This weekend, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez revealed her contempt for the rich heritage of Western culture, and why the Right is correct to oppose her Marxist politics.
Speaking at the Technical University of Berlin on Sunday, AOC responded to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, and she chided him for attempting to build on a “thin” foundation.
“Marco Rubio’s speech was a pure appeal to Western culture,” Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, noted.
She said it’s “important to note how thin that foundation is.”
“Culture always changes,” AOC argued. “Culture, for the entire history of human civilization, has been a fluid, evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in.”
“They want to take this mantle of culture… at the end of the day though… it is very thin, and so, the response that we have to have is, again, it’s material, it’s class-based, it’s common interest,” she said.
The Marxist Critique
Marxist theory teaches that the true causes of politics are economic, and AOC’s speech repeatedly returned to this theme.
“When you have economic stagnation for the working class, that, especially in an environment where GDP is growing, that is the stuff of populist movements, period,” she argued. AOC drew a distinction between what she sees as the negative populism of the Right and the “truth-telling” populism of the Left.
“One direction is we are going to blame this on the vulnerable in society, on immigrants, on people of different gender identities, on a cultural or the educated, in an anti-intellectualist movement,” she said.
AOC condemned such an approach as a “distraction from the truth, which is that economic elites are taking the lion’s share of growth for themselves and leaving crumbs for the working class.”
“That story is not a cultural one but a class one,” she argued.
She claimed that the “economic power establishment in the United States” seeks “to use cultural issues as a division.”
Yet AOC did not even hint at a willingness to cede any cultural territory.
She suggested that illegal immigration is a scapegoat issue, despite the millions of illegal aliens who entered the country under former President Joe Biden, and the Democrats who asked Biden for help as illegals overwhelmed their cities.
She suggested that opposition to transgender orthodoxy was a scapegoat issue, when Americans overwhelmingly oppose men in women’s restrooms, transgender surgery for minors, and gender identity lessons in schools.
Perhaps most tellingly, she framed conservative populism as an “anti-intellectualist movement.”
What AOC Seems Not to Understand
As a proud graduate of Hillsdale College and a former student of Victor Davis Hanson, I can tell you that the conservative movement’s increasingly populist edge is the furthest thing from anti-intellectual.
Yes, conservative populists questioned the authority of so-called “experts” pushing the “scientific consensus” on COVID-19, climate change, and transgender orthodoxy, but we didn’t do so because we oppose learning.
Contrary to AOC’s suggestion, the Western heritage is rich, and Hillsdale trains us to learn it, internalize it, and defend it.
At Hillsdale, I read the roots of ancient philosophy, from the Code of Hammurabi to the wisdom of Job; from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics; from the arguments of Thomas Aquinas to the insights of Adam Smith.
We studied the birth of modern science, from the politics of Galileo to the discoveries of Johannes Kepler. We delved into Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Blaise Pascal—and read how their faith inspired them to learn the secrets of the universe.
We delved into Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. We read the Federalist Papers, which represent an astonishingly brilliant analysis of political history, coupled with a powerful case for a muscular but still very limited government in America after the Articles of Confederation. We wrestled with history, reading the primary sources in the lead-up to the Civil War and dissecting the arguments for the early Progressive movement.
This is the culture AOC dismisses as “thin” and untrustworthy.
AOC isn’t wrong that conservative populism also comes from a sense that the elites have weakened the prospects of the middle class, but she’s entirely off base to suggest that Western culture isn’t under attack.
The new “Woke” movement combines critical race theory (the view that America is institutionally racist and requires fundamental change) with transgender orthodoxy, the view that humans are causing catastrophic climate change, and a faith in technocratic elites.
This they defend as “democracy,” and demonize those who disagree.
This movement directly threatens the West’s rich heritage by suggesting that it is rooted in “oppression” and must be torn down.
Recent events repeatedly undermine AOC’s trite platitudes that none of the Left’s “vulnerable” populations can do any harm. Yesterday, a man who identified as transgender opened fire at a high school hockey game. Somalis have perpetrated massive fraud in Minnesota. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security exposes the horrific crimes that illegal aliens committed before and after coming to the United States.
Conservative populism exists for a reason, and it’s not something AOC can dismiss as bigoted xenophobia. Americans oppose the Woke revolution not because we hate anyone, but because we love our good heritage—and we’re sick and tired of having people like AOC demonize it.
