AOC Cracks it Open

When AOC beat Queens political boss Joe Crowley in last year Congressional Democratic primary, the national media took note. Wow! they said. A young Latina newcomer beat a massively powerful 20-year incumbent! She's more progressive than he is! Younger than he is! Browner than he is! A much more telegenic and better social media communicator than he is! 

All true. But that's not what, here in NYC, was most notable about her victory.

As this article notes, as international and dynamic and exciting as NYC is, it's political culture is "sclerotic." It's old-fashioned, boring, extremely hierarchical and quite small-D "un-democratic", a legacy of Tammany Hall. Politicians in NYC are expected to start their careers as staffers and operatives, working their way up the ladder precinct by precinct, clubhouse by clubhouse, lousy political and government job after lousy political and government job, hoping and waiting to be "next in line" when, eventually some Assembly member, State Senator, or Congressperson retires -- or dies, or gets indicted -- and machine bosses like Crowley handpick them to run in same districts.

That's why, quite frankly, there are lots of mediocrities in elected office.

The political world in NYC is a closed-world and insular -- and its devilishly hard to crack-open. Machine-picked candidates almost always win because they can either kick outsider candidates off the ballot with petition challenges, bribe them off the ballot with jobs or promises of future office, or resort to smear campaigns and blackmail. Often it's just a case of the candidates leaving office endorsing the machine-picked candidates, sending all kinds of mailers and flyers showing the aging outgoing office holder smiling with and shaking the hand of his or her chosen replacement -- and the message to voters is clear, and the so the machine-backed transition to power is completed.

It's neat, orderly, organized, controlled -- everything that democracy, in its purest form, is not supposed to be. 

AOC busted that. She didn't wait her turn, didn't work in the weeds of the NYC political culture, and challenged not only an incumbent but also one of the most powerful in NYC. And she won. Big time, becoming an international political star. 

And it's made her lots of enemies.

Not just amongst Republicans who, naturally hate her politics, her gender, and her ethnicity. AOC's victory also enraged lots of local Democrats, people who have been playing by the rules, working and waiting their turn so that maybe, just maybe, some day down the line, they might become an Assembly-member -- and here's this much younger, complete outsider who took on the machine, beat it, and is now member of Congress. It's gotta sting.

In next year's Congressional primaries, all over NYC, there will be lots of AOC-inspired challengers to incumbents. It'll be interesting to see if she's really created a groundswell, a movement, to crack open the sclerotic political system in NYC -- or if she was just a big, notable exception.