Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged countering the Trump administration’s policies by resisting at every turn, arguing that its incompetence makes it vulnerable.
Her remarks followed chaos caused by a rescinded executive order that temporarily shut down Medicaid portals nationwide.
She encouraged activists to take offline action, citing ongoing mobilization efforts.
Her strategy focuses on making governance difficult for Trump, calling his administration “dangerous and cruel” but also “shockingly dim.”
Bit late. I appreciate her efforts to resist, and we all need to do that, but it honestly is too late now. The time to resist this was last year. Now we’re in disaster recovery, which requires a whole different kind of resistance, and it feels like even people like her don’t quite understand where we are now.
Because of all the people who haven’t fucking listened to the warnings, we’ve entered actual fascism, and regular resistance won’t work anymore. Thinking it will only makes more of us believe small actions or Strong Words will save us. This isn’t 1930 Germany like we were warning last year, it’s 1939 Germany now, and der führer is beginning to build the camps.
Are you going to keep ignoring us when you’re ruffling the ashes of your compatriots from your hair? I honestly believe you will.
You’ve convinced me. I was planning to start attending my local town meetings and lend my support to the few outnumbered progressives there, but instead I think I’ll just hoard canned goods and hunker down.
If that’s what you took from my comment, I’m sorry. Obviously those are things we should do.
My point is we’ve been pushing people to do exactly those things for decades (eta and have been doing them ourselves) and it hasn’t worked. We need to do much more than that now.
Fair enough. I agree that we all need to do more, but I think that’s going to look different for everyone. For someone like me, it means getting off the Internet and actually showing up - not blowing up a federal building or whatever “much more” implies.
Much more is relative.
Yes, thank you for that. That’s much more for many people. If you actually do that, it will be awesome.
Might I ask you for even more, though? You’re already starting to do it, but will you speak out to people IRL like you’re doing with me? Challenge their views like you’re doing here? It really helps people to think critically.
You must be fun at resistance parties. I guess it’s time to annihilate ourselves through labor then (งツ)ว
I’m just saying we need different, more modern strategies. What we’ve been doing doesn’t work.
We can do better. I don’t know the answer, but we can’t keep doing the same things.
I think both you and her are wrong. Dems lost big in this last election. So it’s time to take a fucking step back and ask why. What needs changing? The party is in trouble. And they are in trouble because they are listening to big business and political consultants and not voters and people like AOC and Bernie. Kamala was supposed to be easy ‘safe’ candidate to defeat Trump. How’d that work? Hillary was supposed to be the ‘safe’ candidate to beat him the first time. Safer than Bernie and his ‘crazy radical platform’ of actually making the country work for the fucking people who live in it. How’d that work out?
Maybe having candidates that manipulate the primary process and count on superdelegates doesn’t work. Maybe putting someone forward who polled at 2% among Democrats before election season doesn’t work. Maybe ‘I’m not Trump’ isn’t fucking good enough to win the White House.
Unfortunately I don’t see many Democrats talking about this lesson, let alone taking it to heart. So I am looking forward to four more years of complaining and hopelessly attempting damage control while putting forward no new ideas whatsoever.
Obviously we should ask why. But any answers we come up with in response to whatever strategy we’ve been using will be horribly outdated already because we’re no longer operating under even a veiled democracy.
That was the biggest answer to ‘why’ this last time. Because this is outright, honest to dog fascism. That’s why nothing worked. Because you cannot fight fascism with normal discourse. Because Dems, the media, and everyone still tried to pretend we were working under the status quo when we absolutely were not, and anyone trying to call that out was treated as some kind of alarmist. And the fascists know this, and take advantage of it in their propaganda. Most of us don’t want to believe there’s a true, real, legitimate fascist movement, and fascists use that against us.
It doesn’t actually matter how good Dem candidates are – Dems could run Jesus himself, seen by all as descending from on high and streamed simultaneously on TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch, and it wouldn’t have mattered. They would easily reject Jesus and get all the centrists to oppose him. We’re in an unprecedented age of propaganda owned exclusively by a handful of sociopaths who know they can buy sentiment, views, and votes. They did, and there’s little we can do about it.
It doesn’t matter what democrats say or do at this point. We’re past that.