Mindful
Diamond Member
- Banned
- #1
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez might just be the first-ever virtual politician. The first politician who derives her political authority, and considerable fame, less from a social constituency than from the sycophancy of the Twittersphere. The first politician whose public standing comes mainly from the clicks and likes of the now globalised chattering class. The first politician whose voters – 110,318 in her case – count for less than the patronage she enjoys from the celebrity elite, wealthy liberals, and the strange, fawning online culture of the 21st century in which people like her are ‘kweens’ and in which her every utterance ‘is everything’. The virtual forelock-tugging she enjoys puts to shame the obsequiousness of the royal courts of old.
The extent to which Ocasio-Cortez is a virtual phenomenon more than a political one, a leftish phantasm for an army of disconnected individuals alarmed and bamboozled by the era of Trump and Brexit, was brilliantly captured in the Twitterstorm over her dancing. In the next 11-and-a-half months of 2019 it will be amazing if there is a Twitterstorm as confected and cynical as this one. It started when a Twitter account, since deleted, posted a clip of Ocasio-Cortez dancing when she was a student at Boston University. This is proof she is a ‘nitwit’, the tweeter said.
The female Justin Trudeau
The extent to which Ocasio-Cortez is a virtual phenomenon more than a political one, a leftish phantasm for an army of disconnected individuals alarmed and bamboozled by the era of Trump and Brexit, was brilliantly captured in the Twitterstorm over her dancing. In the next 11-and-a-half months of 2019 it will be amazing if there is a Twitterstorm as confected and cynical as this one. It started when a Twitter account, since deleted, posted a clip of Ocasio-Cortez dancing when she was a student at Boston University. This is proof she is a ‘nitwit’, the tweeter said.
The female Justin Trudeau
