On Monday at the MLK Now 2020 event, self-proclaimed Democrat Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said the Democrat Party is a “not a left party” but “center or center-conservative.”
“I wanted to go back to what you said about our left party,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We don’t have a left party in the United States. The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or a center-conservative party. We do not advocate for— we can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All, not even a floor vote, that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it,” she complained.
“So this is not a left party,” she added. “There are left members inside the Democratic Party that are working to try to make that shift happen.”
While it’s difficult to see today’s Democrat Party as “center-conservative” (the Republican Party itself is barely center-conservative), Ocasio-Cortez is correct that the Party is rife with young leftists like herself pushing to radicalize it even further.