speaks common sense and calls out absurdity
Yes, the bar is that low.
Yeah, providing good ideas on how to reform current issues and showing how they could benefit the people is a dream it seems.
Every politician im seeing just says, “I’m going to stop immigrants from driving up crime!”
Or some crazy shit, and never provides any method/studies/statistics to show how or why, because the absurdity of the claims start to show.
Trump: “I’m going to cut your electricity costs by half!”
Yet never says how he’s planning on doing that, implements no policies aimed at reducing those costs, and suffers no loss of MAGA supporters when he instead drove up those costs starting a war with a country halfway around the world.
So AOC or whomever says, you didn’t do what you said, and people cheer it on I guess.
Great and all… But can the representatives show us their plan on How they mean to fix issues
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Read all the posts here. Most of them are correct in some way.
- She threatens populism from the economic side forcing the corrupt MAGA politicians to care about ‘fake news’ like ‘affordability’
- She threatens insecure dudes by being smart, attractive and speaking spanish
- She threatens the political republicans because she actually interacted wth the public instead of going to an ivyleague college and being taught to speak folksy by a speech trainer
- Won’t somebody think of the lusty christian men?
So she’s like perfect ragebait for every right winger
She’s an attractive latina. This shouldn’t matter. The reason it does is because the right hates her for being liberal, but they hate even more that they could never have her. One thing to understand about the typical “alpha male” hypertoxic-masculine right wing narcissistic douche is they view themselves as hunters. They can’t or won’t acknowledge (or maybe they don’t understand) that they are in fact trophy hunters. When it comes to women, some of the biggest “trophies” are the strong, independent ones. Add in the latina flavor and top it with being liberal (that they would view as needing to be educated) and she’s one of the biggest trophies in their world. The fact that they have absolutely no chance with her pisses them off to no end. So she becomes the target of their ire. Then they try to trash her every chance they get. For this she has gotten a lot more air time and publicity than others.
When she first showed up, I remember one particular picture of her being all over right wing media. Not the most flattering picture, obviously. She was smiling especially broadly, showing lots of teeth, eyes wide open (“bugged out”). Sometimes associated with speculation that she might have Graves disease or some developmental disorder.
No question her appearance has made the media give her more time than they might, but she has a compelling story and she’s connected with millennial voters much better than her septuagenarian peers.
When she first blew up all I would hear about her is how dumb she was, how stupid she was, what a lightweight she was, but everything I ever heard her say made eminent sense and sounded frankly intelligent.
These comments were largely coming from the chudiverse and Fox News, but I realized it was working when a not-conservative-minded relative of mine made an offhand comment along the lines of “everyone knows she’s not very smart.” I responded very directly with a light challenge like “oh, could you point me to something she’s said that’s not very smart because everything I’ve ever heard her say is pretty fucking brilliant.”
I knew full well this person would immediately try and dig something up - but she must’ve come up empty because now she’s a fan. I actually think she learned a lesson about how that kind of shit can work on your without you even realizing it.
Gotta say, good on your relative for actually doing her due diligence and coming out of it enlightened. Wish everyone would actually do even the barest of their own research or fact checking after being confronted…or even if not.
Any politician that actually speaks common sense is a big deal.
Plenty of politicians exist who have sensible policies and speak truth to power and yadda yadda yadda. Most of them lose. The ones that win mostly get back-benched by party leadership or primaried out of office in subsequent elections.
AOC (and Sanders and Mamdani and a few others) tend to be notable because they advance popular policies in a manner that cut through corporate media white noise, while surviving a deluge of character attacks and faux-scandals intent on derailing their mission.
It’s not merely that you have some rando saying shit. It’s that you can hear that person, you can be represented by that person, and you can organize around that person to elect other politicians with a similar set of values and beliefs.
common sense
Careful with that term these days.
The rightwingnuts tend to call their anti-progressiveness talking points “common sense”.
Did you know South Australia was the first place in the world to grant women both the right to vote AND the right to stand for parliament — and it happened partly by accident.
In 1894, the SA parliament was debating a women’s suffrage bill. The bill originally included a clause explicitly preventing women from sitting in parliament. Enter Ebenezer Ward, an MP who was opposed to women’s suffrage. He cleverly moved to strike out that exclusion clause, thinking it was so absurd that women could be MPs that the whole bill would be voted down in disgust.
His plan backfired spectacularly — the amendment was accepted, the bill passed, and South Australian women became the first in the world with full political rights (voting and standing for office). This was 1894, predating Finland (1906) and even New Zealand’s right to stand (1919).
This timeline is really interesting.
ETA: it led me down a rabbit hole upon seeing a woman ran for president in my country (usa) before we had nationwide women’s suffrage, where she also ran on free love, had been involved in the first international before being kicked out, published the first English translation of the communist manifesto, was close with Cornelius Vanderbilt because of her skills as a medium and later stockbroker, and was directly responsible for some of the most draconian obscenity laws our country ever enacted…
It’s kinda alarming that very few people read bills
you’re going to read every line of a 2000 page legal document?
no, you have some interns basically skim it and highly the stuff that makes you look good or is the pork for your district, and as long as that’s in there, then vote yes for it.
bills in the last two decades are overwhelmingly omnibus bills, as in one giant long document with tons of changes to the law and funding.
we don’t pass simple single-issue bills since like the 1970s
As an outsider looking in, yeah, you Americans have lost the fucking script. Spineless, cowed and submissive. Perfect slaves for your future overlords of child rapists and war mongers.
She defeated the Chairman of the Democratic Conference by taking his seat in an upset victory. She did it by bringing out the populist left, which absolutely terrified establishment Dems, who would rather let the country burn than move an inch to the left.
Accurate enough.
Because shes a populist who seems to fight for the things she preaches so people have built their hopes around her.
Look up the “overton window”
How many other politicians are doing that? When a mechanic doesn’t try to scam you, you tell very person that will listen.
I’m my experience (as an Australian on the outside) she’s one of the few that preaches policies that benefit people right wing parties are blatantly for billionaires (if not just straight up the party of a billionaire in Australia’s case) and the traditional/major “left wing” parties are more interested in maintaining the status quo with half measures and compromises. But a lot of actual lefty parties never get anything done because they let perfect get in the way of good.
From what I’ve seen her policies are things that would benefit most people, and are reasonable. That’s rare these days.
Have you been watching any political discourse? Literally no one off the Epstein list has been arrested.
She’s a big deal because fox news made her one. She’s the new target after Hillary stepped out of politics.
Young, female, Latina, everything MAGA hates.
Don’t forget smart and assertive
Don’t forget she was a bartender in college, which they hate.
Meanwhile boebert was very literally an escort, which is how she got into politics. Yet nobody cares
Chalking it up to racism etc. doesn’t give her the credit she deserves - typical superficial social media thinking.
“In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.”
But being serious: AOC and politicians like her ARE us “doing it for ourselves.” For a very long time, the vast majority of politicians elected in the US have gotten there by getting the backing of wealthy capitalists. They don’t say “common sense things” because those things aren’t good for the people who helped them get elected. If they did say those things, those capitalists would not only stop funding them, but fund their opposition more. The result is a government comprised of politicians who very rationally don’t represent us. (That’s not to say some of them aren’t crazy on their own, but them being there is a rational outcome of self-interested actors.)
In order to get a politician who does and says things that are good for people, you need an absolutely massive grass roots effort to win an election against the might of rich donors. AOC was one of the notable times when we managed to do that. But this shows the limitations of that strategy within our current electoral system. For every AOC, Illhan Omar, or Mamdani, there are literally hundreds of more races which are still dominated by big money. It took not only a massive on the ground organizing effort locally, but also a lot of support from engaged people across the nation. And it’s way more costly for the average person to contribute to a campaign than it is for a billionaire. So even if a lot of us want this, it’s going to be really difficult to get a critical mass of wins to actually make an impact.
So that’s why they’re a big deal. They might be basic social democrats in some less corrupt countries, but here they are the few who are unbought. What they say is less relevant than the fact that they are able to say it at all.
It’s a very low bar, and yet she is one of the few politicians who can clear it.
