Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was a bartender before running for Congress, has joked on Twitter about proposed names for “Cocktails for the Revolution” in promoting the “Green New Deal.” But in all seriousness, implementing the sweeping program would require a major political revolution in the United States.

To be clear, when I use the term “revolution,” I do not mean it in the loose sense in which it is typically employed in the relatively stable world of American politics. Political scientists and authors may refer to the Reagan Revolution or the Gingrich Revolution or the Obama Revolution. Sen. Bernie Sanders often refers to his movement as a revolution, and many of his former 2016 volunteers took the name of his book, Our Revolution, and turned it into an organization that supported socialist candidates, including Ocasio-Cortez, in 2018.