A powerful U.S. representative who was an anonymous bartender not even two years ago is not a fan of America’s bootstrap mentality. For Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the idiom about being self-made is a cruel joke, one that perpetuates economic injustice.
There are no mirrors in Congress, apparently.
“You know this idea and this metaphor of a bootstrap started off as a joke?” the congresswoman said this week during a hearing on the White House’s poverty policies.
She added: “Because it is a physical impossibility to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces. It’s physically impossible. The whole thing is a joke!”
A brief aside: To “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is an idiom, not a metaphor.
Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks came amid a larger discussion about recently proposed legislation to measure poverty in America.
“We’re just talking about recognizing poverty,” Ocasio-Cortez said of the proposed measure, “and there is resistance to doing that. Why? Why? I believe that we do not want to recognize the level of poverty in this country because if we did, it would be a national scandal.”
For the record, the United States already measures poverty. It has done so for decades.
The congresswoman continued, referencing the hardships she suffered when she rose from obscurity to power.
“My first three months here in Congress, I slept on an air mattress and walked to work, and people made fun of me because I couldn’t afford a second apartment,” she said. “And that’s with all the privileges bestowed upon this office.”
Ocasio-Cortez went on, growing increasingly agitated.
“Seven million people have not been lifted off of food stamps in this country, they were kicked off stamps in this country,” she claimed. “And people are going hungry! They are going hungry!”
This bit about people being kicked off of food stamps is also a falsehood. The Trump administration has proposed new work requirements that will lead many to lose their benefits, but those requirements have not gone into effect yet, as noted here by Mother Jones. (Read past the headline.)
Putting aside the factual inaccuracies, it is astonishing to hear Ocasio-Cortez, of all people, decry the bootstrap mindset. She is the poster child for the rags-to-riches mentality that she suggests now is part of a heartless joke. The congresswoman herself brags of a supposedly hardscrabble background. She went from waiting tables and tending bar, hustling hard to pay the bills, to being one of the most visible members of the U.S. House of Representatives. And she is not just some backbencher! She is beloved by the news media, she has a massive social media presence, and she serves as a top, hotly sought-after surrogate for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
No, Ocasio-Cortez did not literally act out an idiom to become a member of Congress. But that she is apparently too dim-witted to recognize that she is living proof of the mentality she now denounces leads me to wonder whether she has actually tried to literally, physically lift herself by her shoelaces.
