The Right, as Corey Robin has famously argued, learns from the Left. Edmund Burke argued conservatives should copy the Jacobins. The slaveholders, even as they denounced the rights of man, celebrated the demotic virtues of widespread slaveholding in the antebellum South. Newt Gingrich argued that the conservative minority in the House needed to adopt “Viet Cong” tactics to harry the majority.

More recently, the Left has also attempted to learn from the Right. Liberal activists created the State Innovation Exchange (SIX) as a left-leaning version of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Further left, socialists have argued recently that the left should copy the parliamentary tactics of the congressional far right. Much of this discussion has focused on the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), the right-wing caucus founded in 2015.

All the way back in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself contrasted the unity of the HFC with the much bigger but more loosely organized Congressional Progressive Caucus. In 2020–21, the “force the vote” debate on the Left centered around whether socialists in Congress should, like the HFC, threaten to vote against their party’s Speaker candidate (in this case Nancy Pelosi) unless they received a promise that one of their key legislative priorities (Medicare for All) would be brought to the floor for a vote. More recently, Neal Meyer has argued that the HFC’s success in bullying Kevin McCarthy provides a model for the kind of combativity and cohesion that we should expect from socialist legislators.