politics

Bread And Butter And Bad Faith

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the ultimate “kitchen table” politician, whether Republicans like it nor not (they do not).

The primary feedback I’ve gotten from people both inside and outside the Football Analyst Complex over the past twelve years is to get off my laptop, sit down, and watch the damn tape.

It is the tape, after all, that holds the answers to all my questions. It is the tape that will disabuse me of the ludicrous opinions I have formed about certain teams or players or coaches by poring over spreadsheets and divining meaning from disparate numbers and metrics and rates (for those who might not be familiar with my non-political work, I have had various roles in football media since 2013, some less embarrassing than others).

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Well, I did watch the tape last summer and urged others to do the same, dismissing the numbers that suggested Trump was a singularly talented and appealing presidential candidate. It … didn’t work out. Nevertheless, we persist.

I’m once again asking folks – particularly conservatives – to watch the tape, this time to better inform their claims that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – and Bernie Sanders, of course – is a far-left distraction for the Democratic Party who should be ignored by wise party elders praying to any god who will listen that so-called popularism will deliver them from the wilderness of this fascist era in American politics.

This idea – that AOC is not at all interested in addressing issues that materially affect working Americans every day – has become dogma in Beltway media circles and certain swaths of the Democratic Party base that might be labeled Blue MAGA for their unending fealty to failed party leadership. She is widely portrayed as the looniest of the loony left-wing radicals in Congress. That there are no left-wing radicals doesn’t seem to shake this Beltway-generated perception of Ocasio-Cortez as an out-of-touch democratic socialist who cares only for marginalized groups on the fringes of American society – the ones Republicans used expertly in 2024 to do that weird thing where you put an insurrectionist in power.

Efforts to portray AOC as a dangerous, radicalized Other have ratcheted up in the past month following her astoundingly successful Fight Oligarchy tour alongside Bernie and other progressives. These raucous rallies in bright red parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for the fascist candidate just six months ago were a veritable bonanza of good-faith economic populism that year after year and election after election proves incredibly popular with Americans. Most Democratic candidates either can’t or won’t commit to this kind of ultra-popular good-faith populism because they are funded by interests that might suffer from such an agenda or because they simply don’t want to beholden to real-life working people. This is the story of the Trump era.

You know the Fight Oligarchy tour broke through with people – despite fascist collaborators like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg using their algorithms to suppress anti-oligarchy messaging – because the backlash has been so ferocious and unhinged, both from so-called centrist Democrats and, naturally, from an American right wing that knows their shit is cooked if an actual populist becomes the face of the Democratic Party. There would be no more working class party cosplay for a Republican Party that has gotten away with such a farcical strategy with the help of social media platforms and entrenched Washington media that so desperately needs Republicans to be charge if they are to avoid the boredom of covering real governance instead of the dopamine generator that is our authoritarian takeover.

Stephen A. Smith, the bombastic sportscaster who I once saw strolling through Super Bowl radio row with at least eight security personnel like a head of state, was among the centrist types who joined the right-wing media ratfuck against AOC and Sanders and other elected progressives after they barnstormed red states.

“I think if you are a Democrat, if you are a leftist who rails against the system … if you believe that higher taxes is the way to go, that a focus shouldn’t be on securing the borders, if you believe those kind of things, and that’s where you stand ideologically, AOC is your candidate,” he said. “Most people in the country are centrists, they’re moderates. Whether they’re Republican moderates or Democratic moderates or just flat-out centrists who are independents — that’s most of the American population … she gives the impression, when you talk about universal healthcare and you talk about other things, if you equate it to taxing Americans 70 percent of their income she wouldn’t be against it. That ain’t going to win you elections.”

It’s not possible for Stephen A. to be more wrong. Probably this doesn’t shock you if you’ve watched the man make some of the most spectacularly incorrect sports predictions of the 21st century. Not only is universal health care (Medicare for all) among the most popular proposals in modern U.S. history, but every single congressional district in the country opposes Republicans’ plan to massacre Medicaid.

The Hill, a right-wing propaganda outlet that has long posed as a Very Serious and Objective observer of Washington politics, recently ran an AOC takedown from Douglass MacKinnon, a speechwriter for Ronald fucking Reagan and George fucking W. fucking Bush. The issue with a smear piece like this is not that someone is going after a progressive politician, but that the writer’s argument is presented as a helpful guidepost for Democratic Party lawmakers, feigning concern for their plight and purportedly offering helpful hints and tips on how to take back power from the anti-constitutional Republican Party. MacKinnon, you are to believe, is merely concerned about the poor Democrats remaining in their political wilderness. He so clearly has your best interests at heart, which is why his primary suggestion is to pursue Trump’s agenda with a slightly kinder hand.

Douglass in the weeks after Trump's 2024 victory claims to have “heard from several high-level Democratic operatives who shared essentially the same message: We are done being bullied into unpopular, losing positions by the far-left wing of our party. We will get back to our roots of looking after the working class, the poor and the disenfranchised, they said. Except they didn’t. Exactly the opposite.”

“Those who switched to Trump in 2024 did so for one reason: He was addressing the ‘bread and butter’ issues that were upending voters’ lives and threatening their futures.”

The bad faith is about as subtle as a wrench straight to the eye socket. In no way did Trump run in 2024 – or 2016, for that matter – as a populist. He joined Elon Musk in promising to use any amount of political capital to pass tax breaks for billionaires and destroy the American economy for the benefit of its wealthiest citizens. Distinguishing good-faith populism from bad-faith populism is a task that mainstream media outlets have failed catastrophically over the past decade. Refusing to call out Trump’s populist grandstanding as bad-faith horse shit has allowed Trump to become a friend and defender of working class interests in the popular imagination. They played his horrid little game from start to finish, and even though Americans saw that game for what it was in 2020, first-time voters in 2024 – zoomer dudes particularly – won the Fell For It Again Award and backed Trump because he had been pitched as a savior of the forgotten Working Man, which of course means different things to different people. Such is the magic of Trump: He is, thanks to a corrupt media apparatus and the social media reality-creating machine, whatever you want him to be.

Trump was able to run as an anti-establishment populist candidate after signing a tax bill in his first term that rewarded an American taxpayer in the top 0.1 percent about $200,000 a year in tax breaks while the average family saw a little less than $1,000 in tax savings a year. The guy who got rid of the estate tax – a tax policy designed to make it slightly more difficult to establish dynasties in the US – got to run for president in 2024 as some kind of protector of the working family.

Good-faith populism should expose the right’s bad-faith populist rantings. It does not for many reasons, not least of which is the all-knowing elders of the failed Democratic Party refusing to embrace wildly popular figures like AOC. Americans should be well versed in previous (successful) attempts to leverage pro-working class politics to push an explicitly fascist agenda, just as the only two successful fascist movements of the 20th century did. That Americans are utterly clueless about this history of bad-faith populism is a failure of, well, every institution in the country.

She is, after all, seen as the face of the Democratic Party in these early days of our second dalliance with fascism.

That’s a pants-shitting poll result for the American right and for the feckless centrists, whose credo is and always has been that Better Things Aren’t Possible.

What AOC Actually Says

Watching the Ocasio-Cortez tape would tell you this much: She is as disciplined as any elected official at sticking to economic populism that both deflects public anger from marginalized groups that are blamed for the Republican-induced economic horrors of the 21st century and re-directs that anger to a more appropriate source: The rich guys who have made a hobby out of dancing on the broken backs of working people.

There is no waffling, per an extensive Bad Faith Times review of the tape. She gets straight to the fucking point: Your life is materially worse because of the obscenely wealthy who have installed their coifed and well-dressed puppets into powerful positions in Washington.

“We don’t have to live this way,” AOC, one of the only elected officials who understands we now live in a system of competitive authoritarianism, said at the start of a Fight Oligarchy event in Phoenix. “We are here together because we share the frustration and the heartache that comes from watching the people in power actively tear down or refuse to fight for everyday working Americans like us. We are here because an extreme concentration of power and corruption is taking over this country like never before. We are also here because we know a better world is possible.”

“I understand that their disdain for working people doesn't just come from not being raised right. This disdain is shorthand for the right’s entire political agenda and a certain ugly kind of politics in this country, and that is screwing over working and middle class Americans so they can steal our health care and Social Security benefits so they can afford their tax cuts for billionaires and a bailout for their crypto friends,” she said to thunderous applause.

Fuck yes? Fuck yes.

Everything AOC talks about is a masterclass in speaking to working Americans about "bread and butter" issues. Making healthcare a right, bolstering social safety net programs, using the force of government to make housing more affordable: Nothing could be more bread-and-butter than addressing these issues with real policies designed by folks with the public interest at heart. AOC's entire political existence is based on these bread and butter topics, or kitchen table issues – the stuff soulless pundits bray about every four years on your TV screen. Yet she is widely considered to be uninterested in this basic needs and desires, while Trump – an oligarch's oligarch – has been granted the sheen on a defender of everyday Americans just trying to get along. It makes me want to eat my hand.

Ignoring the spreadsheets (which show progressive causes enjoy eye-watering support) and grinding the AOC speech tape further reveals a politician who characterizes the social safety net as a “promise” for a dignified life made between people and their government.

“We want to live in a society that is not depraved, that is not every person for themselves. … What they call radical, I believe is common sense,” she said during her Phoenix rally, pitching the suppression of wages as a handout to the ultra-rich. "I don't believe in human dignity because I'm an extremist. I believe this because I was a waitress. I know how it feels to be left behind."

Dignity is all people really want. Beyond the giga-chad, muscle-bound grindset types on your Instagram feeds every hour of every day and beyond the crypto guys looking to pump and dump their way to a little wealth, there are everyday people who want nothing more than a decent life, one that maybe includes a treat once in a while, a vacation here and there, the luxury of not worrying about bankruptcy when they get sick or when they lose a job through no fault of their own. They want the dignity of a life without the crushing stress of survival in the richest nation in human history.

I've believed for a long time that oligarchs and their wretched little puppets – strings showing and all – would be stunned to learn how little everyday people actually want. No one in the US is pining for a communist wonderland of economic parity. Folks are just hungry for a little dignity. AOC gets that, and it scares the fucking hell out of power centers in both major parties.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social