This week, AOC was arrested in a stunt posing as a protest. Last week, she was trolled by Alex Stein, some sort of media personality, with mock praise for her ‘assets’. She is known to live her entire political life through Instagram and for providing no time or attention to the humble constituents of her corner of the Bronx, who seem not to care as long as she’s a dramatic personality. She’s intensely vapid, and yet I’m writing about her and not for the first time.
We’re in a new phase of empire decline where qualifications for leadership have declined to extraordinary lows, practically overnight. Media manipulation has become one of the most important skill sets for aspiring officeholders and wealth-seekers alike. “Cash me outside howbow dah” can be leveraged into internet fame, cashflow, a multi-million-dollar property. AOC, perhaps the political equivalent, might aspire to be the leader of the ‘free world’, except of course that in that instance, it would be anything but that by the time we’ve sunk to that low.
Nevertheless, AOC should be taken seriously. She may someday qualify herself as an extraordinary tyrant. Conventional wisdom suggests that she’ll crash and burn. Afterall, how can anyone fully devoid of hard qualifications and so invested in being an Internet tart with a very large irrational mouth, how could she ever win over the hardened people responsible for the meat and potato concerns of fifty states, most of them red and turning redder by the day? Seems impossible?
There are two sliding factors. First, the field of competitors in her own party of alarmingly feckless leadership may provide an array of wide gap openings. While they’re all mindlessly following an appallingly failed script toward universal socialism, AOC exhibits intense ambition. She will cut throats, suffer time-outs, and come back to cut more throats. Second, her ambition could eventually overlap with a window of opportunity: a corrupt election tied up by corrupt courts, a campaign season coinciding with widespread social unrest, a demographic collapse allowing young socialist to seize the entire party machinery (close to happening now), or one of many iterations of a soft or hard coup. Once in, every aberration for governing would be on the table, fascism on steroids.
When examining AOC, it’s not about her, it’s about the tens of millions of dumbed down Americans susceptible to her manner of clawing to the top. For some Americans, fame is the ultimate value, hypocrisy doesn’t even register, even self-interest is dulled to a talking point. The present tide of real discontent over Biden’s failure is enough to inure us against the insanity that is AOC, for now. But that may not always be the case.
The Alex Stein incident, while marginally crude might be instructive for how to manage AOC. She feeds off all forms of attention, good and bad. Make metaphorical foie gras by feeding her unquenchable ego. We have yet to observe any end to her bottomless pit of self. Keep her attention there for at least the next twenty years. She’ll never tire of it.