In a spat between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Marjorie Taylor Greene, which side would American leftists take? Until recently, this might have sounded like a ludicrous question. By any measure, AOC is one of America’s most left-wing politicians. Greene is a self-described Christian nationalist who once belonged to the right-wing Freedom Caucus.
But two weeks ago, AOC described Greene as “a proven bigot and anti-Semite” who shouldn’t be trusted, and many American leftists flocked to Greene’s corner, condemning AOC for her comments. They included the activist Cenk Uygur, the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Grim, the Palestinian writers Susan Abulhawa and Mohammed el-Kurd, and the Democratic strategist Peter Daou, to name a few.
The newfound love for Greene on the left is explained primarily by one factor: Israel. MTG has changed sides on the issue. In the past she evinced strong support for “our ally Israel,” criticized AOC on the grounds that the representative “hates Israel,” and complained about “Israel-hating radicals.” Now Greene has broken with Donald Trump and come to condemn the “genocide in Gaza.”
Greene hasn’t become more tolerant: She greeted the election of Zohran Mamdani, New York’s first Muslim mayor, last year with an X post that showed the Statue of Liberty in a burka. And she hasn’t abandoned conspiracism: Just last week, with regard to COVID-19, she claimed that the pharmaceutical company Moderna had helped “manipulate the virus (bioweapon), make the vaccine (poison), and then make the profits.”
But Israel tops all concerns for some leftists, so Greene’s reversal on the issue is enough to win their support, and AOC’s refusal to embrace her is seen as a counterproductive purity test. Uygur, for instance, claimed that AOC had done “exactly what Israeli supporters want—split the anti-war movement and critics of Israel’s genocide.”
The AOC-MTG dustup is not really about how big a tent the American left should erect, however. It’s not even about whether left-wingers should occasionally collaborate with those on the right. Rather, it presents a choice between two irreconcilable futures for the leftist movement itself.an unrecognizable mash of anti-elite anger. In the process, it will become ever more like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
One of these two visions involves building on America’s liberal tradition while attempting to push it toward democratic socialism. This approach has a long history in the United States. In the late 1930s, the Communist Party gave vociferous support to Franklin D. Roosevelt even while recruiting thousands of people to its own ranks. The Port Huron Statement of 1962—the defining document of the American New Left—called for the movement to “include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.”
Institutionally and electorally, this version of the left relies on a grand coalition of trade unions and civil-rights groups advancing the rights of women and Black Americans—in other words, the historic constituency of the post-1970s Democratic Party. It would work to gain back the working-class votes that the party has lost in recent years.
Such a path is essentially that of Bernie Sanders, who has managed to both oppose the two-party system and make himself a core part of the Democratic Party, occupying top positions and helping shape its platform. AOC has made similar choices: She’s stayed on good terms with the Democratic leadership, even while being enormously popular within the country’s largest leftist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America.
The alternative to this vision for the left is very different. It envisages a future anchored in populist anti-elitism rather than in defined values or political traditions. It would unite those angry at “the system,” including by opposing the post-1945 world order and liberalism itself, in search of an alliance of the far left and the far right. Hence Greenwald, once on the left, now makes common cause with his right-wing counterparts, such as Alex Jones and Candace Owens. A popular pro-Palestinian account on X endorsed both a leftist Democratic-primary candidate in Michigan and Dan Bilzerian, a Holocaust denier who is running for Congress in Florida. As an emotional wedge issue, Israel is ideal for this trans-spectrum populism. Those on the left embrace hostility toward Israel as an anti-imperialist cause, while those on the right advocate an American nationalism suspicious of entanglements abroad, such as the steadfast U.S. support for Israel.
Some of the responses to AOC’s remarks about MTG made clear that her critics weren’t just suggesting that she tactically align with Greene, but that they preferred Greene’s politics to AOC’s, especially on Israel. Daou, for instance, averred that Greene had “far more intellectual honesty” and “far more courage on the defining moral issue of our time,” namely, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Abulhawa, too, asserted that for her, “as a leftie,” Greene had “more credibility and honor” on that issue. In fact, AOC has one of the most pro-Palestinian records in Congress. But the populist wing of the left distrusts her commitment largely because of her association with the Democratic Party establishment. Greene, since her rift with Trump, can be cast as an outsider.
The writer Sohrab Ahmari, who combines Catholic conservative social values with populist economic views, recently wrote about AOC’s criticism of Greene in the British magazine UnHerd. He called on AOC to view society as divided into two camps—underdogs versus those in power—and to mobilize the former against the latter.
But this kind of populism does not have a track record of success for the left. Perhaps the most significant force to have tried it is the Spanish party Podemos, founded in 2014, which attempted to ignite a left-right groundswell against an ill-defined establishment that it called “the caste.” But this message didn’t resonate with Spanish voters. No grand populist coalition came to be; instead, Podemos wound up allying with the Socialist and Communist Parties, and it currently backs Spain’s Socialist-led government.
Populism has, at the same time, proved stunningly successful on the right. And as far-right populist parties consolidate power in one country after another, many on the global left find themselves drawn to join them in a shared anti-liberalism. Last year, Perry Anderson, the grand old theorist of the British New Left, offered an account of populism that strongly suggested that its purveyors on the right and left could pursue a common agenda.
But a far left that put aside its significant differences with the far right to unite over a joint opposition to “the system” and obsession with Israel would no longer be recognizable. It would be forced to abandon or heavily de-emphasize defining values, such as gender equality, anti-racism, and the need for action on climate change, without necessarily finding common ground with the right on its economic agenda.
This is thus a struggle over the American left’s identity. The 2010s, following the 2008 global financial crisis, gave rise to anti-establishment forces across the world. In the U.S., these included both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. The former’s success eventually transformed the Republican Party and brought about the Trump presidency. The left, in turn, has done much to transform the Democratic Party: Despite losing two primaries in 2016 and 2020, Sanders, once a lonely voice on the fringe, has become a major force, and some polls show AOC leading among potential Democratic candidates for president in 2028. A DSA member is now mayor of America’s largest city.
But the American left must choose. It can help transform the Democratic Party into a broad liberal-socialist coalition that encompasses the politics of Sanders and AOC. Or it can try to compete for the right’s populist voters by dissolving its political and historical identity into
250 years. Two hundred and fifty fucking years of the most powerful, most resourced, most theoretically capable nation in the history of human civilization and here is what we have to show for it.
Forty million people on food stamps, thirty million without health insurance, the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, the highest incarceration rate on earth, an opioid crisis that has killed over half a million people and counting, a housing market so broken that working people cannot afford to live in the cities they work in, an education system that buries young people in debt before they earn their first dollar, infrastructure that is literally collapsing, a life expectancy that is going backwards, a political system so thoroughly purchased by concentrated wealth that the laws it produces bear almost no relationship to what the public actually wants or needs, a working class that has not seen meaningful real wage growth in thirty years, a mental health crisis so severe we normalized it, a gun violence epidemic so routine we don’t even act when preschoolers are slaughtered, and a climate hurtling toward catastrophe while the people paid to address it collect checks from the industry causing it.
Two hundred and fifty years of that. And to celebrate, we built a wrestling arena on the White House lawn.
Not a hospital, or a school, or a housing development. Not a single fucking thing that addresses a single goddamn item on the list above. A wrestling arena. With cranes and pyrotechnics and a steel arch that probably cost more than the annual budget of three rural counties combined, erected in front of the building where Lincoln and Roosevelt and every president who ever tried to make any of this mean something once lived and worked and in some cases died trying.
Truthfully, this is not a departure from American values. This is the fullest possible expression of them. Because this is what we chose. Every single time the choice was presented.
We built a culture where a football coach makes forty times what a physics professor makes and then express genuine bewilderment at the outcomes. Where a reality television star becomes president and a school district cuts its art program in the same fiscal year. Where children know every statistic of every player on their favorite sport team and cannot locate their own country on a map. Where scientific consensus on vaccines, climate, evolution, and basic nutrition gets weighed against a Facebook post and the Facebook post wins at the dinner table. Where the school that wins the state championship gets a parade and the school that produces a Nobel laureate gets a budget cut.
We chose the bomber over the teacher. The tank over the clinic. The aircraft carrier over the water treatment plant. We spend more on military than the next ten countries combined, including our allies, while veterans sleep on the streets of the cities they came back to. We built the most expensive killing apparatus in human history and then told the nurse she made too much money. We sent young men to die in wars that made defense contractors rich and called it freedom and put a yellow ribbon magnet on the back of the car and called that support. We made the soldier and the police officer into sacred untouchable symbols of national identity and then cut their benefits, denied their PTSD claims, let them die waiting for VA appointments, and sent them back for third and fourth tours because it was cheaper than taking care of them when they came home. We worshipped the uniform and neglected the human inside it because the uniform is a symbol and symbols are cheaper than healthcare and housing and the therapy that would actually help. We built bases in a hundred and fifty countries and could not build enough affordable housing in fifty states. We funded a military budget that could have ended homelessness and medical debt and student debt several times over and we did it with bipartisan enthusiasm and called the people who questioned it unserious.
We chose entertainment over education so many times and for so long and at every available level of society that we forgot there was a distinction worth making. Spectacle over substance, performance over policy, the aesthetics of greatness in place of the actual thing, and the feeling of winning instead of asking what was being won and who was paying for it and what it would cost the people who came next.
Rome had bread and circuses. We Americans have food stamps and a wrestling ring outside the Oval Office.
250 years. This is what we built. This is what we chose. This is what we are celebrating. And the most perfectly, catastrophically, irreducibly American thing about all of it is that anyone pointing at this image and asking what it means will be called unpatriotic by people watching it on a television they bought on credit they cannot afford to pay back, rooting for a sport they cannot explain, in a country they cannot describe, celebrating a birthday they cannot contextualize, for a nation that has spent two and a half centuries confusing the noise it makes with the work it never did, all while claiming to be the greatest country on Earth.
Happy Birthday America! You have never looked more like yourself!
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