A Democratic Socialist Just Took down One of the Top House Democrats, and It Portends the Death of Centrism

Her name is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

By Jason Rhode  |  June 27, 2018 | 10:15am
Photo by Scott Heins/Getty Politics Features Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
A Democratic Socialist Just Took down One of the Top House Democrats, and It Portends the Death of Centrism

Say it loud:

It’s 1:15 AM on the East Coast tonight. Outside a fine pelting rain is coming down like the wrath of some slighted Chaldean storm god. Great fearsome avalanches of water. But the sun is shining all the same.

Tonight a socialist candidate beat a scum Democrat with a pipe wrench. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat Congressman Joe Crowley for the Dem nomination. Which means she’s definitely going to win the general. Crowley was going to be Pelosi’s successor. He succeeds nothing now.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, also known as AOC, is 28, a Latina, and a Democratic Socialist. She won.

She won.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is a corrupt and crooked organization. It has spent the last two years doing everything in its power—literally everything it could—to keep corporate money in power, to block real progressives from being nominated. AND IT WAS FOR NOTHING.

They threw their power behind Crowley, and they couldn’t thwart the will of the people. They tried to get Ossoff in, and they tried to keep Crowley in, and they failed. They are failures.

Andrew Cuomo is a failure. Rahm Emanuel is a failure. Neera Tanden is a failure. Chuck Schumer is a failure. Nancy Pelosi is a failure. David Axelrod is a failure. All of you centrists failed, failed, failed. Get used to that taste. You’ve failed the American people, you’ve failed your offices, and now you’re going to fail at getting reelected too.

AOC is not even thirty and she just handed this Pelosi follower his ass. Crowley was everything that is timid, hustling, and nauseating about the sell-out Hamptons-beach-loving, Wall Street Democrats. A boneless centrist to his core, he never met a conservative cause he didn’t want to appease. He refused to abolish ICE. That’s where Crowley’s courage ends.

AOC won on the issues. She won on Bernie’s platform. And he got beat. Crowley, you got beat.

If Crowley can be brought down, so can Pelosi. It’s possible to grind the last of the Rahm Emanuel Congress into a fine, hedge-fund-flavored powder.

Crowley’s defeat is also defeat for the Clinton cult. The Vichy Democrats spent two years smearing Young Progressives with charges of racism, sexism, of immaturity.

Why, just this morning, the centrist dead-enders blamed Susan Sarandon for the SCOTUS rulings. As if Sarandon had told Hillary not to visit Wisconsin. You absolute clods, you couldn’t bring yourself to cheer for a woman of color when she had the Sanders platform. You don’t believe in anything, except for the carping civility patrol who are handing the country over to Trump. Your day is done.

Every time the right wing has taken our country further down the storm drain, the corporate centrists whined. Like dented woodwinds, they kept kvetching: farther to the right, farther to the right.

Wrong.

You know what Walker Bragman wrote tonight? “Centrists in safe blue districts are sitting ducks.” He’s right. You sell-outs better start running. If you think the Tea Party purge on the right was drastic, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Here’s how the future looks:

The era of the New Democrats is over. Never tell us our platform is unelectable.

Crowley’s downfall was glorious to watch. On any other day it would have been merely wonderful. But coming on the same day that the dying eunuchs of the Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s goons could block Muslims from entering the country … it was medicine.

AOC won. She won by fifteen points. I am loving every minute of it. The rain is pouring outside and, if you’ll pardon the teenage poetry, it’s washing the past away.

Let me repeat that for the people in the back. AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, won. She is a Democratic Socialist in the United States of America in the age of Trump and she kneecapped this ten-term sell-out. And all of Donut Twitter is in agonies. It’s not just that they’ve been proven foolish and wrong, it’s that their criticisms are shown to be stupid and baseless. They lost.

Stoller’s list goes on until part ten, and that’s just a selection.

Corporate democrats lost. Socialism won.

Say it with me again.

There is nothing, nothing that centrist Democrats can do to take away this victory. Their bullshit about civil, incremental progress in the face of fascism was shown to be the hollow nonsense we all knew it was. They lost in the center of their strength, powerful and wealthy New York. Their op-eds about how ordinary Americans have to tolerate the goose-stepping crooks in ICE lost. They lost. They lost, they lost, they lost.

Cynthia Nixon could win. Ben Jealous could win, and in fact did win last night’s primary in Maryland. John Fetterman could win. Anybody could win.

There is a God.

It’s not a perfectly worded tweet, but Glenn Thompson—whoever that is—put it perfectly, responding to a Sanders hater:

Centrist Democrats, go away. Go far, far away. Your power is coming to an end. We’re on to your con. We’re going to primary every single of one of you.

The night is ending, and dawn is breaking.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won.

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