This article by Carter Moon originally appeared in his Substack, and is republished here with his permission. 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently went viral for a clip from ABC News where she was asked to defend Francesca Hong, the DSA candidate for Wisconsin governor who narrowly lost her primary. Specifically, she was being asked to defend Hong’s past support for police and prison abolition, which Hong, AOC, and Mamdani have all walked back in the last few years. It’s part of a much broader trend of the progressive left throwing in the towel and giving up on making policing and mass incarceration central to the issues they talk about and campaign on.

I’ll put the full quote of what AOC said so you have context:

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy’ … Especially during COVID, I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it’s fundamentally different than the way that we talked about crime in bringing crime down. And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today. And I’m grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they’re campaigning on in this moment.”

It leaves me asking a very basic, but I think crucial question: What are we trying to accomplish here? It’s something the American left needs to really interrogate. AOC is, in all likelihood, the DSA candidate for president in 2028. How she positions herself now is enormously consequential. If she, and the broader movement behind her, are too cowardly to stand up to modern policing and the mass incarceration machine, then what hope do we have? Are we really just trying to tax billionaires a little more fairly and make the insurance system slightly less brazenly evil? Or are we actually engaged in the project of rewriting the American social contract while tearing up systems of oppression root and branch? I know which project I’m committed to.

There’s been a refrain I encounter with increasing regularity that talking about defunding the police, let alone abolishing them, is simply too politically toxic to force the conversation in the electoral realm. But that begs the question: What is the appropriate venue, when is the appropriate time? As I’ve written before, the American carceral system is antithetical to any notion that we live in an equal and democratic society. Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson was on “Democracy Now!” this week explaining how the modern death penalty is the stepchild of lynching, that we really have just found a way to create the illusion of a justice system while maintaining a vicious racial hierarchy. The private contractor-driven mass deportation machine currently powering ICE is an outgrowth of our domestic for-profit prison system.There is no transformation of American society free of oligarchy, inequality, and oppression without reckoning with the brutality of how our criminal legal system works as an engine that sustains racial capitalism.

Derecka Purnell, abolitionist organizer and author of the book Becoming Abolitionists, wrote an excellent response to AOC’s comments in The Guardian. She acknowledges that the problem with much of the shallow, performative online posturing in 2020 didn’t really translate to people’s ideologies changing in the long-term, and these electeds walking back their earlier statements is a reflection of that shallowness. But she also makes an incredibly astute point: “The very movements producing that rhetoric, from abolition to Free Palestine, also produced the possibilities of their elections. And downplaying those movements puts organizers who continue this work at risk, especially right now.”

So much of the discourse defending AOC has been about how everyone somehow lost their minds during COVID and temporarily supported something clearly impractical and impossible. This completely dismisses and ignores that grass roots movement that exploded in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown, which saw explosive nationwide organizing for six years in the lead-up to the mass uprisings of 2020. It did not, in fact, just happen spontaneously, and would not have had there not been brave organizers coordinating campaigns across the country to force the American public to reckon with the realities of police brutality. Six people connected to the original Ferguson protests have died under highly suspicious circumstances; these were sacrifices made in the name of the broader movement that need to be honored.

Let’s trace the lineage of one prominent politician who rose to power in 2020. Nithya Raman upended the status quo of the LA city council by leaning into the fervor of Defund the Police rhetoric and beating an incumbent who had the Democratic machine fully behind him. She has since walked it back and routinely voted for more police power, although, to her credit, there have also been moments where she’s stood up to the police union. She’s currently running for mayor and attempting to square a very strange circle of openly distancing herself from Mamdani and DSA while also pitching herself as the anti-status quo candidate. It’s a very puzzling manifestation of this phenomenon we’re seeing play out nationally.

Since I had a minor role as a paid canvasser on Raman’s 2020 campaign and consistently devote too much brain power to the sewer that is LA politics, I have a clearer perspective on why Raman is in the position she’s in than I do on these nationally elected figures. There’s a tendency among LA radicals to dismiss Nithya as a sellout who never genuinely believed in the things she ran on, and I think that’s part of the story in her case. But I think another component we need to be honest about was that the movements that were strong enough to get her elected weren’t strong enough to overcome the hegemonic forces in City Hall. As a result, Nithya found herself isolated on a very right-wing council, a council that brazenly punished her for daring to challenge them, with no reliable social base continuing to back her up for her more radical positions while she was in office.

This is why I ultimately think Nithya’s mayoral campaign is doomed, because she still doesn’t have a movement strong enough to counter the more reactionary elements in city politics to bolster her. (This is my analysis of why my friend Rae Huang failed to take off in her own mayoral campaign as well.) Mamdani has been successful because he not only had an incredibly robust support of NYC DSA, but also incredibly well-organized tenant and environmental movements. (The podcast “The Dig” spent months examining Zohran’s campaign from every conceivable angle.) Mamdani is at his best when he’s delivering on city services and standing up to abusive landlords, and I’d argue that’s because he’s got a network of seasoned organizers in his administration who have been in the trenches of these issues for a long time. I don’t see Nithya making radicals part of her coalition in the same way, and it’s going to make it difficult for her to govern in a way that resonates and feels genuinely new.

But when we talk about the limits and weaknesses of these electeds, I think we need to be really honest with each other about the limits of our broader movements. When these politicians walk things back and give in to reactionary pressure, they’re doing it because we, as the movement left, haven’t yet successfully shifted the hegemonic consensus. It doesn’t really matter what a politician believes in their heart; they are, at the end of the day, attempting to do the things that will either keep them in their seat or elevate them to a higher one. Too often, politicians chase public opinion, and especially the opinion of the donor class, rather than trying to redefine what public opinion should be. If there isn’t a force like DSA that’s capable of effectively disciplining them and keeping them on track, they inevitably capitulate to the inertia of politics as usual and the narratives set by the corporate media.

The movement left has largely failed, up to this point, to build the counter-hegemonic force we have to become if we want to overcome the intersecting existential crises facing us. If we are serious about trying to turn the clock back on techno-fascism and climate annihilation, we have to build a legitimately cohesive new consensus for rewriting the social contract that governs day-to-day life in this society. That means our movements can’t afford to throw our hands up and not participate in electoral politics entirely, but we simultaneously have to be really serious about building up candidates and leaders who are capable of wielding power effectively on behalf of this vision for a truly liberated world. They also have to be more afraid of us as a disciplined, unified movement than they are of the fascists, which they’re currently not. Without that, we’re just going to continue to let the world burn faster and hotter.

I’ll pull back here to concede that the attempt to distance ourselves from the more grating discursive elements of what the internet is calling “Woke 1” makes sense. Francesca Hong got put under fire not just for her support of police abolition but also Tweets examining her proximity to whiteness and calling for the cancellation of Thanksgiving. This way of framing things does have a tendency to alienate people who otherwise might have been winnable to the broader goals of the left. Cultivating the ambient threat of being scolded, shamed, or canceled does little to inspire and mobilize a mass base. Similarly, simply Tweeting “abolish the police” without context or an explanation of the better world you want to replace the police with isn’t particularly helpful, especially from leaders. Oftentimes this style of communicating can be hijacked by elites, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has written about brilliantly, saying: “Instead of forging alliances across difference, some have chosen to weaponize identity politics, closing ranks — especially on social media — around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests rather than building solidarity.” But ultimately we shouldn’t misconstrue getting better at communicating our ideas and expanding our coalitions with the right to abandon core moral positions like confronting policing and mass incarceration.

I’m halfway through Yotam Marom’s monumental book For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness. I’m going to write a full review of it soon, but I wanted to end with a quote from it. To me, AOC and other democratic socialists capitulating on issues of policing and incarceration is them cowering from an important central truth about injustice in this country. Moram writes beautifully in his book about why it’s essential that we always strive to tell the truth:

“Telling the truth is good in a way that is obvious and practical, but it’s more than that too: Telling the truth is central to transformation. It is a fundamental part of looking at what is and what might be and making the choice to climb the distance between; a chance to flex that muscle of becoming and becoming again; an opportunity to become bigger as individuals and greater than the sum of our parts as groups.”