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{"source_url": "https://www.thenation.com", "url": "https://www.thenation.com/article/2020-aoc-democrats/#comment-2109969140", "title": "AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020", "top_image": "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img.jpg", "meta_img": "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img.jpg", "images": ["https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=233793277040432&ev=PageView&noscript=1", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img.jpg", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/denmark-sg-img.jpg?scale=340&compress=60", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img.jpg?scale=896&compress=80", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/themes/thenation/images/loader_40x40.GIF", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/johnnichols_small1.jpg?scale=60&compress=80", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/m-logo.png", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/themes/thenation/images/infi_loader.gif", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cover0113.jpg", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/logo-260x571-today.png", "https://api.pymx5.com/v1/sites/track?event_type=PAGE_VIEW&noscript=1", "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/charlottesville-torches-rtr-img.jpg?scale=340&compress=60"], "movies": [], "text": "Ready to fight back? Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation\u2019s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and get three actions in your inbox every week.\n\nThank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue\n\nSubscribe now for as little as $2 a month!\n\nSupport Progressive Journalism The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter. The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.\n\nFight Back! Sign up for Take Action Now and we\u2019ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week. You will receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation\u2019s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here. Sign up for Take Action Now and we\u2019ll send you three meaningful actions you can take each week.\n\nThank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue\n\nTravel With The Nation Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits. Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.\n\nSign up for our Wine Club today. Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?\n\nAs 2019 closed, the centrist pundits and politicians who make it their mission to police the Democratic Party were busy reanimating one of the oldest lies in the book. They were aiming at 2020, the year in which the party will nominate a candidate to take on the biggest liar in American politics: Donald Trump. To beat Trump, the centrists argued, Democrats must reject \u201cpurity tests.\u201d Ad Policy\n\nAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez, luckily, has recognized this threat contained in the coded language about \u201cpurity tests\u201d and countered it with a masterful defense of the politics of principle that will be essential to upend Trump and Trumpism. She finished the year arguing, correctly, that Democrats must stand strong for their ideals in 2020, or they will run the risk of letting Trump frame the debate.\n\n\u201cFor anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests, it\u2019s called having values. It\u2019s called, giving a damn,\u201d the Democratic representative from New York told a cheering crowd of 14,000 at a December 21 rally for Bernie Sanders in Venice, California.\n\nWhile at least one Sanders rival, Pete Buttigieg, has been busy decrying purity tests regarding issues and strategies, AOC has pushed back against a politics where the parties are defined by the demands of big donors\u2014and the cautious policies they favor. \u201cIt\u2019s called having standards for your conduct to not be funded by billionaires but to be funded by the people,\u201d she said. MORE FROM John Nichols William Greider Knew What Ailed the Democratic Party December 27, 2019 President Scrooge and His Dickensian Cabal December 25, 2019 Who Tops the 2019 \u2018Nation\u2019 Honor Roll? December 24, 2019 Author page\n\nThe wrestling over standards between progressives and centrists is real, and it can be healthy for a democracy. Unfortunately, the centrists who refuse to surrender their rigid grip on the Democratic Party\u2014especially when it comes to naming presidential contenders\u2014want Democrats to believe that the only way to tackle Trump, the man who has shredded every standard for electioneering and governing, is with a return to politics as usual. They imagine that it is possible to make politics great again. Their back-to-the-future approach, which is as dangerous as it is naive, suggests that the 2016 election was an aberration.\n\nCentrism is an unyielding ideological construct. It demands that candidates and parties abandon ideals in order to satisfy the whims of professional pessimists like David Brooks of The New York Times, who earlier this year reduced the Democratic contest to a David Brooks primary. In a Times column headlined, \u201cDems, Please Don\u2019t Drive Me Away,\u201d Brooks warned, \u201cThe party is moving toward all sorts of positions that drive away moderates and make it more likely the nominee will be unelectable. And it\u2019s doing it without too much dissent.\u201d\n\nNever mind that poll after poll shows that the \u201cpositions\u201d Brooks perceives to be electorally poisonous\u2014support for real health care reform and a sufficient response to the climate crisis\u2014are, in fact, quite popular. Never mind that Brooks, a man unscathed by even the slightest measure of irony, bemoaned the lack of dissent in a column prominently featured in the nation\u2019s most influential newspaper. Brooks was not happy because no one seemed to accept his premise that \u201cthe moral case against Trump means hitting him from the right as well as the left.\u201d\n\nCurrent Issue View our current issue\n\nThe defenders of the empty politics of the past spent 2019 in a fret fest over the success of a democratic socialist, Bernie Sanders, and a progressive anti-monopolist, Elizabeth Warren, in framing out a bold vision for the party and the 2020 campaign. The Washington Post\u2019s Catherine Rampell warned against \u201clazy sloganeering \u2014 lately exemplified by Medicare-for-all and the Green New Deal\u201d and counseled that Medicare-for-All was \u201cin danger of becoming a purity test for 2020 candidates.\u201d\n\nActually, Medicare-for-All should be a purity test for candidates; as AOC said, \u201cit\u2019s called having values.\u201d If the Democratic nominee in 2020 cannot communicate a vision for treating health care as a right, then the party will sacrifice one of its strongest tools for mobilizing young and disenfranchised voters.\n\nDemocrats should recognize the value of keeping pure on major issues\u2014even if major donors might ask them to compromise. Clarity on the big issues helps a party to increase turnout among potential voters who agree and to shape the discourse in ways that appeal to independent voters who are frustrated by the concessions that both major parties make to America\u2019s oligarchs.\n\nIt is reasonable to suggest, as does former President Obama, that the Democrats must avoid being so pure that they only attract \u201cpeople who already agree with us completely on everything.\u201d Even Warren, who made her name taking on the big banks, admits, \u201cNobody is perfect, and nobody is pure.\u201d But Warren also says that Democrats have to avoid compromising at the start of the process, with \u201cvague calls for unity.\u201d And Sanders continues to advocate for a renewal of former President Franklin Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cI-welcome-their-hatred\u201d approach to the billionaire class.\n\nIn the last Democratic debate of the year, Buttigieg decried efforts to apply \u201cpurity tests\u201d when it comes to campaign fund-raising and claimed that \u201cin order to build the Democratic Party and build a campaign ready for the fight of our lives, these purity tests shrink the stakes of the most important election.\u201d\n\nWarren and Sanders stood their ground, making the case for funding campaigns with lots of small donations as opposed to bundles of big checks. Buttigieg stood his ground, as well, rejecting charges that he is running as \u201cWall Street Pete,\u201d defending \u201ctraditional fundraising\u201d and telling The Washington Post, \u201cThe thing about these purity tests is the people issuing them can\u2019t even meet them.\u201d\n\nPerhaps. But Democrats should at least try to meet some of them. That was AOC\u2019s point when she warned against buying into the fantasy that \u201cthere is no difference between being funded by a handful of wealthy people and being funded by small grassroots donations.\u201d\n\n\u201cLet me tell you something,\u201d the former waitress explained, \u201cI go into work all the time and I hear people say \u2018what will my donors think?\u2019 I hear that phrase. I hear and I see that billionaires get members of Congress on speed dial and waitresses don\u2019t.\u201d\n\nIf Democrats want to mobilize the masses in 2020, they\u2019ll need the waitresses\u2014and the rest of the working class\u2014not the defenders of billionaire money and elite centrism.", "keywords": [], "meta_keywords": ["Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez", "Bernie Sanders", "Donald Trump", "Elizabeth Warren", "Pete Buttigieg"], "tags": [], "authors": ["John Nichols", "December", "Steve Brodner", "Karen Rothmyer", "Joan Walsh", "Kathy M. Newman", "The Nation", "Mychal Denzel Smith"], "publish_date": "Wed Jan 1 12:00:35 2020", "summary": "", "article_html": "", "meta_description": "\u201cFor anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s called having values. It\u2019s called, giving a damn.\u201d", "meta_lang": "en", "meta_favicon": "https://www.thenation.com/images/favicon.ico", "meta_data": {"viewport": "width=device-width, initial-scale=1", "fb": {"pages": 7629206115, "app_id": 711914725636301}, "sailthru.image.full": "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img-680x430.jpg", "sailthru.image.thumb": "https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/aoc-congress-impeachment-reporters-gt-img-275x173.jpg", "sailthru.title": "AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020", "sailthru.date": "January 1st, 2020", "sailthru.content_id": 335293, "sailthru.description": "\u201cFor anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s called having values. It\u2019s called, giving a damn.\u201d", "sailthru.tags": "Campaign Finance,Campaigns and Elections,Climate Change,Democrats,Economic Policy,Election 2020,Elections,Inequality,Political Ideologies,Politics,The Left,", "keywords": "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,Bernie Sanders,Donald Trump,Elizabeth Warren,Pete Buttigieg", "sailthru.author": "John Nichols", "description": "\u201cFor anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s called having values. It\u2019s called, giving a damn.\u201d", "og": {"locale": "en_US", "type": "article", "title": "AOC Tells Democrats How to Get it Right in 2020", "description": "\u201cFor anyone who accuses us for instituting purity tests,\u201d she says, \u201cit\u2019s called having values. 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