When Democratic firebrand Jasmine Crockett agreed to be profiled by The Atlantic, she probably expected just another boot-licking puff piece that would add to her leftist street cred and fundraising numbers. What she got was a surprisingly balanced account of her background and meteoric rise in a collapsing political party, which is why she reportedly tried to spike the article.
Perhaps Crockett was incensed by the embarrassing anecdote that staff writer Elaine Godfrey related at the very beginning of the piece. During her quixotic effort to be named the leading Democrat on the House Oversight Committee last month, Crockett whined that she was “[feeling] a little used” by her colleagues. When Godfrey asked her about her failure to get the post, she said, “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” as if that explained why she should be handed power and responsibility on a plate.
Godfrey’s journalistic honesty has accidentally revealed an inconvenient truth about the new blood on the American left. Crockett and her ilk aren’t true public servants, but social media influencers who see representing the American people as a mere side hustle. This narcissistic approach to their duties makes them dangerous to the body politic.
A Lack of Substance
One of the more disturbing aspects of social media is how it grants unscrupulous users the ability to craft a false identity for themselves. For Crockett, this persona is the “tough black girl from the Dallas streets.” She regularly hurls viral insults at people such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, or Hispanics who voted for Donald Trump.
Though she wrongly characterizes these antics as “forthrightness,” Godfrey refuses to buy fully into Crockett’s charade. She reminds her readers that Crockett hails from St. Louis, where she attended a private high school before going to Rhodes College, a small liberal arts school in Tennessee. The closest Crockett ever got to life on city streets was a role in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors” in her college days.
Crockett credits her entry into law and then politics to an incident at Rhodes in which she and a few other black students received threatening and racist letters from an anonymous source. According to this tale, the black female attorney hired by the college to look into the matter became Crockett’s “shero” and inspiration. Oddly, Godfrey could not fully confirm any of these details; Crockett could not even remember the name of this “sheroic” attorney. All in all, this origin story sounds like a social justice warrior’s Instagram fantasy.
When it comes to Crockett’s policy goals, Godfrey is at a loss; apart from mentioning her law firm’s defense of Black Lives Matter demonstrators and a vague reference to her support for “criminal justice reform” while in the Texas state legislature, the reader gains no insight into what issues concern her or those she represents. Instead, we are treated to a description of her “unofficial leadership” of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled their state to D.C. in 2021 in order to stymie legislation meant to tighten and clarify voting rules, a stunt that guaranteed Crockett a career on the national level while frustrating more moderate Democrats.
But Crockett clearly knows how to get clicks and likes. Godfrey explains, “On TikTok and Instagram … she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio,” which is strange behavior for a legislator. The lack of substance behind Crockett’s style reveals that for her, government is not a sacred trust between her and her constituents, but a stage on which she can strut and receive applause.
A Familiar Story
If the broad strokes of Crockett’s story seem familiar, that’s because they could have been cribbed from that of another young leftist darling. Change “black” to “Latinx,” “Dallas” to “the Bronx,” and “law school” to “bartending,” and you have the backstory of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, the four-term New York congresswoman who joined with other radical malcontents in 2019 to disrupt and try to destroy the first Trump administration.
Like Crockett, AOC would not exist without social media platforms, where her skills have allowed her to ignore a multitude of questions regarding her path to power. For instance, she graduated with honors from a fairly prestigious university with a double major in international relations and economics, so when she moved to a global financial and diplomatic capital, why was bartending the only job she could get? Was she hit hard by the Obama years or was she covering her upper middle-class background with some working class astroturf to appeal to the plebs in her district?
AOC also prefers political dinner theatre to more serious efforts at leadership. Her followers lavishly praised her choice to wear a “Tax the Rich” dress to hobnob with the glitterati at the Met Gala even as it inspired an ethics probe. Her cosplaying of being arrested at a protest against the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision cemented her reputation as a demagogue with little care for the broader impacts of her deranged approach to policy-making. While she fiddles, her district burns.
Perhaps most tragically, AOC’s term as a political influencer has encouraged other bad actors to seek the spotlight. Without her trailblazing, New Yorkers would probably not be suffering the indignity of the communist Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor.
The Banality of Reactive Politics
Because she is writing for The Atlantic, Godfrey is of course obligated to blame Trump’s “coarse style of politics” for Crockett’s prominence in the Democratic Party. This swipe is at least partially true, as the careers of Crockett, AOC, and a whole host of other young leftist politicos are founded on the dead end of anti-Trump reactive politics. Without Trump, they would have nothing to say or even think.
But the similarities between Trump and his critics end with their rhetoric. Yes, Trump is very theatrical and often crude, yet underneath that braggadocio is a core of principle founded on real-world experience that AOC, Crockett, and their cronies lack. This alone explains the many successes of both his administrations as well as the dearth of their legislative achievements.
Social media involves the creation of a fantasy world that looks pretty enough but shatters when it meets reality. The young left likes to tout its energy and skill at messaging, but these advantages mean less than nothing without substantive policies grounded in the American tradition of ordered liberty. The sooner that Democratic voters understand this truth and reject influencers masquerading as public servants like Jasmine Crockett, the better it will be for our country.
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
