In una lunga intervista condotta da David Remnick e pubblicata sul New Yorker, la deputata democratica Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez riflette sulla vita a Capitol Hill, sul suo rapporto coi Repubblicani e su tutti quegli aspetti prettamente politici rivelatori della fragilità e incompiutezza della democrazia negli Stati Uniti.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat representing parts of Queens and the Bronx (including Rikers Island), quickly became the most prominent progressive voice in the House of Representatives after she defeated a twenty-year incumbent, Joe Crowley, and went to Capitol Hill in January, 2019. In Congress, she is hardly alone in her advocacy for issues ranging from Medicare for All to the Green New Deal; she belongs to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Party. But few in the history of the institution have so quickly become a focus of attention, admiration, and derision.

Elected when she was twenty-nine, the youngest woman ever to serve in the House, Ocasio-Cortez has proved herself an effective examiner in committee hearings and a master of social media. In other words, she offers both substance and flair, and this combination seems to drive her critics to the point of frenzied distraction. Fox News, the Post, and the Daily Mail, along with a collection of right-wing Republican foes in Congress, obsess over her left-wing politics and her celebrity. In November, Paul Gosar, a Republican representative from Arizona who has spoken up for white-nationalist leaders and voted against awarding the Congressional Gold Medal to police officers who defended the Capitol on January 6, 2021, posted an anime sequence that depicted him killing Ocasio-Cortez with a sword. More recently, a former Trump campaign adviser, Steve Cortes, went online to mock Ocasio-Cortez’s boyfriend, Riley Roberts, for his sandalled feet, prompting her to fire back, “If Republicans are mad they can’t date me they can just say that instead of projecting their frustrations onto my boyfriend’s feet. Ya creepy weirdos.”

L’intervista tocca anche altri temi: la politica interna, il rapporto col resto del Partito Democratico e con la Presidente della Camera Nancy Pelosi, la sua piattaforma politica, il suo utilizzo dei social media e della celebrità acquisita negli ultimi anni.

Do you worry sometimes that you take the bait too much or poke the bear in a way that might not be, in retrospect, something you should’ve done? Like, for example, the Met Gala, the “Tax the Rich” dress, or your response to the really weird tweet about your boyfriend’s feet?

All the time. Every day you make decisions, and you have to make decisions about whether it’s a good idea to go after this or if it’s a bad idea to go after it. Sometimes you make good decisions. Sometimes you make less-than-optimal ones. And then you reflect on them and you try to kind of sharpen your steel.

What were the less-than-optimal ones?

Everything has a different goal, right? And so, if you’re at home on Twitter, or if you’re at home on TV, there are some things that are not for you. There are some things I do that you don’t like that are not intended for you to like, such as what happened with the Met Gala. There are a lot of folks who did not like that. There were some “principled leftists” who didn’t like that. But, when you look at my community, it’s not a college town, a socialist, leftist, academic community. It’s a working-class community that I’m able to engage in a collective conversation about our principles. And, honestly, there’s a response to that in some circles online that may be negative, but in my community the response was quite positive.