To Force Climate Action, We Need More Than Just Protests

By Edward Carver, Jacobin

12 December 20

Two years ago, the Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion both captured media attention through bold direct action. Since then, Sunrise has combined protest with political work challenging fossil-fuel interests. XR and other groups tepid about electoral politics should do the same.

n November 2018, two climate activist groups crashed onto the public stage. In Washington, DC, the Sunrise Movement occupied Nancy Pelosi’s office, demanding a Green New Deal (GND). In central London, Extinction Rebellion (XR) seized five bridges, blocking traffic with their camps and getting arrested at an even faster rate than Sunrise.

A month earlier, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report had declared that humanity had only twelve years to act to limit ecological catastrophe. Student strikes led by Greta Thunberg were kicking off across the world; it felt like a new era in climate activism.

Both Sunrise and XR engage in nonviolent direct action, and much of their activity is run by semiautonomous local chapters: Sunrise has over four hundred “hubs” in the United States, while XR has nearly five hundred in Britain and dozens of other countries. Yet they follow starkly different approaches to politics. XR has stayed mostly on the “outside,” pushing for change through protests and cultural renewal, while Sunrise has combined such actions with direct political involvement.

In last December’s British election, XR sat on the sidelines, proclaiming itself “beyond politics” even as parties with a decent climate plan challenged a right-wing prime minister with an abysmal climate record. By contrast, Sunrise mobilized to help oust Donald Trump, a climate change denier, even though the alternative candidate was uninspiring.

XR’s abstention can’t be blamed for the Labour Party’s loss, and Sunrise played a relatively small role in Donald Trump’s defeat. But Sunrise’s electoral efforts have helped propel many pro-climate candidates to victory — and pushed Democrats to take bolder policy stands. Beyond its short-term results, Sunrise has begun to build a political machine that could be a model for other climate activist groups including XR and Fridays for Future (FFF), the main organization behind the school strikes.

XR and FFF are larger and better-known internationally than Sunrise, and this makes it all the more important that they channel their energies strategically. With the planet heating up and less than a decade to act, it’s time for climate activist groups to convert their disruptive capacity into concrete political influence.

The Sunrise Machine

Though run by young people, Sunrise has matured into a political force. Its founders cut their teeth on pipeline and divestment campaigns in the mid-2010s, and they were inspired by Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary run. They launched Sunrise in 2017 as a hybrid group that would protest and do electoral organizing, including by campaigning for pro-GND, left-wing candidates.

It recently helped New York’s Jamaal Bowman and Missouri’s Cori Bush to upset primary wins over establishment Democrats in blue seats, ensuring their election to Congress. Sunrise also produces savvy ads, such as one that dubbed Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who faced an establishment challenger, the “Green New Dealmaker.”

After Sanders’s defeat, Sunrise could have shut down its operations. Instead, it kept building them to beat Trump and help down-ballot candidates. This summer, Sunrise executive director Varshini Prakash was invited to join the Biden-Sanders unity task force on the climate. She helped convince Biden’s team that a strong climate platform was a political winner, especially with young voters. Now, Sunrise is in a position to pressure him to follow through on his declaration that climate is his “number one issue.”

Ahead of November’s election, Sunrise reached millions of young voters by phone and through social media. It helped fuel a surge of youth turnout; eighteen- to twenty-nine year olds were a bigger share of the electorate, even as the number of elderly voters also increased.

Young people ultimately put Biden over the top, with “net youth votes for Biden” exceeding his margin of victory in decisive swing states. Meanwhile, the GND had success down-ballot. Ninety-two of ninety-three House cosponsors of the GND resolution won reelection, including four in swing districts. (There are 101 cosponsors in the 435-member House, but several are retiring; fourteen out of a hundred Senators cosponsor the resolution.)

Sunrise’s decision to go all in for Biden was controversial on the Left, but it helped lead to immediate, consequential change, however insufficient. Its bolder efforts may take more time to pay off. Targeting “Red to Green New Deal” seats, it campaigned for eight left-wing candidates taking on Republican incumbents in Congress — but none came close to winning.

Still, it was always going to be difficult to go from zero to GND in just two years. And Sunrise is helping to build networks and institutional capacity for the future.

A Not So Rebellious Rebellion

From the start, XR’s orientation has been rather different. One cofounder, Gail Bradbrook, is a scientist and former NGO project manager. A miner’s daughter, she today lives in Stroud, a prosperous English town with a bobo vibe; she has said she was inspired to start XR after using psychedelics in Latin America.

In 2018, before the bridge-taking in London, Bradbrook and others started giving a “Heading for Extinction” talk across Britain. It was heavy on science and light on power dynamics. “Climate change is not a political issue, it’s a moral issue,” they said.

Some of the same messaging has endured. Last year, my local XR chapter proclaimed itself “A-political” and “neutral” on social media, arguing for “cross-party” solutions. The press team recently wrote on Twitter that XR was “not a socialist organization.”

This approach has doubtless succeeded in drawing in some people who wouldn’t join a left-wing organization or are alienated from politics. It’s also unleashed a surge of energy, tapping into a talent for spectacle among its activists.

Before protests, they “paint the streets” with brightly colored posters, flags, and badges, many adorned with XR’s signature hourglass. During protests, they samba, hula-hoop, and move through synchronized “mourning” rituals (for the dying natural world), all while the police try to remove them from the streets.

Last year, its protests helped prompt the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency and strengthen its decarbonization plan. Yet this didn’t mean substantive climate action. In general, XR hasn’t had the concentrated or measurable political influence that Sunrise has.

On a given week, when major actions aren’t on, XR activists might create community gardens, lobby local councils, or form tree protection brigades at construction sites. This is laudable work, but not enough to bring the drastic structural change that’s needed. XR activists call themselves “rebels” and refer to multiday actions as “uprisings” even when these events’ end times are announced in advance. But what exactly is XR rebelling against?

As political ecologist Heather Alberro wrote recently in the Conversation, “[W]ithout a political analysis of the problem, XR risks leading a mass of motivated people nowhere.” Indeed, the people at BP, Barclays, Ineos, and Conservative campaign headquarters can’t be very worried about XR in its current form — it presents little direct challenge to their power. Boris Johnson’s own father, himself a Tory, joined the street protests, as if to stamp them “nonthreatening.”

XR sat out Britain’s December 2019 general election, aside from a few publicity stunts, and refused to draw distinctions between parties. When Labour slightly dialed back its climate commitments due to union concerns that a rapid green transition would hurt workers, XR dressed the party down rather than sizing it up next to the Tories. This revealed a lack of perspective — a puritanical bent — and an unwillingness to seek common ground with the working class.

XR’s main foray into politics has come via its push for “citizens’ assemblies” in which randomly selected juries of non-party, non-experts set policy. It recently lobbied for a Climate and Ecological Emergency bill in Parliament, putting major focus on such assemblies. Very few MPs support the bill.

Citizens’ assemblies, while an interesting idea, are hardly a cure-all. To demand them is to delay addressing the most difficult political questions; it indicates a naïve belief that presenting “the truth” convincingly is enough to effect change. Indeed, “tell the truth” is one of XR’s demands and slogans.

Society will never be a courtroom where facts are adjudicated free from vested interests. Citizens’ assemblies or not, the powerful will frame the terms of debate, and so XR should focus on countering the power of entrenched interests, rather than questioning their morality. Its strategy of rendering climate inaction “criminal” and denouncing “politicians” for “not caring” is little more effective than judging people for using plastic water bottles. It needs to push for a fairer political and economic system.

Disempowering Structure

Fortunately, XR does appear to be moving in this direction. But in order to successfully push for a reordering of power dynamics in society, it needs to sort out its own internal ones.

Neither Sunrise nor XR is perfectly inclusive or democratic. Sunrise supports a just transition and has partnered with worker organizations like Fight for $15 and Raise Up NC, but activists report that its base remains disproportionately white and middle-class.

According to a letter that six of Sunrise’s founders wrote in September, people of color have “experienced tokenization and felt that their voices as leaders aren’t heard at the national or hub level.” Despite these weaknesses, Sunrise has at least built a diverse leadership: roughly half of its hundred staff members are people of color.

XR’s leaders often have trouble even seeing that they sit at the top of power structures, in the organization as in society. These internal issues are a symptom of its wider focus on moral appeals over power dynamics.

At many protests last year, XR activists chanted “police!/we love you/we’re doing this for your children too” — without realizing how much this alienated those with a very different relationship with police. XR’s street tactics and internal culture have ended up glorifying activists who are more willing and able to risk arrest.

This blindness owes to its organizational structure. The call for a nonhierarchical “holacracy” has benefits: the lack of rigidity can be a refreshing alternative to party meetings with dry debates on quorum rules. Yet in reality, XR’s de facto leaders have outsized power, and rank and filers have little way to replace them or hold them accountable. The press team, for example, shapes XR’s image for all the world to see.

Such dominance by unelected insiders is partly the result of what US feminist Jo Freeman once called the “tyranny of structurelessness.” She argues that every group forms hierarchies and that keeping them informal makes it harder to hold leaders accountable: better, perhaps, to have a transparent hierarchy than one that purports not to exist.

In the US, Sunrise has its own structural issues. Like XR, it has no formal membership or dues-paying system: the rank-and-file do not get to choose their leaders. But they are at least chosen in a transparent way, through an open hiring process.

XR, in contrast, is a volunteer-run organization without paid staff. Many of the volunteers are full-time, and the work they put in is admirable. But this setup perpetuates the dominance of those who don’t need paid employment — and makes it harder for people without economic advantages to take on leadership. (XR does give modest living stipends to some coordinators, but only once they’ve established themselves as volunteers.)

Sunrise has adopted the legal structure of a major nonprofit. Its fundraising team brought in about $13 million this year through two entities, a 501(c)3 and a 501(c)4. The latter is less appealing to donors (i.e., provides fewer tax benefits), but allows Sunrise to engage in politics more directly. Sunrise also has a political action committee that receives direct donations.

Though exerting influence in the twenty-first century political arena may require this funding, Sunrise’s professionalization has democratic drawbacks. It risks becoming just another advocacy group, channeling money from foundations that don’t have the same priorities as its activist base, which has little control over how money is spent. Activists have been sidelined in environmental groups before; one political scientist wrote of how they had been used as “organizational wallpaper, a collective backdrop for professional advocacy.”

How XR makes financial decisions is unclear. XR’s leaders have set up two private companies, Compassionate Revolution and Climate Emergency Action, to receive grants and donations, which have totaled at least $2 million since 2018. Those who control the funds aren’t accountable to XR’s rank and file. (The XR press team declined to respond to requests for comment for this article).

More democracy within XR could change its priorities or even its political approach. A first step would be to learn from a democratic step that Sunrise took. In late 2019, its leaders asked rank and filers to vote on whether to endorse a candidate in the Democratic primaries. They said yes, and selected Sanders. Sunrise then put its institutional resources behind his campaign — coming within striking distance of a monumental victory for the climate movement.

Ideas Beneath the Movements

Any activist group needs a sound theory of change and a clear strategy for gaining influence. Sunrise’s founders spent nine months planning with the help of an activist training institute. They built a strong narrative around justice — intergenerational, economic, racial — and developed a bold, positive vision for the future, with a plan focused on creating jobs and producing clean energy.

They engaged in nonviolent direct actions, while also building political power, partly through elections. They decided not to try to “persuade” the Right, but instead to look for climate “champions” who would refuse political donations from fossil-fuel interests and push for a GND.

XR’s founders, conversely, are stuck on the idea that achieving radical change requires mobilizing 3.5 percent of the population (in the UK, 2.3 million people; in the US, 11.5 million). This figure comes from Erica Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works. Yet her research focuses on movements against authoritarian regimes, and doesn’t necessarily apply in a liberal-democratic context.

What’s more, this approach relies on the moral authority of those rebelling; middle-class white people can’t expect to engender the same response as oppressed groups who participated in, say, India’s liberation movement. And finally, no single social movement will be enough to address the climate crisis. The most effective groups will be those that partner well with others.

Though its rebranded international outfit rightly calls for a “movement of movements,” XR spent a long time in semi-isolation. Instead of joining the Thunberg-led global climate strike in September 2019, XR scheduled its own rebellion for the next month. And despite recent efforts to reach out to workers of all races, XR hasn’t made inroads with trade unions — remarkably, its proposed bill doesn’t even mention them.

At its worst, XR is more of a moral crusade than a focused effort to exact change. According to a new study, “[M]any XR activists we spoke to had little confidence in victory. As a result, there is a strain of apocalyptic thinking present in the movement. This is evident in its nihilistic artistic expressions and the popularity of Jem Bendell’s work, which suggests that societal collapse, due to climate breakdown, is inevitable.”

In this way, XR looks like failed ’60s movements that focused too much on moral and spiritual one-upmanship — the apocalypse is coming, but it’s not my fault. Indeed, though the group calls for collective action, it maintains a strong strain of individualism. XR and FFF activists are relatively likely to believe in the effectiveness of lifestyle environmentalism, the new study noted.

Sunrise activists have been quicker to recognize that power disparities, and not moral deprivation, are the main cause of the climate crisis — and the best way to solve it is by taking power back. Environmental moralizing doesn’t work; indeed, it can limit the appeal of the movement. Most people will never be inclined to trippy awakenings.

Beyond Protests

Although it’s not always evident from its press team’s rhetoric, XR has moved to the left. Esther Stanford-Xosei, an activist who supports colonial reparations, has taken a leading role. Many branches and chapters have started to partner with racial justice groups, and some have added a “demand” for global justice — calling for a green transition that helps marginalized groups and honors indigenous rights.

The emphasis is evident in XR’s new “Heading for Extinction” talk, much different than the 2018 version. “The world’s most pressing problems are closely interlinked,” it says. “And at the heart of it all is power. Power, financial and governmental, is concentrated in the hands of a very small minority of humanity. Think political leaders, think global corporations, think financial institutions.”

It’s not just rhetoric — XR’s actions have become more targeted. At its most recent rebellion, in September, it held protests at right-wing think tanks that spread misinformation on climate change, and in the City of London (where XR held a “walk of shame” tour explaining the role that financial institutions play in the climate crisis).

XR activists also blocked road access to two of Rupert Murdoch’s printing presses, limiting the circulation of right-wing British newspapers for one day — to draw attention to the fact that the so-called free press is dominated by Murdoch’s News Corp and has a terrible record of reporting on the climate.

Not surprisingly, the establishment pushed back. Both major UK political parties condemned the action, and the government moved to potentially classify XR as an “organized crime group.” One of the billionaires behind the Climate Emergency Fund, a 501(c)3 which gave XR $350,000 last year, also denounced the Murdoch action; the fund will no longer support XR, the Telegraph reported. XR has also just announced a financial disobedience campaign meant to draw attention to the “political economy’s complicity” in the climate crisis.

Yet no matter how well-targeted, protests won’t be enough. Some branches of XR have shown themselves to have a left orientation, but the organization’s leaders remain wary of organizing around a left approach — and haven’t adopted the global justice demand.

Moving forward, XR, like society at large, needs structural change. It must tell the truth about conservative politics, rally around a progressive vision, make movement leaders more accountable, and build an in-house electoral machine.

Sunrise is like a turbine that turns disruption into political power. Other activist groups, like XR and FFF, need to get out the rotors and start learning energy conversion as well. Two years have passed since the IPCC’s grave warning, and every year that passes without change means far more human suffering and ecological destruction. We don’t have time to dream of a world beyond politics.

The Distinct Political Paths of Barack Obama and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

11 December 20

 

arack Obama is on a book tour, a setting so mundane that it can be a little jarring to encounter him there, amiably pursuing sales. Aiming for a young audience, the former President appeared this week on the Snapchat show “Good Luck America,” the host of which, Peter Hamby, asked whether the Democratic Party still had a “pro-capitalist” case to offer young voters. “Socialism is cool. Bernie, A.O.C., they’re cool. The Democratic Party isn’t really cool,” Hamby said.

None of this confident allocation of cool surprised Obama, who nodded—and who, incidentally, still looked cool himself, wearing a dark suit and tieless blue-striped shirt, his hair now on the white side of gray. He said he thought that the Democrats should have given Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a much more prominent role at the national convention this past summer. But, if he wanted Ocasio-Cortez to talk more, he didn’t think that the Party should talk more like her. “Socialism is still a loaded term for a lot of folks,” Obama told Hamby. When it came to the call to defund the police, “I guess you can use a snappy slogan like ‘defund the police,’ but you know you’ve lost a big audience the minute you say it.” Obama added, “The key is deciding do you want to actually get something done? Or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”

Right now, the most important arguments within the Democratic Party are taking place mostly out of public view, in the maneuverings to place staffers in the Joe Biden Administration—and, in so doing, to shape its ambitions. But, in the month since the election, a parallel argument has taken place in public between the Party’s most progressive elected officials and its moderates, who believe that the progressives’ embrace of activist slogans—particularly the call to defund the police—cost the Democrats seats in 2020 and might eventually cost them their House majority. The progressive faction is poor in numbers but rich in ideas and public profile, and the 2020 election neither strengthened their position within the Party nor wiped them out. The dispute over whether the progressives are too radical in their talk has settled into a stalemate, especially because there is no consensus on what “defund the police” means; Obama’s entry into the debate, characteristically caveated, didn’t break the impasse. But Obama and Ocasio-Cortez are the two politicians who in this century have managed to embody the qualities essential to the Democratic Party: youth and idealism, hope and change, the promise of a future different than the past. In elevating Ocasio-Cortez and gently criticizing her ideas, Obama opened up a different conversation—not just about the left and the center but about how a star politician ought to be, between one generational talent and another.

During the tumultuous past half decade—as conservatives contemplated authoritarianism, as Democrats reconsidered socialism, as liberalism generally faltered—Obama spent much of his time writing a book. Unlike his previous two books, his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” is mostly about the mature Obama (he is inaugurated as President a third of the way in) and about the evolution of the character who appeared on Peter Hamby’s Snapchat show, with his caution and good humor. The book’s first sections are the most interesting in terms of Obama’s account of his own character: a central theme is the tension that the future President felt, when he was around thirty, between “wanting to be in politics and not of it.” On an early date with Michelle, which takes place at an organizing workshop Obama is leading, she tells him that he is talking about a place between “the world as it is and the world as it should be.”

In Obama’s account, he had been snapped out of a self-serious post-undergraduate mode—lost in the abstraction of “the world as it should be”—by his encounters with working-class people on the South Side of Chicago, during his pre-law-school stint as an organizer. “I came to love the men and women I worked with: the single mom living on a ravaged block who somehow got all four children through college; the Irish priest who threw open the church doors every evening so that kids had an option other than gangs; the laid-off steelworker who went back to school to become a social worker,” he writes. “Their stories of hardship and their modest victories confirmed for me again and again the basic decency of people.” Chicago brings him out of his own head: “In other words, I grew up, and I got my sense of humor back.” Reading this passage, I doubted it a bit. Those characters are flat. They read as grist for stump speeches. They are rendered more than they are seen.

The people he does obviously love in this book, whom he takes the time to see in full, are the political professionals who work mostly for him. When he is feeling grouchy on the Presidential campaign trail in 2008, his spirits are restored by his body man, Reggie Love, who says that he’s “having the time of my life.” Obama admires his gruff, heavyset, flannel-clad Iowa field director, Paul Tewes, who has “the heart of the ten year old boy who cared enough, who believed enough, to cry over an election.” A couple of days before Osama bin Laden’s killing, he observes his devoted national-security adviser, Tom Donilon (a man who just returned to BlackRock rather than take a job as Biden’s C.I.A. director). Donilon, Obama writes, had “been trying to exercise more and lay off the caffeine but was apparently losing the battle. I’d come to marvel at Tom’s capacity for hard work, the myriad details he kept track of, the volume of memos and cables and data he had to consume, the number of snafus he fixed and the interagency tussles he resolved, all so that I could have both the information and the mental space I needed in order to my job.” The White House becomes an image of the country he’d like to see. Most people are not out for themselves. Everyone works so hard.

He loves them, and they love him back. When Obama decided to run for President, he had been in Washington for two years, almost exactly as long as Ocasio-Cortez has been there now. Nonetheless, in Obama’s account, he had the tacit support of many of the Party’s elders. He spoke to Harry Reid, who told him a story about a young boxer and said he should go for it: “You get people motivated, especially young people, minorities, even middle-of-the-road people. That’s different.” Obama also paid a visit to Ted Kennedy. (He recalls the avuncular senator rising “gingerly” from his seat.) Kennedy told Obama that he couldn’t endorse him early—“too many friends”—but, recalling his brothers, encouraged the younger senator to run nevertheless: “The power to inspire is rare. Moments like this are rare.” Once in office, whenever Obama feels stuck, he notices the ambition, dedication, and hope in the people around him, and becomes determined again. In Obama’s telling, external pressures—the Republicans, the press—always nudge him toward loneliness. The salve—in many ways, the theme of his story—is comradeship.

Who are Ocasio-Cortez’s comrades? If any leading senators are taking her aside to tell her that she represents the future of the Party, no one’s given any public hint of it. Among Democrats, she often seems nearly alone. The Squad, composed of Ocasio-Cortez and Representatives Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, project a sense of solidarity, but there are still just four of them. Trace Ocasio-Cortez’s public statements since her election and she makes her distance from the mainstream Democratic Party plain. When David Remnick asked Ocasio-Cortez, in 2019, whether she had a relationship with Nancy Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez replied, “Not particularly.” When New York magazine’s David Freedlander asked her earlier this year what she made of Joe Biden, Ocasio-Cortez said, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party.” There is a history of slights and incursions on both sides. In November, 2018, just after Ocasio-Cortez won, she participated in a sit-in of Pelosi’s office by the young climate activists of the Sunrise Movement; a month later, Politico reported that she had recruited a challenger to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the fifth-ranking Democrat in the House. As for Pelosi, at that time, she made a habit of dismissing the dreams of young progressives, referring to “their public whatever,” “the green dream or whatever they call it.” Last month, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times’ Astead Herndon that, during the first six months of her term, she was unsure whether she would even run for reëlection. “It’s the stress. It’s the violence,” she said. “I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere—they’re probably the same.”

The dispute between the moderates and progressives went on a long hiatus during the Presidential campaign, but the weeks since the election have made clear that it isn’t a matter of the past. On a House Democratic Caucus call in November, Representative Abigail Spanberger, a former C.I.A. case officer who was narrowly reëlected in a suburban Virginia district that voted for Trump in 2016, asked her colleagues to watch reels of attack ads run against moderate Democrats, to see the political consequences of allying with activists. In audio that leaked to the Washington Post, Spanberger said, “The No. 1 concern and thing that people brought to me in my district that I barely re-won was defunding the police. And I’ve heard from colleagues who have said, ‘Oh, it’s the language of the street—we should respect that.’ We’re in Congress. We are professionals. We are supposed to talk about things in the way where we mean what we’re talking about.” Ocasio-Cortez’s response was that the Democrats’ failures were not ideological but tactical; she blamed a lack of digital-ad spending and the Party’s abandonment of door-knocking during the coronavirus pandemic. But the details of the argument appeared less important than how eager both sides seemed to be to engage in it again. A few days later, four progressive groups—New Deal Strategies, the Sunrise Movement, the Justice Democrats, and Data for Progress—produced a memo supporting Ocasio-Cortez’s contentions. These have been Ocasio-Cortez’s comrades: not the Democrats but the activists.

A paradox of Ocasio-Cortez’s position is that her skills are not activist skills but mainstream ones. She delivers highly polished speeches. She finds connections between niche political news and the lives of working people. She can conjure a news cycle out of thin air—and then win it. An early risk in Ocasio-Cortez’s Washington career was that she would be seen strictly as an ingénue, but she turned her committee hearings into platforms to showcase her careful study of policy and incisive questioning. It isn’t news to her allies that her base is not big enough, and in the past two years they have taken steps to build it—to broaden her appeal without moderating her. In July, after Representative Ted Yoho, a Republican of Florida, called her a “fucking bitch” in earshot of reporters, Ocasio-Cortez delivered a remarkable speech expressing frustration on behalf of all women, because “all of us have had to deal with this in some form, some way, some shape, at some point in our lives.” Not long after, Ocasio-Cortez sat for a long cover interview with Vanity Fair, which focussed on her upbringing, her personal life, and the daily indignities that a working person must endure.

The line of scrimmage between progressives and the established Democratic Party has not moved much since Bernie Sanders’s first Presidential campaign, five years ago. For all the talk of generational revolution, the Party is run by more or less exactly the same people. What has changed is that the Democratic establishment has embraced policy changes that it would have shunned a decade ago. Having won the primary as the most moderate figure onstage, Biden adopted a much more progressive agenda in the general election. Biden’s platform proposes raising three trillion dollars in revenue during the next ten years, almost entirely by taxing the wealthy and corporations. He plans to spend two trillion dollars on climate transformation during his first term, forty per cent of it targeted to help disadvantaged communities. Like nearly all Democrats, Biden now supports a fifteen-dollar-per-hour minimum wage, a key part of Sanders’s platform in 2016, and like much of the Party he supports a public option for health insurance. There isn’t such an obvious place for Ocasio-Cortez in the Democratic effort right now; it is trying to persuade voters that an expansive agenda is actually pragmatic and common sense, while she is trying to emphasize what is revolutionary.

What were Obama’s and Spanberger’s arguments with Ocasio-Cortez about, anyway? Mostly, language. Neither has emphasized policy differences with the progressives; they were talking about talk. In their interview, Obama told Hamby that Ocasio-Cortez and Biden shared a desire for broad action on climate change, and implied that they were divided only by how to talk about it: “If you want to move people, they are moved by stories that connect with their own lives. They’re not moved by ideology.” This tendency to police language is part of what has always grated on the left about Obama. But it is also a sign of a winning hand. The paradox of Ocasio-Cortez’s position right now is that she isn’t isolated politically because she is losing. She is isolated politically because, on more substantive matters than it is in anyone’s interest to admit, she has already won.