Occam's Razor

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Mahatma Gandhi

Newly minted congressional representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has been making quite a name for herself. This is amazing considering she’s been in Congress less than three months. It could be that she is only 29 (also my daughter’s age), making her the youngest person in a congress full of old folk. Nah, it’s not that. Maybe it’s because she’s of Puerto Rican ancestry, but it’s not that either and besides, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It could be that she is a woman, and you are getting a bit warm there, but with roughly a quarter of Congress now comprised of women, she’s hardly a groundbreaker there. So what is it about her that has the press and the right wing so agog?

I’ve been analyzing AOC (she’s so well known that she is more often known by her initials) trying to figure it out. For whatever reason, she got the attention of the right wing when she handily unseated incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for her district that covers the west Bronx and northern Queens burroughs. At this point, even Donald Trump must be getting jealous because it seems Fox News can’t stop talking about her, in a disparaging way of course, which means less attention on him. Based on their attention on her, the right wing judges her as a spectacular threat. She quickly went from being ignored before her primary, to laughed at shortly thereafter, to the “fight you” stage. The right wing sees in AOC something unique and chilling that they don’t fear from the many other liberal women who joined Congress in January.

My take is that she is breaking gender stereotypes right and left. Women are socialized to be nice, so some part of them must always project that stereotype. You can see it in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with her perpetual fake smile. It’s like she’s had surgery to permanent keep a smile on her face. That smile was key to how she managed to gain and retain power in Congress over many decades. She wielded her femininity quite adroitly by exploiting a number of female stereotypes (like always smiling) through her mostly male colleagues.

It’s not that AOC doesn’t smile, but she quite clearly rejects gender stereotypes. With AOC you see a person first, instead of a women first. More importantly, the right wing sees her as a person first, and that’s totally scary to them. Right-wingers by definition don’t like change, and while they don’t like liberal women, they tolerate them more when they act like they act like think women are supposed to act.

AOC though acts as herself. She really doesn’t give a crap what other people think about her, which is in contrast to other women like, say, Nancy Pelosi who carefully stage manages herself. AOC is so much her own person that I don’t doubt that even Nancy Pelosi is a bit irritated and jealous. AOC is changing the rules for how women “should” behave, and criticism just can’t seem to stick. It’s like water off a duck’s back.

Of course, if she looked butch or mannish, then perhaps their attacks would sting. But she also happens to be a beautiful woman. They can’t hate her for being a lesbian, as she is happily heterosexual with a boyfriend while using the newer term “cisgender woman” with unnatural ease. Frankly, they don’t understand a lot of what she’s saying, because she has mastered the code words of her generation. Right-wingers hate terms like cisgender. That’s in part because they don’t believe in gender; they believe that the sex you are born with is your gender, despite the vast mountains of evidence around them that say just the opposite.

So basically she makes them squirm, and this makes their level of vitriol grow. The real threat is hard for them to articulate, but I can. They can’t acknowledge that she is the generation that’s coming at them, and this generation is far more tolerant and far less likely to engage in stereotypes than their generation. She represents not just potential change, but actual change. This is why they are pulling out all guns (hopefully just metaphorically) to stop her, or at least undercut her. It’s just that nothing seems to work. And when she does deign to respond to criticism, she cuts to the chase with a tweet or a statement that underlies the real problem that they cannot even acknowledge to themselves.

The threat they perceive but can’t acknowledge is that AOC is a model. Lots of others in her generation, and even aging geezers like me, can see how she works and realize, Hey, I don’t have to play that game either. I can just be me, and it’s okay! With AOC you don’t see a man or a woman, you see a person: a person very much in touch with who she is who is not afraid to be herself and tell you what she thinks. She oozes self-confidence.

It’s possible she will screw this up somehow. She hopefully has a long career ahead of her and she is bound to make mistakes. When she does, her critics will be merciless. But as long as she projects confidence in herself, none of it should stick. Needless to say her critics will be doing everything possible to trip her up. Let’s hope AOC always stays one step ahead of them because she is truly inspiring in a way that few people ever actually attain.