AOC’s Ignorance Is No Laughing Matter

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Over the past week or so, many on the political Right have understandably enjoyed a laugh or two at the expense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.). AOC went to the Munich Security Conference to provide “balance” to the Trump administration’s presence and to burnish her own credentials on the global stage. Instead, she mostly just made a fool of herself. Not only did she stutter, stammer, and offer a Kamala Harris-esque non-answer when asked about American interests in and obligations to Taiwan, but she also demonstrated a comically poor grasp of geography and a righteously ignorant understanding of history. In an effort to rebut and embarrass U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, AOC embarrassed only herself, showing that historical facts mean far less to her than identity-inspired fiction.

But while it’s inarguably fun to chuckle at and mock the ignorance of the smug congresswoman and presumed presidential aspirant, it is also important to acknowledge that her historical and political illiteracy extends beyond the superficial and touches on matters of real and critical importance. Notably, this purported champion of the working class does not know the history of working-class politics, does not understand the reasons for the collapse of the working-class-centered ideology, and, as a result, has never contemplated the dangers inherent in attempting to resuscitate that failed doctrine.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has long emphasized her biography and working-class roots to enhance her political status—and justifiably so. Her childhood may not have been quite the struggle she pretends it was, but she nevertheless endured economic hardships—especially after her father’s death—and was unable to find employment commensurate with her education. She was, famously, a bartender and a cocktail waitress before her election to Congress and, as a result, has long fashioned herself a champion of the working class and its purported priorities.

Indeed, on her trip to Munich, AOC emphasized her affinity with the working class and admonished democratic nations to erect a bulwark against totalitarianism by focusing on workers, workers’ rights, and worker-centered politics. “It is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class,” the congresswoman said, “or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.” She railed against large corporations and especially billionaires, insisting that they had to be stopped from “throwing their weight around” in domestic and international politics. In short, the good congresswoman used her trip to Munich to urge the workers of the world to unite, because, as she sees it, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

There’s only one little problem with AOC’s exhortation: it’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s been tried . . . and tried . . . and tried. It doesn’t work. And when I say that, I don’t mean that socialism doesn’t work or that communism has been tried countless times before and failed every time. That much is obvious by now. Rather, what I mean is that the workers of the world don’t care about the rest of the workers of the world. They don’t like the idea of being divided into classes, and they don’t have any particular affection for their fellow laborers. They don’t dislike other workers necessarily, but they don’t see themselves as a monolithic federation sharing the same interests, needs, or political predilections. Truth be told—and this is the key to understanding the silliness of the whole “global proletariat” nonsense—even the Marxists long ago gave up on uniting the workers of the world. In fact, in the United States, the most prominent Marxist theorists actually gave up on workers altogether as allies in the fight against capitalism.

One of the most pervasive bits of common knowledge about World War I is the idea that the ruling classes of Europe did not expect it to last very long or to be particularly destructive. Kaiser Wilhelm infamously predicted that Germany’s troops would be home “before the leaves fall.” What is less well known is that this “short-war illusion” was shared and embraced even more unequivocally by the era’s Marxist agitators. They believed, as Engels in particular predicted, in the inevitability of a “new man,” who would evolve from the working classes and would never harm his fellow new men. Just two years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Manifesto of the Second International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912 declared that war between working men was a virtual impossibility:

It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.

Of course, things didn’t exactly go as planned—either for the ruling classes or the Marxists. World War I did many things to Europe, most of them awful and ugly and demoralizing. It did many of the same things to Marxism. Although the war did incite revolution in Russia, that was far less than the Marxists had hoped for. Russia’s revolution was led by the educated classes and animated by peasants. Proletarian “workers” were largely non-existent. In the industrialized parts of Europe, workers flat out rejected appeals to class unity, choosing instead to fight for God and country. German workers saw themselves not as workers but as Germans. French workers saw themselves not as workers but as Frenchmen. And so it went.

In the aftermath of the war, Marxists were forced to confront two massive and related problems: the workers’ refusal to unite and the rise of profound and entrenched nihilism. In order to save their ideology, these Marxists had to revise it and explain its failures. As any schoolboy knows, they did so by concluding that the workers of the world did not understand their own interests or even their own natures. Workers were dissociated from their interests by the institutions of society, especially the institutions of cultural transmission: the Church, the schools, the media, art, entertainment, and so on. Therefore, to enable workers to see their real interests, those institutions had to be taken over, destroyed, and rebuilt along ideological lines. And thus began the Gramsci, Lukács, and Frankfurt School-led “long march through the institutions,” which largely killed economic Marxist theory, creating what we know today as “cultural Marxism.”

In 1964, Herbert Marcuse—a latecomer to the Frankfurt School who became America’s most prominent Marxist theorist—essentially gave up on the workers as the stimulators of revolution. As I have noted before in these pages, “Marcuse conceded that the capitalist system was simply too good at providing goods and services that made the masses comfortable and happy. It therefore deprived them of ever knowing or caring about their true oppressed consciousness. Workers had become one-dimensional consumers, distracted from their fate by their egos and the creature comforts of capitalism.” In turn, Marcuse laid the foundations for “identity politics,” which would, he believed, enable the rise of a new revolutionary class, motivated by new perceptions of oppression.

Long story short (if that’s possible any longer), over the course of the last century, Marxists gave up on workers and even on economics, deciding instead to focus on culture and identity-based grievances.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t appear to know any of this, of course, which means that she also doesn’t know that appeals to working-class unity have tended to end in tragedy, followed by massive, civilization-destroying revisionism. Most notably, because she doesn’t know that revisionism was necessary in Marxism, she also doesn’t know that the other stream of post-World-War-I Marxist revisionism ran through Rome and Berlin and resulted in authoritarianism on a scale previously unimagined.

AOC’s ignorance isn’t just about cowboys, in other words. It’s also about the greatest and most profound tragedies in world history. Her ignorance is dangerous.