The AOC Generation

December 7, 2020
Journalist Freedlander debuts with a granular account of New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political rise and the social and economic conditions that fueled it. Placing Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 victory over incumbent Joseph Crowley within a broader context, Freedlander examines how the 2008 financial crisis, Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, and outrage over Donald Trump’s election helped to bring left-wing ideas into the political mainstream, and cites evidence that millennials are the best educated, most diverse, and most liberal generation in American history. Milestones from Ocasio-Cortez’s college years, including her father’s death when she was 19 and her junior year in Niger, where she worked on maternal health-care issues, shed light on her personal motivations and political acumen, but the book’s strength lies in the attention Freedlander pays to lesser-known figures and movements. He explains how the efforts of grassroots activists in the Bronx and Queens to unseat a group of Democratic state legislators who caucused with the Republican Party helped Ocasio-Cortez’s campaign, and profiles the leaders of Jacobin magazine, whose reading groups and “open hearted” yet “sharp” editorial sensibility reinvigorated the Democratic Socialists of America. Progressive political junkies will relish this deep dive into the forces behind Ocasio-Cortez’s turn in the spotlight.

January 15, 2021
A frontline report on millennial and postmillennial politics, as exemplified by the representative from the Bronx. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aka AOC, was famously the youngest person in her congressional class and "rose from the life of an adrift twenty-something making her way in New York to an overnight sensation...becoming an icon of pop culture in the process." AOC seems sui generis, but, as journalist Freedlander notes, she came to office thanks to the efforts of many allies and a changing political dynamic that cast her entrenched, long-serving Democratic opponent as an out-of-touch member of the political establishment--and never mind that he had once been viewed as a party progressive. The chief impetus for AOC's rise, writes the author, was Bernie Sanders, who, as a democratic socialist, "ran one of the most vocally left-wing campaigns in US political history." Sanders also spurred a democratic socialist movement that, though identified with AOC and fellow representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, is now widespread. Freedlander notes that there are "democratic socialists in the Maryland legislature and in the city councils of Denver, Philadelphia, and Seattle," among other places. Some of the other allies that furthered the movement were the activists of Occupy Wall Street, the protestors at Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter organization, and Our Revolution, which Sanders' backers founded after he ceded the primary to Hillary Clinton. On the larger scale, Freedlander examines underlying political and demographic trends, from an activist's recognition that "we lose elections because a lot of our ideas are not popular" to the younger electoral cohort's shift to the left. That shift is so pronounced that even if they become more conservative in later years, they will still be well to the left of older people today--which has countless implications for the politics of the future. Both activists and prognosticators will find Freedlander's reporting valuable.

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February 1, 2021
The 2018 election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to the U.S. Congress represented not just one woman's victory, but also the introduction of a new kind of political movement. Ocasio-Cortez stood for a generation of young progressives who seek to engage new voters, build coalitions, and upend conventional wisdom about what is and isn't possible in politics. Political reporter Freedlander follows Ocasio-Cortez's meteoric rise to fame and connects her success to a broader shift in millennial activism. The AOC Generation explores groups like the Democratic Socialists of America--a group with whom, despite breathless news reports to the contrary, Ocasio-Cortez has never been officially affiliated--and Brand New Congress, a political action committee formed by Bernie Sanders' supporters after the 2016 election to seek out new candidates for Congress. In part because Freedlander is focusing on disappointed Sanders supporters, much of the book focuses on white male activists, with Ocasio-Cortez as the notable exception. However, this book does offer thoughtful insight into a much-maligned branch of liberal thought, and it will appeal to politically inclined readers hoping for change.

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