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Since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s shock victory over high-ranking Democrat Joe Crowley, the socialist challenger has been the subject of a number of absurd attacks from the Right, from the fact that she, among other things, “supports seniors” in her platform to the fact that she once lived in a house. It’s easy to forget, however, that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was also a shock to the system for liberals and the center. While this group largely embraced Ocasio-Cortez’s win, they too have found their own, more subtle ways to play down its significance to the future ideological tilt of both the Democratic Party and the country. Here are four of the most common rationalizations.

1 It was just “demographics.” It’s perhaps little surprise that many pundits chose to view the Ocasio-Cortez win purely through the prism of her identity as a young woman of color. “The argument that there is a Democratic establishment resisting the progressive tide is a straw man,” wrote Dana Milbank. “Crowley lost because of the changing demographics in his district, which had been redrawn considerably after 2010 and is now only 18 percent white.” As proof, Milbank argued that Crowley was “a down-the-line liberal” and claimed dubiously that Ocasio-Cortez ran a “largely non-ideological” campaign against him. “The real warning shot here isn’t ideological but generational,” wrote Michael Tomasky, who similarly pointed to the fact that the district was “just 18 percent white” and mostly Latino. Similarly, Jim Kessler of Third Way, a centrist think tank, told the Guardian that while Ocasio-Cortez’s victory wasn’t an “accident,” it had less to do with ideology than Democratic voters’ yearning for more female candidates. This fixation on identity found its crudest form in a Daily Show segment that, in lieu of jokes or actual analysis, used the win as a vehicle for host Trevor Noah to channel tired sassy-Latina stereotypes that weren’t even funny in their heyday. Meanwhile, Gina Raimondo, the Democratic governor of Rhode Island who is facing a progressive challenger, compared herself to Ocasio-Cortez despite the fact that, as David Sirota pointed out, she’s a Wall Street–friendly former founder of a private equity firm. So there you have it: Ocasio-Cortez won not because she waged a hard-fought campaign or because her message and policies were more appealing, but because Joe Crowley was a white guy. How true is all this? Well, not very. For one, the idea that a Democratic establishment isn’t resisting the rise of more left-wing forces within the party is only believable if you’ve spent the past year in a bunker. And the idea that Ocasio-Cortez ran a “non-ideological” campaign doesn’t quite square with her actual platform or her widely praised campaign aid, which rattled off some of her major policies and explicitly positioned her campaign as part of a struggle for power between working families and the wealthy elite, of which, the ad implied, Crowley was one. More saliently, according to a post-election analysis of voting data by the Intercept, Ocasio-Cortez actually did better in more mixed neighborhoods, and was outpolled by Crowley in some areas of Queens that were less white.

2 It doesn’t really matter. While a number of pundits insisted on the primacy of “demographics,” congressional Democrats insisted that there was no point in deriving any sort of wider lesson from the race. “It’s ascendant in that district, perhaps” said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi when asked if the victory showed democratic socialism was ascendant within the party. “It is not to be viewed as something that stands for everything else.” Elsewhere, Pelosi stressed that “every district is its own entity,” that the Democrats are a “big tent,” and that “many of the districts in our country are focused in a different way.” Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth echoed these points, arguing that Ocasio-Cortez represented “the future of the party in the Bronx, where she is,” and that you can’t “go too far to the left and still win the Midwest.” (Duckworth apparently doesn’t share the view that Ocasio-Cortez’s victory was non-ideological.) A number of other Democrats repeated similar dismissals to Time magazine. South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn, who might be better known for arguing during the 2016 primary that free college would be a bad idea because it would kill private black institutions — and prior to that, for running a charity that served as an influence-peddling operation — said it meant “nothing for the party.” “One election out of five hundred and thirty five?” Vermont senator Patrick Leahy asked in disbelief. It wasn’t just congressional Democrats. Time itself got in on the action, arguing that “adding a socialist to the Democratic caucus is unlikely to help the Midwestern Democrats’ efforts” to win seats. This is rich given that since 2016, liberals and centrists have relentlessly advanced the (completely false) narrative that Sanders’s appeal was solely limited to white people, men in particular, chiefly because of his poor showing with older black voters in the South during the Democratic primary. Now, that criticism is seeing a wholesale reversal: socialists can only win where white voters are a minority.

3 Socialism? What socialism? One trend that quickly became apparent was that Ocasio-Cortez herself was more willing to label herself a socialist — albeit not just a socialist — than were a number of news outlets. For the Associated Press, Ocasio-Cortez was a “twenty-eight-year-old liberal activist” who was running on “an unabashedly liberal platform.” In one story, the AP did at least note that she “received endorsements” from groups including the Democratic Socialists of America (in fact, she’s a member), but still didn’t use the s-word to describe her. This was repeated in a range of other outlets. At CNBC, she was a “progressive challenger.” At the Star and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, she was again a “liberal activist.” In headlines, the USA Today described her platform as an “ultra-liberal” pitch, and Axios called her win a “stunning liberal surge.” These last two at least did both quote someone else correctly identifying her as a socialist. The insistence on referring to Ocasio-Cortez and her platform as anything but socialist is likely a holdover from older convention when “socialist” was still an unspeakable word — a subconscious tic, in other words, for a media that has always found it difficult to imagine politics beyond whatever Democrats and Republicans say they stand for at any given time. Although it’s an unacceptable erasure of Ocasio-Cortez’s political identity — and a continued, subtle marginalization of the Left — it’s unlikely this was calculated. The same can’t be said for the next category.