AOC

What a great interview of Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez. I couldn’t help but notice shifts in her thinking toward the Democratic Party, members in Congress, and coalition politics. I wish more on the left possessed a politics and analytical disposition that was equally flexible and dialectical as hers.

Frankly, too many on the left, unlike AOC, are politically stuck. Their categories of analysis – center, right, left – are static and frozen – rather than open ended and fluid. Once political leader or a political/social movement or political coalition are typed, they stay typed. They’re enclosed and remaine in one category or another.

What is more, Joe Biden, it is said, is a “Bourgeois” or “Establishment” politician. The Democratic party’s center of political gravity is frozen in time, dangling somewhere in the neoliberal era. And liberals have no place in this discourse, except as a term of ridicule and opprobrium.

In short, movement, complexity and contradictory locations have no place in this rigid analysis. Political life is lifeless and petrified.

But here’s the problem: If taken too seriously by too many, the winning of next year’s election becomes an unnecessarily steep climb. Luckily most activists have more common sense, not to mention analytical skills.