A serious note on Ocasio-Cortez

These past few days I've pinioned the newly minted U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with satirical pieces ("Area dairy cows offended by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's 'farting cows' remark" here; "29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez gifted with 'infused knowledge,' liberal theologian argues" here). Today, however, I wanted to offer a few serious reflections.

Ocasio-Cortez's politics trouble me first of all because I'm not a socialist. Although I may resist political affiliation as a matter of principle, I have always been skeptical of ever-increasing

entitlements. I don't think, for example, that a "basic income" would be helpful to solving lower-income folks' economic woes, and I don't think a total government takeover of medical insurance is the answer to our current broken system. But we've lived with socialist politicians in the past, and we're living with them in the present (God forbid a Bernie Sanders presidency, though!), and if all Ocasio-Cortez had were socialist aspirations, I'm sure her aspirations could be tempered when they meet the hard reality of the facts on the ground. That's what politics is about, after all: The Democrats want something, and the Republicans want something else, and they wrangle it out with a compromise that, while it makes nobody happy, does leave the government intact.

In her temperament, however, Ocasio-Cortex shows little inclination toward compromise, and her rhetoric in particular is consistently inflammatory and over-the-top. While campaigning in Kansas, for example, she made an analogy between Kansas voting to join the union as a free state in 1861 and their need to elect the Democrat she was campaigning for instead of his Republican opponent. Later, when members of her own Democratic party sought to block Pelosi's election to the House speakership, she accused them of doing so because they are white and male. She has compared the combatting of climate change to the Allies' fight against Hitler in the Second World War. The list could go on and on.

On the one hand, Ocasio-Cortez's radical temperament is easy to dismiss. Some will say that she is new to politics, and that when she encounters her first real political road-blocks, she'll be forced to tame her rhetoric and learn the art of compromise. That's what has happened to most of the "tea party" Republicans elected a few years ago, at least the ones that survived. Despite his own inflammatory rhetoric, even our current president is usually kept in check--his creative use of executive orders and emergency declarations notwithstanding--by the limits that our Constitution places on the power of the executive branch of government.

Yet, if I am reading the political tea leaves better than Ocasio-Cortez's incumbent opponent did in the Democratic primary, the new congresswoman is wielding a great deal more power than her lowly position as a first-term legislator would suggest. Like the "tea party" Representatives before her, Ocasio-Cortez was swept into office by a wave of public frustration. But unlike the members of the "tea party," whose momentum largely fizzled when it met the impenetrable wall of entrenched career politicians in their own party, Ocasio-Cortez seems to have the Democrats in her pocket. Put simply, they're afraid of being the next Joe Crowley.

We often think of the United States as a democracy, and that is, of course, partially right. But the beauty of a representative democracy is that legislative decision-making occurs at some distance from the back-and-forth waves of public opinion. The biggest problem with Ocasio-Cortez, I think, is that in her very personality she has brought the immediate public discontents directly into House chamber. That in itself isn't the problem, though. The real problem is that her lack of knowledge and her unwillingness to compromise means that whatever she puts forward--however radical, however ill-advised--is going to have a greater chance than it should of actually making it into law.

I recognize that there is very little chance that Ocasio-Cortez will, for example, bring the aviation industry to its knees in a decade, or, for that matter, eliminate "farting cows." But I'm afraid that whatever she manages to craft legislatively is going to be very much of the confrontational, "us-versus-them" variety. It will most certainly go beyond what the prudence of our representative democracy would ordinarily countenance.

The saddest thing, I think, is that there are very real reasons for the public discontent that thrust Ocasio-Cortez into office, and that what we really need right now is a politician who not only "gets' the public's anger, as Ocasio-Cortez clearly does, but who also has the prudence and the wisdom to broker deals and get laws passed that actually help get our nation back on the right path. My assessment, in short, is that Ocasio-Cortez clearly lacks that sort of prudence and wisdom, and that, with the power she's already wielding, there is little incentive for her to grow in these virtues.