AOC’s First Encounter With the Gaffe Industrial Complex

Last Friday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez addressed the Munich Security Conference about the threat posed to democracy by growing income inequality. It’s like Cannes for international security, where even the name of the location is a counterargument. By Tuesday, you might have seen a screenshot on Bluesky of CBS, The Washington Post, Fox and a few others weighing in with the verdict. Not surprisingly, it was the oldest one about AOC, a get-out-of-thought free card laid over whatever misogyny, racism or classism drew it: The lady bartender is unqualified — intellectually, diplomatically and presidentially dead on arrival. 

As garnish — in the sense parsley is a garnish, a trifle most people consider tasteless — The New York Times transcribed all of AOC’s filler words like “um” and “you know.” To illustrate her incompetence, you understand. This is a service they decline to provide Donald Trump, a statesman renowned for his eloquence. AOC’s treatment by the mainstream media sent a message: This is how any AOC campaign will be treated. (For what it’s worth, AOC didn’t announce a presidential candidacy in Germany. But talking Big Boy ball in Europe about diplomacy sure sounds like what presidential candidates do, which perhaps got Democrats skittish.)

To be fair, AOC did not impress while answering a question at Munich — an apt location to deliver a message about rising fascism, even if a media complicit in its rise would prefer to look past that and instead judge a D.C. beauty contest. She stumbled for about 20 seconds about whether the U.S. would commit troops to defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion, before transitioning to emphasize the need to use nonmilitary levers and incentives to head off escalating conflict. Which is to say, she gave the correct answer in a tenth the time that Donald Trump would spend digressing about how many people have told him that Suzanne Somers should have called him The ThighMaster, when you think about it, before not answering it at all.

Objections about AOC’s delivery overlook the fact that the policy itself is a polite fiction of, well, Formosan proportions. Boil it down to the naked nouns and verbs, and America’s Taiwan policy amounts to the almost-Trumpian, “There are two Chinas. Until China decides there isn’t. Whereupon, we are going to, you know, respond. It’s very important that we respond. Our response will be very important.” Taiwan exists largely at China’s sufferance; America lacks the blood or treasure to change the latter’s mind, and we are going to continue to pretend otherwise until we can’t anymore. AOC’s gaffe comes down to lying only semi-fluidly about something of unsatisfactory substance. 

More AOC gaffes will come, because anything can become a gaffe if detractors wish hard enough. Cowardly media leadership will only intensify the search. The White House is such a black hole of corruption and malefaction that even the Memento-like tendency to accord them good faith anew each day can no longer create sufficiently ass-covering equivalencies. As such Democratic incompetency and dishonesty will have to be manufactured until it can almost balance the partisan scales — the way that Hunter Biden turns into Donald Trump Jr. if you squint hard enough and hit yourself in the head with a hammer. The process will only be goosed by internal polling and anonymous comments from Democratic leaders who want to finish beating back the left and return to bearing witness to tragedy between stock tips.

Because what else do you do when you see a change election coming for everyone? The Democrats’ default strategy has only persisted because their opponents grow more and more demonstrably immoral and, in the footsteps of Dear Leader, insane. For the longest time, Democrats could get away with being better candidates by staying put and letting their opponents sprint away from reason and likeability. But with a voter base increasingly fed up with Democratic timidity, one would think establishment Dems would read the room. 

Absolutist prescriptions and clearly distinct positions, like the left’s call for wholesale ICE abolition, are an easier pitch. It’s harder to sell tepid, baby-step changes for ills for which you are partially responsible. Democrats not only co-own Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they have to be slapped away from increasing its funding like a kid who keeps reaching for the cookie jar. Their take on income inequality amounts to, “Our billionaires are good.” Some police reform is already too little from a party that responded to winning big after a summer of “defund the police” with increased police funding, after a decade of selling discount Iraq War surplus to anything with a badge. Democrats helped build the world’s leading carceral state, with its lethal living conditions, rampant sexual abuse, abysmal medical care and execrable food; they helped create the inflationary sentencing regimes that keep beds full, contracts fulfilled and deter nothing. The most meaningful party statement on health care came in the 2020 debates, when almost every other Democratic candidate elided Americans’ private health insurance expenditures to demonize Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All” costs. This sleazy sleight of hand gave primacy to working- and middle-class tax burdens and shifted debate away from the economic and personal benefits of cradle-to-grave care. 

Given the above, firing an opening shot at AOC over diplomacy makes sense. The Democrats are still coasting on being less responsible for Iraq, and Trump has made enough of a hash of the international order that immediately restoring the institutional culture that brought us here sounds like a relief instead of the start of a reprise. More importantly, focusing on international relations moves evaluation of AOC’s candidacy out of U.S. territorial waters, where conventional wisdom tells us that politics — the thing that brought AOC to the dance in the first place — stops. It’s a context in which media and Democratic insiders can get past the misogyny/racism/classism hump by making the discussion not about her identity, per se, but about the identity of those whom elite society accords the privilege of conducting diplomacy. Even among progressives, it is easy to default to a vision of diplomacy as the playground of white elite, to see her as The Other because it is what we’ve been taught for decades: Diplomats have nicknames like “Poppy” Bush and proper names like Strobe; that she does not hail from the same alma mater is baked into her initials. 

The most unforgivable thing that AOC keeps being to the establishment is not them. They are rightly afraid that it’s the most electable thing about her.