Ocasio-Cortez, at SXSW, blasts FDR, Reagan and capitalism, says political moderates are ‘meh’

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U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez slammed political moderates at the South by Southwest Conference & Festivals in Austin, Texas, calling their views “misplaced” as she defended her progressive politics in a room full of supporters.

“Moderate is not a stance. It’s just an attitude towards life of, like, ‘meh,’” the New York Democrat said Saturday during an interview with Briahna Gray, senior politics editor for the Intercept. “We’ve become so cynical, that we view ‘meh,’ or ‘eh’ — we view cynicism as an intellectually superior attitude, and we view ambition as youthful naivete when … the greatest things we have ever accomplished as a society have been ambitious acts of visions, and the ‘meh’ is just worshipped now, for what?”

The self-declared Democratic socialist also criticized the treatment of minorities throughout American history, from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, which she claimed was racist, to Ronald Reagan’s policies, which she said “pitted” white working class people against minorities in order “to screw over all working-class Americans,” particularly African-Americans and Hispanics.

“So you think about this image of welfare queens and what he was really trying to talk about was … this like really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were ‘sucks’ on our country,” she said.

“So you think about this image of welfare queens and what [Reagan] was really trying to talk about was … this like really resentful vision of essentially black women who were doing nothing, that were ‘sucks’ on our country.”— U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

“And it’s this whole tragedy of the commons type of thinking where it’s like because … this one specific group of people, that you are already kind of subconsciously primed to resent, you give them a different reason that’s not explicit racism but still rooted in a racist caricature,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “It gives people a logical reason, a ‘logical’ reason to say, ‘Oh yeah, no, toss out the whole social safety net.'”

CAPITOL GRAPPLES WITH COMPLICATED HISTORY ON RACE

Other topics Ocasio-Cortez discussed included the Green New Deal and capitalism, which she said could not be redeemed because it puts profit “above everything else.” – MORE

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