The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy by Anand Giridharadas

Author:Anand Giridharadas [Giridharadas, Anand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

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A few weeks later, Ocasio-Cortez was at Harvard for an orientation the university organizes for new members of Congress. Many Americans had probably never heard of this peculiar ritual of new members going to a private university to learn how to do their jobs—until that year, that is.

What changed that year was the arrival of Ocasio-Cortez, who showed up for orientation and was incapable of overlooking what so many new members before her had abided. “Was this a multi-decade, pro-corporate lobbyist project the entire time?” she tweeted in the middle of the orientation, sharing glimpses of what was being presented to the members and who was presenting it. She criticized the organizers for bringing in bankers and lobbyists to make presentations while leaving out representatives of labor. She criticized hearing about how great the recent Trump tax cuts were and how bad a $15 minimum wage would be. And, again, she couldn’t have been the first person to chafe at some of this. But she was pretty much the first person to call it out in the way she did, not taking her hosts aside, not suggesting some changes for next year, but blasting to hundreds of thousands of people that her own institution, her very own teammates, had been corrupted.

I asked Ocasio-Cortez how she had thought about—to use her word—her “posture” in these early moments. How strategic or spontaneous was the political style that was gelling?

“I think part of it was I was so tied to why my constituents sent me here,” she told me. “At that point, I wasn’t a member of Congress. I was, like, a waitress.” And, working in the restaurant, she remembered all the conversations she had with customers and co-workers speculating about what they would do if any of them ever got into the rooms where things happened, if they ever came up close with the powers that be. The Harvard orientation, she told me, “was like one of these insane situations that people talk about at the bar all the time: ‘I wish I was in that room. I wonder what it’s like. What are these people thinking when they see these things?’

“All of a sudden, in a matter of three months, I went from behind the bar to walking straight into this room with all of these people—like, ‘Holy shit, this hypothetical situation is real.’ ” And the bar banter came back to her, even haunted her: “All these people talking shit at the bar, like, ‘What would you do, man? Would you say something? Would you just kind of duck out?’ People are like, ‘No, man, I would say something. I would say—.’ ” And a fellow banterer would inevitably hit back, skeptical: “Oh, yeah, would you?” Out of all the people at that bar on those nights, she had somehow been chosen and teleported into the hypothetical. And the question could no longer be theoretical: If faced with bullshit, would you say something? Would you?

So there she was at Harvard. The CEO of Goldman Sachs was over here.

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