But Ocasio-Cortez, soon to be the youngest woman ever elected to Congress, has more in common with the Sanders youth than with the septuagenarian senator they idolize. Like many who’ve “felt the Bern,” she calls herself a Democratic Socialist without knowing what it means. She claimed during a country-crossing jaunt in August to have enjoyed “examples of Democratic Socialism,” but listed Acadia National Park, a co-op general store, a worker-owned business, and a Planned Parenthood outpost... none of which has the least bit to do with her platform of Medicare for all, free college, a $15 minimum wage, and a federal jobs guarantee.
V. Debs’ Socialist Party. But true to generational form, she isn’t a stickler about labels. She said in an early interview that her political individuation has been “more about action than about words or descriptions or -isms.”
Her father, an architect, was “born in the South Bronx while the Bronx was
burning,” and her mother, who worked as a housekeeper, “was born in poverty in Puerto Rico,” she said in a Vogue magazine interview published the day before her big win. She majored in economics and international relations at Boston University and headed the school’s Latin-American affinity group. As a teenager, she interned for Ted Kennedy, and she was later a community organizer for Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. That is, when she wasn’t tending bar to make ends meet – a resume detail Sanders appreciates. “Last year, she was a bartender! Now she’s practically a congresswoman-elect!” Sanders cheerfully grumbled the day after her primary at a party for his senior-most staffer, Jeff Weaver, who was promoting his memoir of their 32 years together. This summer, Ocasio-Cortez upstaged more top-billing names at events across the nation. At a rally for New York attorney general candidate Zephyr Teachout at SUNY New Paltz, Ocasio-Cortez received the first and loudest standing ovation. Her team tried not to steal Teachout’s thunder. “We’re letting them steer this one,” Ocasio-Cortez’s communications director Corbin Trent told me, sotto voce , stageside in New Paltz. Progressive candidates weren’t altogether thrilled with the amount of attention Ocasio-Cortez – or, as Trent calls her in
[She} has more in common with the Sanders youth than with the septuagenarian senator they idolize.
This summer, a Gallup survey of Democrats found 57% view socialism favorably. Last year, 69% of Americans polled with a multiple-choice question by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation could not define communism. Whatever it is, it polls highest among Millennials, more than half of whom believe the U.S. economy works against them and that they’d be better off in a socialist country. Ocasio-Cortez belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, a group rooted in Eugene
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