Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Channeling FDR
Working-class economic populism is necessary for both Democrats’ electoral success and the defense of democracy itself. Not many Democrats since FDR have recognized this, but Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is one of the few who does.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaking at the Munich Security Conference. (Sven Hoppe / picture alliance via Getty Images)
In 2021, Academy Award–winning director Alex Gibney and I published a desperate plea. In a Rolling Stone essay, we implored Democrats then in power to heed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR) long-forgotten warning about the link between economic hardship and authoritarianism. Five years later, it appears that at least one prospective Democratic presidential candidate understands the warning — and is using her platform to amplify it.
Back in 2021, many liberals had gone back to brunch, assuming that the “democracy crisis” was over and that Donald Trump would never reemerge. In our Rolling Stone piece, entitled “Democrats’ Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy,” Gibney and I were sounding a discordant alarm after completing Meltdown. That audio series traced how Democrats turning hope and change into more of the same created conditions for Trump’s 2016 ascent and posited that the same thing could happen again.
The key passage in our essay was here:
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.