AOC Must Become the Next President

by Rose DuBois

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez must become the next president of the United States.

Just one year in with Trump’s second term, many of our worst fears have been confirmed. We glibly talk of coups, civil wars, rigged elections and concentration camps, not as mere hypotheticals, but as real and tangible things, things that seem in store. Trump posts threats of genocide and the world can only look on in horror to see if he’ll actually do it. Nobody can say for sure how far down this abyss really goes.

But in this darkest hour, we find the enemy exhausted and weakened, our ranks swelling. Rather than a permanent fascist realignment, the new ruling coalition is shattering in real time. Trump’s popularity is sinking to new lows as everything falls apart for him—a flailing economy, the Epstein files, rage at ICE agents kidnapping children and murdering bystanders, and now another pointless quagmire in the Middle East.

And having built a cult around their god-king for the past decade, the Republican party feels more vulnerable than ever as his body rots and withers. Like a medieval king whose person was thought to be linked with the prosperity of the land, so too is the fate of the American fascist movement inseparable from the person of Donald Trump, a man as mortal as any. None of the hopefuls to replace him have the same magnetism.

The danger has not yet passed, nor should we grow complacent, but the tides have turned, and the midterms seem to be shaping up to be a reversal in electoral fortunes on a scale not seen in many years. While we should not over-index special elections, it’s impossible to not feel a tinge of optimism when a Democrat can overperform by 31% in a district Trump won to flip it. It seems we are being given a rare opportunity: a second chance. The question is, what will we do with it?

Enter stage left, a congresswoman from the Bronx.

A Second Chance

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems preternaturally suited to be a repudiation of Trumpism. Her election as a young working class woman of color, would be a symbolic triumph over the oligarchic, white supremacist and misogynistic creed of MAGA. But not merely an apt image, no one is more fitted than she to herald in a new political era. In the 2028 Democratic primary, we will decide what to do with our second chance, and it is by no means certain we will capitalize on it. Because of this, it is paramount that AOC run for president, and we must get behind her. Not only does she have it in her to win, but she has a better chance than Bernie did. She is not his successor, but the fulfillment of his promise.

Every electoral defeat forces the losing party to confront and grapple with its loss. Inevitably, competing narratives and views emerge as to how to move forward, and these struggles define the contours of factional politics. After 2016 two broad camps emerged, roughly mapping onto the Clinton-Sanders divide of the primary. For some, Trump’s first victory was an aberration, a fluke, and one that wasn’t supposed to happen. Others saw an opportunity: Clinton’s defeat was the culmination of NAFTA and neoliberalism, of emptied out towns and closed down factories. The white working class with their “economic anxiety” merely wanted to shake up the system that had failed them.

Never popular during his first term, Trump’s presidency unraveled almost as soon as it began. By its end, as a new disease upended our lives, the American people were tired of his antics, and wanted to move on. Not a revolution—they rejected that option—but a promise that everything could be reset to the way it was before Trump descended down that golden escalator. They turned to a figure of nostalgia: Obama’s Vice President, Joe Biden, and the smooth comfort of normalcy that he represented. Over the course of his term, Biden stayed within the bounds of ordinary politics, despite governing in extraordinary times.

This attempt at returning to normalcy failed. With instability and mass murder abroad, and spiraling prices at home, by the end of Biden’s term, America felt listless, with no one at the helm as chaos seemed to be the order of the day. And into this void again stepped Donald Trump.

Trump’s victory in 2024 could not have felt more catastrophic. The weeks that followed were nothing like the dizzying days that came after the 2016 election. Gone was the shock, the confusion. The outcome seemed plausible, even expected. Gone too was the sense that they were a hateful minority. “America is a fascist nation,” the results announced, and as everywhere swung red—across races and ages, genders and geography—we almost believed it.

Having shed his establishment handlers on January 6th, Trump and his movement spent four years in the wilderness stewing and radicalizing, as the thirst for revenge consumed their souls. While his first election was simply the inauguration of a new president, his second marked The End. The ideologies of the broad left—socialism, progressivism, liberalism, feminism, even the concept of human kindness—felt not just temporarily defeated, but vanquished. We were witnessing the fall of democracy and a new era of eternal darkness.

Not reopening the same rifts, Trump’s second term has again divided Democrats between growing camps, somewhat mirroring but not entirely matching those that came before. While the future is ever mercurial, two roads appear to lay before us: one defined by cynicism, another by belief; one which leads only to doom and demoralization, another which can redeem us; one represented by a millionaire governor from California, another by a former bartender.

Capitulation Politics

While no one is in the “lead” for the Democratic nomination (it’s far too soon for that), an early frontrunner is Gavin Newsom. With his outreach to the far right, his flip flopping and his pivots towards reactionary centrism, Newsom seems to be angling to enact an American version of Starmerism. Keir Starmer (for those fortunate enough to not know) is the current Prime Minister of the UK and the Leader of the Labour Party. After a decade of Conservative misrule, in 2024 British voters gave him an overwhelming majority (411 of 650 seats), but this had less to do with Starmer than the fact that he wasn’t the incumbent.

Yet granted such a vast mandate, Starmer has done nothing but squander it, taking a hard right turn on issues such as immigration and trans rights, with predictable consequences for his support. He has propelled the fascist Reform party to first in the polls, while progressive voters flee to the Greens.

While Starmerism may appear at first glance to be similar to the politics of a return to normalcy, it is actually something far worse: total capitulation. The crime of Clinton or Biden wasn’t failing to assess the danger of Trumpism, it was misunderstanding it as a temporary blemish on our politics that would go away. Newsom’s project, by contrast, embraces Trumpism, taking on the bigoted social views of Republicans. Others, such as Josh Shapiro (on his quest to claw back changing Democratic views on Israel) and John Fetterman (on his quest to become a Republican) are also representative of the same Capitulation Politics.

Newsom’s nomination would be a disaster for the same reason it has been in Britain. Progressive voters, already demoralized in 2024 over Biden’s support for Israel’s genocide, will find themselves even more so, only exacerbating voter disengagement, and we will find the fascist right once again ascendant.

Belief vs. Nihilism

There are ideological differences that divide the present Democratic coalition, but the underlying tension isn’t so much between clashing worldviews, but between belief itself and nihilism. Whether socialist or liberal, center left or left wing—we believe in something, and that what happens to people, real people, matters.

Trumpism, by contrast, lacks any of this. It holds no values other than self-enrichment and self-gratification, a screaming maelstrom of animalistic urges, domination, rape and murder. There is no moral logic because it is deliberately anti-moral. Those hurt in its unquenching drive for power could not matter less, just grist for the content mills. And of the MAGA base? They squeal for it, the red hatted piggies hungry for their slop. Their lives haven’t improved, but that’s not the point, resentment and malevolence is all they live for.

Newsom isn’t Trump, but his mode of politics is the same. He and his reactionary centrist politics are a color swapped inversion of Trump, from the use of Content to the naked drive for power. And holding no beliefs, he tramples on the exact same victims as those who suffer under fascism.

Laying out the divisions this way, it’s obvious why a candidate like Zohran was able to break out in a time such as this. An authentic candidate—who is genuine and thoughtful, who cares about his constituents—is a breath of fresh air. Cuomo, another representative of Capitulation Politics, could not stand up to someone like Zohran, because voters saw through him and they did not like what they saw. (It’s no coincidence that Cuomo, like Trump, was a heavy producer of AI slop). And yes the classic young left wing voter were critical for Zohran’s victory, but they alone could not bring him over the top. While Bernie divided left wing voters from left-liberal ones, Zohran united them into a single coalition. Repulsed by Cuomo’s sleaze, such voters turned towards a democratic socialist, ending the career of a candidate who had seemed invincible. This dynamic is a defining feature of the current terrain of politics, and it will continue to be one through the 2028 primary. As a result, it is imperative that we have a standard bearer in the primary who can channel our faith, lest we ourselves fall into the same darkness that has consumed the Republicans. Luckily there is a woman clearly fit for the job.

No Return to Normalcy

An AOC presidency would be no return to normalcy. Democratic voters want a fighter, someone who will take on the corrupt elite, the tech oligarchs and the Supreme Court, who will end the genocide and endless wars in the Middle East, who will destroy Trumpism, not let him walk free. Few have been more consistent on this than AOC. And like Zohran has, she can combine the good-governance and clean politics that appeal to social liberals, with an ambitious and revolutionary vision for America. Where 10 years ago AOC was seen as a fringe radical, today she has wide appeal beyond the socialist core and into the mainstream.

Added to this fertile soil is the fact that an Ocasio-Cortez presidential campaign will be bigger than either of Bernie’s runs. This is for the simple reason that the American left is so much stronger and well prepared than in the late 2010s. Even as the popularity of our message has grown, so too has our organizational might. Recently exceeding 100k members, the Democratic Socialists of America is larger than ever. In 2016 Bernie almost entirely stood alone, today there is a wealth of elected officials who would assuredly endorse AOC, from the halls of congress, to state officials, to the mayor of the largest city in the country. The linkage between labor and the establishment has also shifted in the past decade, as a budding left-labor alliance continues to grow.

AOC is also an extremely effective political communicator. Young and understanding the digital age, such communication techniques are not only pivotal for winning an election, but also in governing. Social media is the primary medium through which a growing number of voters experience politics, and one of Biden’s shortcomings was his inability to adapt to this new reality, ceding much narrative ground to the right as problems arose.

Further differing herself from Biden, AOC seems to understand that Democratic hypocrisies help fuel the very cynicism that strengthens the Republican Party. Yes, with governance and an executive office compromises are inevitable (something we are already seeing with Zohran’s mayoralty), politics is an art of give and take after all, but there is a difference between negotiating with what one can and cannot accomplish, and with enabling a mass genocide. Cynicism feeds into the amorality of Trumpism, while demoralizing humanistic voters.

Beyond persecuting Trump’s officials (something she’s already promised to do), AOC could transform America. While we don’t yet know the precise details of what her platform would look like, we can be certain that she will go further than Biden ever did with an ambitious legislative plan to upend our country’s unjust economic order through proposals such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

We also shouldn’t underestimate what her presidency will do abroad. For decades, the might of the American war machine has been used to kill and to maim innocent people across the world, from Iran and Iraq to Vietnam to Latin America. But under Trump, the coercive logic of imperialism and transactional gangsterism has reached its apotheosis. Under AOC we can attempt to develop a foreign policy of international cooperation and the promotion of the good of all people.

A Chance for Ourselves and the Planet

This isn’t to say that any of this will be easy, or that a President AOC will wash away our problems—it would not. But it would give us the chance, for ourselves and for the planet.

Some, including seemingly some in her inner circle, might believe a Senate seat is the safer target. They are wrong. Yes, a Senator AOC may have greater influence on Democratic politics, and such a move might serve as a stronger stepping stone to a future presidential run than a House seat. But the time for her to run for president isn’t then, it’s now.

More Americans want to abolish ICE today than keep it. All the forces of reaction that Trump unleashed are in retreat, and they have conjured a situation where Americans are shifting leftward at a rapid rate. Whichever Democrat walks into the Oval Office in 2029 will come with an immense amount of political capital at their finger tips.

Furthermore, AOC already has most of what she would gain from a Senate seat. She already has far more name recognition than most sitting Democratic senators or governors, and more popularity. She is also already a prolific fundraiser, and the moment her campaign announced she would be flush with cash. And beyond that she’s already polling in the top handful of candidates!

Were AOC to lose the primary, her career also would not be over. Come 2030 she could run for governor or take on Gillibrand. Reagan ran for president twice, in 1968 and 1976 before he was finally made the nominee, so did Biden. It’s not like she would disappear forever. And unlike in 2018, where AOC stood virtually alone, today we have a far deeper bench of elected officials and candidates ready to pick up where she left off. While such a loss may be bitter and disappointing, we’ve seen what having a candidate like Bernie in the primary can do to help alter the direction of the party, and it’s critical that such a voice is present. The lack of a left wing challenger in 2024 was devastating. The best way to survive the catastrophe of a Newsom presidency and the accompanying right wing backlash is to have a powerful, institutionalized left, which an AOC presidential campaign would help strengthen and grow.

An important question for the naysayers is simple: who else is there? No other candidate, not a Pritzker or a Van Hollen, while perhaps palatable in the situation where AOC declines to run, will be able to activate the depth and breadth of energy AOC will capture. Nor will another option out of the democratic socialist or labor left work. Rashida has neither the interest nor the same public profile, and Shawn Fain will never win a Democratic primary when he has tied himself so closely to one of Trump’s most unpopular policies: tariffs. More importantly, he has a general strike in 2028 to worry about.

Yes, there are fair and legitimate criticisms of AOC (though she is doing her best to address them). She is not perfect. But after years of intense and acrimonious debates about AOC, it can feel as if the weight of the world rests on how they are decided. We proceed as if our discussions and disputes, the articles we write, the posts we make will determine the course of events. Our scribbles cannot contend with the forces of history that align behind AOC. Everything we have argued will matter very little, forgotten and condemned, overwhelmed by that which we have no agency over. Should AOC run for president, millions of people will be instantly energized and her campaign will sweep us away. A man once said that politics begin where the millions are. An AOC presidential run will prove him right.

History is converging to create the means, and the opportunity to have a Democratic Socialist president. While cowards flinch and reactionary centrists sneer, it is on us, and on AOC, to recognize the chance we must take. We may not have it again.