Denny Carter: AOC Is The Ultimate ‘Bread And Butter’ Politician

By Denny Carter

In my role as a football analyst, the primary feedback I’ve gotten from people both inside and outside the Football Analyst Complex is to get off my laptop, sit down, and watch the damn tape. 

It is the tape, after all, that holds the answers to all my questions. It is the tape that will disabuse me of the ludicrous opinions I have formed about certain teams or players or coaches by poring over spreadsheets and divining meaning from disparate numbers and metrics and rates.

Well, now I’m asking folks, particularly conservatives and moderates, to watch the tape to better inform their claims that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – and Bernie Sanders, of course – is a far-left distraction for the Democratic Party and who believe that AOC and Sanders should be ignored by wise party elders who are betting everything on so-called popularism to deliver them from the wilderness of this fascist era in American politics. 

This idea that AOC is not at all interested in addressing issues that materially affect working Americans every day has become dogma in Beltway media circles and certain swaths of the Democratic Party base. She is widely depicted as the looniest of the loony left-wing radicals in Congress. 

Efforts to portray AOC as a dangerous, radicalized Other have ratcheted up in the past month following her astoundingly successful Fighting Oligarchy tour alongside Bernie and other progressives. These raucous rallies in bright red parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for the fascist candidate just six months ago were a veritable bonanza of good-faith economic populism that, year after year and election after election, proves incredibly popular with Americans. 

The Fighting Oligarchy tour must have broken through with people because the backlash has been so ferocious and unhinged, both from so-called centrist Democrats and, naturally, from an American right wing that knows their working-class cosplay nonsense is cooked if an actual populist becomes the face of the Democratic Party.

The Hill, a right-wing propaganda outlet that has long posed as a Very Serious and Objective observer of Washington politics, recently ran an AOC takedown from Douglass MacKinnon, a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. The issue with a smear piece like this is not that someone is going after a progressive politician, but that the writer’s argument is presented as a helpful guidepost for Democratic Party lawmakers, feigning concern for their plight and purportedly offering helpful hints and tips on how to take back power. MacKinnon, you are to believe, is merely concerned about the poor Democrats remaining in their political wilderness. He so clearly has your best interests at heart, which is why his primary suggestion is to pursue Trump’s agenda with a slightly kinder hand. 

MacKinnon, in the weeks after Trump’s 2024 victory, writes this: he “heard from several high-level Democratic operatives who shared essentially the same message: We are done being bullied into unpopular, losing positions by the far-left wing of our party. We will get back to our roots of looking after the working class, the poor and the disenfranchised, they said.  

Except they didn’t. Exactly the opposite.

Those who switched to Trump in 2024 did so for one reason: He was addressing the ‘bread and butter’ issues that were upending voters’ lives and threatening their futures.”

The bad faith in this opinion piece is about as subtle as a wrench to the eye socket. In no way did Trump run in 2024 – or 2016, for that matter – as a populist. He joined Elon Musk in promising to use any amount of political capital to pass tax breaks for billionaires and destroy the American economy for the benefit of its wealthiest citizens. 

Distinguishing good-faith populism from bad-faith populism is a task that mainstream media outlets have failed catastrophically over the past decade. They played his horrid little game from start to finish, and even though Americans saw that game for what it was in 2020, first-time voters in 2024 – zoomer dudes particularly – won the Fell For It Again Award and backed Trump because he had been pitched as a savior of the forgotten Working Man, which of course means different things to different people. 

Good-faith populism should expose the right’s bad-faith populist rantings. It does not for many reasons, not least of which is the all-knowing elders of the failed Democratic Party refusing to embrace wildly popular figures like AOC. 

She is, after all, seen as the face of the Democratic Party in these early days of our second dalliance with fascism, according to recent polling. That’s a petrifying poll result for the American right and for the feckless centrists, whose credo is and always has been that Better Things Aren’t Possible. 

Watching the Ocasio-Cortez tape would tell you this much: She is as disciplined as any elected official at sticking to economic populism that both deflects public anger from marginalized groups that are blamed for the Republican-induced economic horrors of the 21st century and re-directs that anger to a more appropriate source: The rich guys who profit off the broken backs of working people. 

AOC gets straight to the point: Your life is materially worse because of the obscenely wealthy who have installed their coiffed and well-dressed puppets into powerful positions in Washington. 

Everything AOC talks about is a masterclass in speaking to working Americans about “bread and butter” issues. Making healthcare a right, bolstering social safety net programs, using the force of government to make housing more affordable: Nothing could be more bread-and-butter than addressing these issues with real policies designed by folks with the public interest at heart. Yet she is widely considered to be uninterested in these basic needs and desires, while Trump – an oligarch’s oligarch – has been granted the sheen of a defender of everyday Americans just trying to get along. 

Watching the AOC speech tape further reveals a politician who characterizes the social safety net as a “promise” for a dignified life made between people and their government. 

Dignity is all that people really want. Beyond the giga-chad, muscle-bound grindset types on your Instagram feeds and beyond the crypto guys looking to pump and dump their way to a little wealth, there are everyday people who want nothing more than a decent life, one that maybe includes a treat once in a while, a vacation here and there, the luxury of not worrying about bankruptcy when they get sick or when they lose a job through no fault of their own. They want the dignity of a life without the crushing stress of survival in the richest nation in human history.

Oligarchs and their wretched little puppets – strings showing and all – would be stunned to learn how little everyday people actually want. The majority of people in the US aren’t pining for a communist wonderland of economic parity as so many on the right claim as a scare tactic. Folks are just hungry for a little dignity. AOC gets that, and it scares the hell out of power centers in both major parties.

Denny Carter is a writer and podcaster, a YouTube host, and the author of Bad Faith Times.