AOC Boosts Jill Stein by Attacking Her

Howie Hawkins

Posted September 9, 2024

IN A SPRING 2021 interview with Democratic Left, the magazine of Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was asked, “Some on the Left have looked at Biden’s record and his difference with the Bernie (Sanders) wing of the party, and they conclude that no progress is going to come out of the Biden administration. What’s your view?”

In her response, AOC criticized “bad faith critique” by some on the Left: “Well, I think it’s a really privileged critique. We’re gonna have to focus on solidarity with one another, developing our senses for good faith critique and bad faith critique. Because bad faith critique can destroy everything that we have built so swiftly. And we know this because it has in the past, and it’s taken us so many decades to get to this point. We do not have the time or the luxury to entertain bad faith actors in our movement… We’re so susceptible to cynicism. And that cynicism, that weaponization of cynicism, is what has and what continues to threaten to tear down everything that we have spent so much time building up.”

AOC ignored her own advice in an Instagram rant attacking Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein. Slouching back on her couch in a disrespectful pose for a serious topic, AOC went on an arrogant and ignorant “bad faith critique” of Jill Stein and the Green Party. Saying she was not directing her remarks to those who were thinking of voting for Stein (but, of course, she was), AOC lectured at Stein, saying “You’re not serious,” “not authentic,” and “predatory.”

AOC asserted a litany of falsehoods about Jill Stein, the Green Party, and her own supposed experience as a “third party candidate,” which we will fact-check below. If AOC was trying to persuade people sitting on the fence between Harris and Stein, her negative diatribe probably pushed most over to Stein’s side.

AOC is known for her effective use of social media. She has 13.2 million followers on X/Twitter and 8.1 million followers on Instagram. A January 2021 teach-in streamed on the gamer platform Twitch.tv drew a quarter of a million viewers.

But in this case, AOC handed Stein as much mass media coverage as she has had all campaign, rivaling only the coverage of her arrest at a pro-Palestinian encampment at Washington University in St. Louis last April. And more than just coverage, she gave Stein a platform to respond.

The coverage with Stein’s responses has appeared in articles in USA Today, Time, Newsweek, The Hill, NY Daily News, and more, including the high-traffic Daily Dot, whose beat is internet culture and life online.

I don’t know if AOC’s September 1 attack on Jill Stein was coordinated with the Kamala Harris campaign or any other part of the Democratic Party machine, but the next day, September 2, the Democratic National Committee issued a statement calling Stein “a useful idiot for Russia.” The Bulwark reported on September 3 that “After ten months of almost completely ignoring Jill Stein’s impossibly long-shot presidential bill, the Democratic Party is now actively trying to bury her.”

That is good news for the Stein campaign. Getting any kind of mass media coverage is a huge hurdle for Green Party presidential candidates. It is better to be attacked and respond than to be ignored. The Democrats may now become Stein’s biggest publicists. More voters are now going to hear about Jill Stein, as the Democrats give her opportunities to respond to attacks and advance her positive policy platform, from ending U.S. arms for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza to Medicare for All and the Ecosocialist Green New Deal. Voters are repelled by negative campaigning. Voters are more responsive to candidates who tell them what they stand for than in hearing from them what is wrong with their opponents.

AOC’s attack on Jill Stein was as based on “alternative facts” as a Trump tirade. She said “trust me on this, I run as a third party candidate in New York” with the Working Families Party. Of course, just about every Democrat like AOC runs in New York with the WFP as a second line in addition to the Democratic Party. That is world of difference from running as a real third party candidate against the Democrats and Republicans.

AOC added that “I’ve been on record about my criticisms of the two-party system.” But AOC doesn’t walk that talk. She did say in the New Yorker in January 2020 when she was supporting Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign about what her role as a member of the House would be under a Biden presidency, “Oh God, in any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party, but in America, we are.”

Responding to the commentary this remark generated, she tweeted: “Yeah, I don’t know why people are up in arms about this. Many other countries have multiparty democracies, where several parties come together in a coalition to govern. In another country, I’d be in a Labor Party like Jacinda Ardern [then prime minister of New Zealand].”

If AOC was really interested in creating an inclusive multiparty democracy, she would be cosponsoring and promoting the Fair Representation Act for proportional ranked choice voting to create proportional representation in Congress.

I wrote an article about this for the August 2022 issue of Ralph Nader’s Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper, which is hand-delivered to the offices of Representatives and Senators. The article challenged AOC to follow up on her words for multiparty democracy with action on that bill. It was titled “MIA on Ranked Choice Voting and Proportional Representation: AOC and the Progressive caucus punt on election reform.”

AOC is still not a cosponsor of the bill and has never, to my knowledge, advocated for it.

AOC has also been crickets on the 2020 New York bill that eliminated all third parties from New York’s ballots except the fusion parties that are satellites of the two major parties, the Working Families Party for the Democrats, and the Conservative Party for the Republicans. That bill more than tripled the vote needed to maintain a ballot line, tripled the signatures needed to put a candidate for Governor or President on the ballot to win enough votes to gain a ballot line for the next election cycle, and doubled the frequency with which these standards must be met from every four years to every two years.

As a result, in 2020 the Green and Libertarian parties that run their own candidates lost their ballot lines. Only the fusion parties, WFP and the Conservatives, retained their ballot lines by cross-endorsing Biden and Trump respectively.

In 2022, only the Democratic and Republican candidates appeared on the ballot for statewide offices — for the only time since 1890, when state-issued secret ballots were introduced.

In 2024, New York will be the only state where only the Democratic and Republican candidates for President will appear on the ballot. The ballot access requirement of 45,000 good signatures to be collected in just 42 days is the most difficult in the nation.

The prime movers behind New York’s 2020 ballot access exclusion law were the now disgraced Governor Andrew Cuomo and the still Democratic state party chair Jay Jacobs. Cuomo and Jacobs both said after the 2020 election that eliminating all but the Conservatives and WFP was their objective all along.

Jacobs claimed the goal was to eliminate the “transactional parties.” But the transactional parties are the fusion parties that cut quid pro quo deals with the major parties in return for their ballot lines. The Green Party runs its own candidates independently of both major parties.

My experience with AOC’s “third party,” the Working Families Party, is that they are more interested in defeating Greens than Republicans, if a Green might beat a Democrat. In my campaigns for city council in Syracuse in 2011 and 2013, in which I received 48 percent and 40 percent in contested races, WFP flooded my district in the last ten days with out-of-town paid canvassers to defeat me. There was no WFP organization in the district or the city.

Labor and socialist activists circulated a petition protesting WFP’s 2013 campaign against me in favor of a centrist Democrat. That became the topic of a discussion on Doug Henwood’s Facebook page the night before the election.

While I was at my job unloading trucks at UPS, WFP’s upstate political director Jesse Lenney wrote on Facebook that “a victory for Hawkins tomorrow would be worse for the progressive cause than any other victory for a Right Winger.” The day after the election, an analysis in the daily Syracuse Post-Standard noted that “the Working Families Party has shown it can parachute in to influence Syracuse elections.”

Asked why WFP focused solely on a Green vs. Democratic race to the neglect of several other close Democratic vs. Republican contests in the Syracuse metro area, Lenney said, “Paid canvassing is very expensive. We have to marshal our resources.” Apparently, it was a more important priority for WFP to defeat a left independent than Republicans.

AOC has no grounds for saying to trust her, that she’s a third party candidate. She runs on the same Democratic and WFP tickets with corporate Democrats like Andrew Cuomo, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.

AOC continued her screed by criticizing Stein as the “leader of her party” who only shows up every four years to run for president and doesn’t run down ballot candidates for city councils and state offices. “That’s bad leadership,” AOC said, “because if you have been your party’s nominee for 12 years in a row, four years ago and four years before that and four years before that and you cannot grow your movement pretty much at all and can’t pursue any successful strategy and all you do is show up every four years… you’re not serious… you’re not authentic… It reads to me as predatory.”

In these comments, AOC displays utter ignorance about the Green Party. I was the Green Party candidate for President four years ago in 2020, not Jill Stein. Green Party electoral activity is primarily at the local level. The Greens have won over 1,500 elections, all local except for five state legislators. 149 Greens currently hold elected office. In 2023, the Greens won 42 of 81 local races they entered for a 52 percent win rate. The Greens have elected more people to office than any independent party on the left since the Socialist Party of the early 20th century. The Greens are “serious” and “authentic.”

As for “predatory,” AOC should look in the mirror. She appropriated the Green New Deal as her signature issue from the Green Party, whose signature issue it has been since 2010. I ran for New York Governor on A Green New Deal for New York that year. By August, a statement calling for a federal Green New Deal was signed by scores of Green candidates across the country. The theme of Jill Stein’s 2012 and 2016 presidential campaigns was A Green New Deal for America.

We know that AOC got the Green New Deal slogan from the Greens. Her campaign manager in 2018, when she was first elected to the House, was Vigie Ramos, who the previous year had managed the campaign of a Green Party candidate for New York City Council, Jabari Brisport, who ran on a Green New Deal for New York City. AOC has never given any attribution to or contacted any of the Green Party’s Green New Dealers.

AOC took the slogan but diluted the content of the Green Party’s Green New Deal. The nonbinding resolution for a Green New Deal she introduced and still boasts about, although it went nowhere, eliminated the Greens’ call for a ban on fracking and all new fossil fuel infrastructure, for the phaseout of nuclear power as renewables come on line, and for deep cuts in military spending to help pay for the program. It extended the deadline for zero carbon emissions by 20 years to 2050 from 2030. And real zero emissions was reframed as “net zero emissions,” which is what the fossil fuel industry has lobbied for so they can continue to burn fossil fuels while promoting the unprofitably costly and hazardous process of carbon capture and sequestration.

Jon Rynn, Mark Dunlea, and I told the full back story to “Whatever Happened to the Green New Deal?” in CounterPunch in August 2020. In that article we explained the problems with the neoliberal market-based climate policies of the Democrats, whether or not they call them a Green New Deal. Because the Democrats appropriated, diluted, and neoliberalized their Green New Deal, the Green Party now calls for an Ecosocialist Green New Deal.

Stein posted her own video response to AOC. She criticized AOC for supporting Harris, who continues to support U.S. arms to Israel for its brutal obliteration of Gaza, for supporting the anti-democratic actions of the Democratic Party and its army of lawyers who are trying to remove Greens from the ballot with frivolous lawsuits and fraudulent misrepresentations, and for the predatory appropriation without attribution of a watered down Green New Deal.

AOC’s Instagram invective was mean-spirited gaslighting, not the “good faith critique” she has advocated. Progressives in the Democratic Party should recognize that independent challenges to Democrats from the independent left can strengthen their hand within the Democratic Party. Progressive Democrats have little power without an independent left.

If independent progressives are gaining votes and electing people because the Democrats refuse to adopt popular policies like curtailing arms to Israel’s pitiless assault on Gaza and Medicare for All, it gives progressives in the Democrats a stronger case for adopting such policies. Outside of election campaigns and once the results are in, there should be a way for independent Greens and other leftists to work in common cause with the progressives in the Democratic Party for policies we all support.

I have tried to push AOC with constructive criticism in another article in the February/March 2024 issue of Capitol Hill Citizen. The article made the case for why we need to go beyond Medicare for All as simply National Health Insurance, a payment system, to a fully socialized National Health Service that includes the delivery system. The late Ron Dellums sponsored a bill for a democratic worker and community controlled National Health Service between 1977 and 1997.

I noted that AOC had received an enthusiastic response at a 2019 rally in which she told veterans that the Medicare for All legislation would not change the Veterans Health Administration’s fully public healthcare delivery system. “If you ask me,” she said, “I would like VA for All.” So I concluded my article by saying AOC could take the first step in that direction by re-introducing the Dellums bill for a National Health Service. I do know that article was hand-delivered to AOC’s congressional office. I don’t know if it passed her staff’s screening into her hands.

If the other bill I urged AOC to support in Capitol Hill Citizen, the Fair Election Act for proportional representation in Congress, had passed, AOC would probably be more comfortable politically with the newly elected ecosocialist Greens than with the corporate neoliberal Democrats. The point here is that the independent left and progressive Democrats should not be saving their harshest criticisms for those closest to them on policy, whatever their differences on electoral approaches under the current winner-take-all system that generates the two-party duopoly.

The door is open from the Green side for a constructive relationship with progressive Democrats like AOC. The question is whether they are willing to walk through it.