this, to be frank." For her generation, civility and comity had helped to uphold systems of injustice and hadn't delivered much besides forever wars, fragile employment, and foreclosures.”

“She took a risk in opposing Amazon's bid to locate a new headquarters in New York, in the shadow of her district... Amazon site would supposedly have generated many jobs. But she saw the giant tax breaks local officials had offered the company... "What we're seeing here is a complete public cost for a private corporate benefit, when you give a $3B tax break to the richest company in the world..." ”

“For as long as anyone could remember, the persuasive approach of mainstream Democrats had been outreach through dilution. Reach across to moderates, Republicans by tempering your ideas as much as possible. Here was a different, and effective, method at work: force the unthinkable to be thinkable, get everyone talking about it, rile up your diehards to become your conversational army, and actually change some minds.”

“Ocasio-Cortez was, to use a term she was helping to popularize at that moment, "moving the Overton window." She was changing the boundaries of discussion, rendering the undiscussable discussable and the outlandish plausible.”

“The Guardian observed, "She has realized what Republicans have known for a long time: if people are talking about your agenda, even if they're talking about how bad and silly it is, you are making that agenda more plausible." ”

“back in the '60s and when a progressive tax rate... let's say, from zero to $75,000 may be 10 percent or 15 percent. you have But once you get to, like, the tippy-tops-on your 10 millionth dollar sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent. That doesn't mean all $10 million are taxed at an extremely high rate, but it means that as you climb ladder, you should be contributing more.”

“"I'm looking forward to working with everybody," she remem- bered saying, "but I'm less a believer in bipartisanship, and I'm more a believer in common ground. And so I'm hoping to find common ground in expanding people's health care and their wages, et cetera, because bipartisanship got us war. It has gotten us tax cuts for the rich." She remembers silence. ”

“"...How wonderful bipartisanship is and the virtue of bipartisanship. I'm sitting here, and I'm just like, 'Fuck. No one's talking about health care, no one's talking about wages, no one's talking about any actual substantive issue. They're just talking about how amazing bipartisanship is?" She was seeing up close how it happens, how the machinery grinds ideals to dust. "It's brainwashing. It's like a cult,"”

“She operated, or so it seemed, with a faith that with her multimodal approach her elongated NPR explications wouldn't undermine her pithy sloganeering and that her sloganeering wouldn't undermine her NPR explications. There was a time and place and medium for everything. You could be many yous. You could shift shapes and thus be more, not less, authentic. It was a distinctly modern approach.”

“This way of reaching people and changing minds required Ocasio-Cortez to be many selves and to juggle a wide array of approaches. Her multimodal method owed a debt to Nieto and his lessons of confronting white racists, wooing them, and helping them save face, all at once. ... At one moment, she was calling in; the next, she was starting shit and calling out. She pushed. Then she pulled others in.”

“In addition to this method of provocation followed by gentle teaching, Ocasio-Cortez showed a talent for recognizing and shaping and making the most of politically opportune moments. She understood that provocation, commanding attention, didn't just come from putting ideas out there; it often required those ideas to be attached to a moment that people were trying to make meaning out of.”

“But at the heart of the operation was Ocasio-Cortez herself, who combined the humble, bottom-up approach of chasing every vote and out-knocking the competition with a once-in-a-generation talent for pushing the boundaries of conversation, raising the profile of marginalized subjects, and forcing a response to the provocation of her ideas.”

"I just hope that more people will ignore the fatalism of the argument that we are beyond repair. We are not beyond repair. We are never beyond repair."

“My argument was, 'We can't live like this anymore, we deserve better, and you matter. And because you matter, you not turning out decides this election, and you turning out also decides this election in a different direction, but you're making a choice. I want you to know that you matter to me.' ”

“From the beginning, Ocasio-Cortez engaged in this multimodal form of persuasion that brought together traits lesser talents might have struggled to blend: being provocative and capable of seizing attention while meeting people where they are and offering vulnerability and humanity.”

“...you'll never have a career in New York City politics ever again if you do this." But Ocasio-Cortez did it anyway. And her opening salvo was a video ad that went viral and reflected the persuasive methodology of that PowerPoint presentation. "This race is about people versus money," she said in the spot. "We've got people; they've got money." There it was, Bernie's "them" and Barack's "us" forged together.”

"Someone is causing these divisions... and that is the billionaire class." The politics of an expansive "us" was powerful and beautiful and resonant, but without a politics of "them" added to its analysis, it risked advocating for what Shahid likes to call a "rainbow oligarchy," an America that looks more inclusive, that celebrates diversity, but is fundamentally still controlled and exploited by the few.”

“You needed your vision of progress to prevail over theirs... Retreat itself was not negotiable, but there could be ways of their retreating that bred resentment and made the conflict live on forever and other ways of retreating that made those who had lost or had changed their mind feel considered and seen, feel that they still had their dignity intact, which allowed them to let go of having to be right and... win.”

“Among the lessons of Nieto's that Ocasio-Cortez has publicly brought up is one he calls the golden gate of retreat—that notion of giving people who might change their mind a face-saving way out. All too often now, a latecomer to an idea is dismissed for their tardiness rather than celebrated for coming around, which was the whole object of trying to persuade them.”