Was "everything fine" before Trump?

Here is one of those annoying political profile articles that treats individual politicians like Hollywood celebrities. But you should read it anyway because it is about AOC and contains a couple of items worth making note of.

The first is this little bit of reflection on one of her first public acts upon arriving in Washington.  She participated in a sit-in protest in Pelosi's office organized by the Sunrise Movement. It's kind of a forgotten episode now. But it still says something about Ocasio-Cortez's instincts.

“I was terrified,” she told me. She doesn’t regret it — though it set the stage for a very complicated year with Pelosi. “I learned a lot about how fear shapes the decisions of elected officials: ‘I know this could be bad, and this could make someone mad, and I don’t know exactly how they would drop the hammer on me or what hammers would be dropped.’ It felt like the right thing to do, and when you say that people think it’s a form of naïveté and that it’s childish, but I don’t think it was.”

It can be very easy to back out of doing what you think is the right thing because of institutional pressure to get along.  The implicit threat that publicly challenging the Speaker of the House would have debilitating consequences for a freshman Rep. was real. Typically the way to build a career and reputation in the party is to keep your head down and definitely not make anybody mad.  The only way you might decide to buck those rules is if you understand the actual nature of "the party" and which side of it you are on. 

She said the Congressional Progressive Caucus should start kicking people out if they stray too far from the party line. Other caucuses within the Democratic Party in Congress require applications, Ocasio-Cortez pointed out. But “they let anybody who the cat dragged in call themselves a progressive. There’s no standard,” she said.

The same goes for the party as a whole: “Democrats can be too big of a tent.”

It is comments like that that kept Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Democratic Party from reaching any kind of meaningful détente. I asked her what she thought her role would be as a member of Congress during, for instance, a Joe Biden presidency. “Oh God,” she said with a groan. “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

That's the line that got this story shared all over the internet today.  For some reason people are having difficulty with it. But it's actually very easy to understand.  If you want to know which Democratic Party you happen to be in, just ask yourself whether or not "everything was fine" before Trump?

“This whole primary,” she went on, referring to the one Biden and Bernie are in, “is going to be about the soul of the Democratic Party. I think it’s a referendum on whether we think everything was fine before Trump. People who live in a lot of privilege, who think of public programs as charity, they often think there was nothing wrong before Trump. They think Hillary was the problem. But it’s much deeper than that.”

This morning, Atrios put up a blurb to the effect that the Bush Administration was also quite monstrous, you know.  Which doesn't seem like something that even needs saying to those of us old enough to have been paying attention back then. I mean I would assume anyone old enough to have a living memory of the Bush years who says Trump is any sort of unique and radical departure from that is lying.  If you are a Democrat who tells that lie, it is because your political program is specifically about guarding your own privileges with minimal or no changes to the system that grants them. Where do adherents to such an agenda get to describe themselves as "progressives"? Only in America.