Adrift, Broke, and Disillusioned

How a struggling bartender became the face of a resurgent left.

- By Lisa Miller. Photography by Jose A. Alvarado Jr.

Even her haters call her a “generational talent,” a disparagement candy-wrapped as a compliment, the implication being that the astonishing rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was somehow encoded in her DNA. Frame a thing as expected and it can be discounted. But rewind five years and it becomes clear just how unprecedented her rise has been. “Women like me aren’t supposed to run for office,” she said at the start of her journey to Washington. She was only stating facts. Months before AOC became the new face of the Democratic Party, she was working in a bar where she was expected to look “hot,” riding the 6 train, fretting about health insurance, and not really sure what she wanted to do with her life.

Her victory on June 26, 2018, over her mainstream Democratic opponent, Joe Crowley, was a marker delineating the moment after which American politics would never be the same. It established AOC’s prodigious political gifts while showcasing a new sort of Democratic candidate and a new way of recruiting them. Barack Obama, previous holder of the “generational talent” title, may have resembled Ocasio-Cortez in some ways. Brown-skinned, good looking, with his own misadventures in the postcollegiate wilderness, he challenged political convention even as he titillated its guardians. But he had a résumé—the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review, constitutional-law professor at the University of Chicago—that the Democratic-consultant class could easily recognize and safely admire. The Establishment didn’t know what to make of AOC. As she put it in an interview then, “If a spaceship landed in your backyard, it’s like, ‘What the fuck is that? Is it going to hurt me?’”