In the summer of 2018, almost no one thought Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could beat Joe Crowley. Crowley was a 10-term incumbent, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, a man some thought would one day be speaker. A 28-year-old former bartender and democratic socialist was the longest of long shots to succeed him. But ever since she did, the political establishment has been trying to decide whether to take her seriously.

For a while it decided not to. The Missouri representative Emanuel Cleaver said the Democratic caucus did not need her “sniping”, while the then senator Claire McCaskill dismissed her as a “bright and shiny new object”. Ocasio-Cortez seemed to enjoy the response. Asked on 60 Minutes whether she wanted people to underestimate her, she said: “Absolutely. That’s how I won my primary.”

American socialism has produced dazzling individuals before. A little more than a century ago, Eugene Debs won nearly a million votes for president, while his socialist party sent Victor Berger to Congress, elected more than a thousand of its members to office and ran city halls from Schenectady to Milwaukee. Then it was gone, broken by wartime repression and its own splits, and eventually absorbed into a New Deal coalition that adopted parts of its program while denying it an independent political role. At best, it has been honored as a tradition of noble campaigners, a moral compass for the country rather than a contender for power. As Senator Ted Kennedy said of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) founder after his death in 1989: “Michael Harrington never believed that we could not do better and never stopped urging us to try harder.”

Ocasio-Cortez never seemed content to be solely a voice of conscience, however. On Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, she made herself the most visible defender of the Berniecrat program and built a mass following among young Americans. In parts of Europe, the anger of a downwardly mobile generation hardened into support for the populist right. In the United States, Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez won a good part of that generation for the left instead.

Some of the people who once formed the base of the left had split their tickets or stayed home, and she was one of the Democrats willing to walk toward them instead of writing them off

A majority of Americans under 35 and of Democrats........

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