AOC Bravely Encourages us to use Healthcare we Don't Have Access to...
...without calling out by name her party leaders who are opposed to us ever having it
Perhaps it is cynicism, maybe it is privileged lack of self-awareness, or perhaps it’s either depending on the day and topic. In any case, the world’s elite - even those who take on the affect of populism - sure are tone-deaf a lot of the times.
One of the United State’s most famous and popular elected officials, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, recently spoke up and out about mental health and access to mental healthcare. As she often does, Ocasio-Cortez used compassionate, populist and democratic rhetoric.
The problem wasn’t in anything she said, but rather in what she didn’t say. Ocasio-Cortez recently discussed that she goes to therapy.
That’s fantastic - both that she gets to take advantage of counseling, and that she speaks openly about it because it might help de-stigmatize therapy. Then, the congresswoman said that she and other Congress members who were in the Capitol on Jan. 6 during the President Trump-inspired stupid self-coup attempt had effectively “served in a war.”
That wasn’t quite so fantastic. In fact, it is insulting to both the Americans and people of foreign countries who Ocasio-Cortez and her colleagues place in real war scenarios.
I have no doubt that Ocasio-Cortez was scared on Jan. 6th. That’s probably a great topic for her and her therapist to discuss.
But, no, she and her wealthy, powerful colleagues did not serve in a war just because they were scared for a few hours. That level of trauma is likely known by, for example, the Venezuelan people upon who the United States - with not just Trump’s backing but also with support from Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, and their party’s leadership - attempted a military coup recently.
If Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t like being traumatized by coup-attempts, she might consider the victims of the ones she supports in other nations. That was cringe-worthy enough but Ocasio-Cortez later followed-up by calling for all Americans to have access to mental health resources and care.
Again, that’s good. It’s a basic, not particularly impressive thing to say, but it’s good. “Mental healthcare is healthcare,” she wrote on social media.
“It should be guaranteed as a right along with dental and vision. If you get a bad cut you go to a doctor to heal it faster and healthier. Same goes here. If I could prescribe it to other members, I would.”
Ocasio-Cortez, of course, cannot prescribe therapy to her colleagues. She can, however, call out the leaders of her party - the party in control of the federal government - for opposing universal healthcare.
Neither therapy, nor dental nor vision care, nor any doctor visits of any kind are guaranteed to all Americans. We stand nearly alone in the developed world in not offering some form of universal healthcare to all our citizens.
Ocasio-Cortez gets a lot of mileage out of calling - generically - for universal healthcare for all Americans but she hardly ever calls out her own party leadership for opposing it. She demonizes her Republican colleagues for opposing universal healthcare but is largely silent when it matters on her own party being just as opposed to us having healthcare.
Ocasio-Cortez’s call for universal healthcare is similar to liberals’ calls for “generic peace” in Palestine. Both call for objective, popular good things, while not calling out by name the people and powers who actually make those good objectives impossible.
Ocasio-Cortez’s friend, her “mama-bear” Nancy Pelosi - the Speaker of the House of Representatives - still opposes universal healthcare. The Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer opposes it.
President Biden, who Ocasio-Cortez has gone out of her way to praise as having exceeded expectations thus far in his term, opposes universal healthcare. While it might be a nice sentiment from Ocasio-Cortez that she wishes all of us had the same healthcare resources that she does, it’s insulting and indefensible that she sides with and supports the very leaders of her own party who fight to make sure that we don’t get that healthcare.
Ocasio-Cortez could be believed as a good-faith advocate of universal healthcare if, let’s say, she said something like she did above but added onto it real fighting words. “Mental healthcare is healthcare, and all people deserve it as a right along with every other type of healthcare. My colleagues and I are fortunate to have some of the best healthcare in the world, and it is a travesty that our constituents don’t also receive it. We have the money to make this happen, and now that Democrats control the federal government it is high-time that our leaders, people like President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer end their opposition to universal healthcare and make it a reality for all Americans.”
Instead, Ocasio-Cortez centers herself in broadly encouraging people to use a type of care that most of us simply don’t have access to. Then, she ends with a winking tease at her colleagues, insinuating that they need mental healthcare.
Politicians like Ocasio-Cortez centering their own lives and experiences is only useful to her constituents if she uses it as a discussion starting point to demand and do better for them. All too often politicians like her use the language of inclusion and compassion to simply signal that they are like us, without taking the necessary steps to guarantee that we are supported materially in the manner that would truly put us all on equal footing.