Since the ground seemed to fall away from beneath our feet on Election Night 2016, many millions of us have been trying desperately to fight our footing again, by working to understand a political landscape that has seemed both profoundly changed and hauntingly familiar. There is plenty of grounds for criticism of the media over its role in aiding and abetting the catastrophe of Donald Trump’s election; yet before the election and after, many reporters and opinion writers have worked to investigate and explicate the truths of America’s economic, racial, and cultural conflicts that have brought us to this awful pass. There is a liberation in finding out the facts of the case, no matter how bitter they may be, in that it helps the world feel knowable again, and lays the groundwork for making positive change.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer has consistently taken accurate and incisive measure of this Trumpworld in which we find ourselves, in part because he’s keenly aware of the deep links between our pre- and post-Trump realities. Serwer’s devastating takes on the racial and cultural dynamics of our current moment bring an odd comfort in describing the continuity with what has existed before, and continues to exist, in our country. To reprise a fundamental, widespread observation about this presidency: it is shocking, but not surprising.
Serwer’s take on Republican antipathy to newly-elected Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a case in point: by focusing on this one political and cultural flashpoint, he describes broader dynamics, unawareness of which might be said to render any American citizen a relative political naif. Digging past the basic fact that Republicans have latched onto Ocasio-Cortez as a figure of hatred and revulsion, he persuasively diagnoses the dynamics at play:
More than simply a leftist to be opposed, Ocasio-Cortez has joined Barack Obama as a focus of the very same fear and anger that elected Trump in the first place. She represents the prospect of a more progressive, diverse America where those who were once deprived of power and influence can shape the course of the nation and its politics. The story of her family’s working-class roots in the Bronx is both specific enough to be compelling and universal enough for anyone, including many voters in Trump’s base, to relate to. And that’s precisely why her story, like Obama’s, must be discredited.
The focus on undeserving minorities receiving unearned benefits at white expense is not an incidental element of modern Republican politics; it is crucial to the GOP’s electoral strategy of dividing working-class voters along racial lines.
It is not too much to say that, in a single stroke, Serwer reminds us that the racial elements of Trumpism have long been at play in the Republican Party, while going straight to the added threat that Ocasio-Cortez presents. She represents the fear of rising minority power and diminishing white privilege, which is fed by a Republican strategy of stoking fears that minorities basically steal wealth at whites’ expense. Yet she also represents something of a double threat to politicians who appeal to such anxieties to maintain power: the possibility that a figure like Ocasio-Cortez can cut through such racial fear-mongering via a recognition of shared interests among working class Americans that transcends race, and re-calibrate political awareness more along the lines of a 1% versus 99% dynamic.
Likewise, Serwer contextualizes the basic status threat that minorities pose to whites when they gain positions of power, as noticeably happened in the 2018 midterms, which as Serwer notes resulted in the election of the most diverse Congress ever:
When people of color enter elite spaces, they make those with unearned advantages conscious of how they’ve been favored by the system. That poses a choice to those whose access to such cloistered communities is unquestioned: They can recognize that others might also succeed given the right circumstances, or they can defend the inequities of that system in an effort to preserve their self-image, attacking the new entrant as a charlatan or the group they belong to as backwards.
As the coup de grace, Serwer reminds us of how this relentless focus on supposedly undeserving minorities draws the focus away from the actual threats to security and power for white Americans:
The unworthy, in this case, are not the legislators and their wealthy benefactors who have worked tirelessly for decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few, at the expense of American welfare and democracy. Rather, they are marginalized communities and their white liberal allies, who maintain a corrupt spoils system for black and brown people at the expense of hardworking white Americans. As long as rank-and-file Republicans are focused on these supposed villains, they won’t realize who is being conned, and who is trying to con them. And it isn’t Ocasio-Cortez.
For anyone who has marveled at the hatred Ocasio-Cortez has inspired — in a sickeningly sexist and racist breach of decorum, she was apparently the only Democratic member of Congress to draw Republican boo’s when she cast a vote for Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker — Serwer offers something of a skeleton key to unpack the mix of irrationality and calculation displayed by the GOP. He hints at it but doesn’t explore the idea in depth — but clearly what has begun to infuriate the right still more is Ocasio-Cortez’s fundamental composure, righteousness, and fighting spirit in the face of their relentless disparagement (her reply to those GOP jeers? A tweet suggesting that they “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.” ) In this, Republicans may be helping bring to fruition their greatest nightmare: supercharging national focus on a politician who may end up playing an outsize share in helping refute generations of lies and propaganda about how a rise in minority power can only bring ruination upon white Americans. Republicans also seem blind to the fact that the slings and arrows hurled at Ocasio-Cortez are felt sympathetically by untold millions of voters, minority and white, who understand that there is no more fundamentally American a story than the underdog who takes down those who cling to unmerited power.