Whatever happened to the ‘Squad’?
“It’s tough being a member of the Squad these days”, wrote Branko Marcetic last year in the pages of Jacobin magazine, lamenting that “even committed socialists question what the point of the Squad has been”.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s successful bid to unseat long-term Democratic Party powerbroker Joe Crowley from his New York congressional seat in June 2018 unleashed an avalanche of expectations. The popular documentary Knock down the House chronicled her rise, described by producers as one of the “most shocking political upsets in recent American history”. Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, was joined by three other successful progressive challengers: Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley. Together, they were dubbed “the Squad” by the media.
On the American reformist left, expectations of a socialist breakthrough led by the Squad were high. Miles Kampf-Lassin wrote in Jacobin: “It’s no shock that Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort are being treated as a threat to a party establishment that has cozied up to corporate power and helped maintain the deeply unequal economic and political order in this country. It’s because they are one”.
Five years later, the Squad has lost its sheen. Rather than taking a hammer to the Democratic establishment, the Squad has become its enthusiastic left flank. Commitment to party unity has meant accepting the Biden administration’s right-wing domestic and international agenda, from voting to impose a unilateral contract on railway workers and quash their right to strike, to voting to fund Israel’s Iron Dome.
As large numbers of young people turned away from Biden, labelling him “Genocide Joe”, and wealthy party donors abandoned him over his fading mental acuity, the Squad stood out as the biggest enthusiasts for the increasingly beleaguered president.
In response to criticism after Biden’s disastrous performance in the presidential debate, Ilhan Omar offered a passionate defence, telling the Washington Post: “He’s been the best president of my lifetime, and we have his back”. This came after Omar in early February accurately described Biden as “greenlighting the massacre of Palestinians”—apparently a minor detail.
When Biden announced his intention to withdraw from the 2024 race and endorsed Kamala Harris as his replacement, support from the Squad followed. Squad colleague Jamaal Bowman wrote effusively: “I am ... excited to see her execute her own transformational vision for the future of our democracy and our foreign policy ... Let us all follow her guiding light”.
The “guiding light” the Squad are now following is a cop. Harris is a former California attorney general—making her one of the leading enforcers of a system that has given the US the most incarcerated population on the planet. Harris fought against the early release of prisoners, her legal team arguing that emptying prisons would deplete the state’s source of cheap labour. She resisted Black Lives Matter demands to make police body cameras compulsory.
Those who once claimed to challenge the warmongering, mass-incarcerating, corporate-backed Democratic establishment are now part of the furniture. Those, like AOC, who built their profiles protesting migration detention now face angry pro-Palestine protests calling out their complicity in their party’s crimes. So what happened?
The truth is that, despite projections of radicalism from some of their supporters, the Squad were always moderate liberal Democrats with no real project of challenging the party leadership. While portrayed as “outsiders” in the media, most members of the Squad have a long history in the party. Ayanna Pressley worked her way up as an intern for a member of the Kennedy dynasty, as did Ocasio-Cortez. Rashida Tlaib worked as a Democratic staffer from 2004, while Ilhan Omar did the same in Minnesota from 2013. Their subsequent trajectory shows that it’s impossible to defend left-wing principles within the structures of a profoundly pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist party.
Their approach to the Democratic Party was collaborative from the start. One of AOC’s first acts in office was an occupation of congressional powerbroker Nancy Pelosi’s office alongside climate activists. But AOC couched this action within an approach that aimed to gently influence Pelosi. “One of the things I admire so much about leader Pelosi is that she comes from a space of activism and organising, and so I think that she really appreciates civic engagement. And really what I’m here to do is just to support the folks who are here”, she said at the time. “Should leader Pelosi become the next speaker of the House, we need to tell her that we’ve got her back”, AOC added.
The Squad did indeed have Pelosi’s back. They supported the venture capitalist—who has an estimated net worth upwards of $100m—for re-election as party leader at the end of 2018. Soon, AOC had christened her the “mama bear” of the Democratic Party. This established a pattern: members of the Squad would trade loyalty to the Democratic leadership for a shot at sitting on influential congressional committees.
The relationship between the Democratic left and centre was consummated under Biden. After swiftly dispensing with the half-hearted challenge from Bernie Sanders in the 2020 primaries, he moved to coopt the left by adopting some elements of their rhetoric as part of his policy agenda. As journalist Ryan Grimm, a sympathiser of the Squad’s project, admitted:
“While Ocasio-Cortez and the Squad spent much of 2019 in conflict with party leadership, and spent the first half of 2020 trying to nominate Sanders for president, AOC had been a team player in the general election, and through Biden’s term, she had consistently framed her advocacy as in support of his administration and his agenda.”
The economic and social agenda of the Biden administration, dubbed “Bidenomics” by the press, has sometimes been presented as a victory for the left, something at least approximating the reformist vision of a Green New Deal. US socialist Ashley Smith argues that Bidenomics should better be understood as a project of “imperialist Keynesianism”—a project to rebuild the foundations of US capitalism, stabilise domestic politics and restore Washington’s imperial supremacy over China and Russia.
Rather than pulling Biden to the left, Sanders and the Squad were pulled to the right, abandoning their reformist program to cheerlead an administration overseeing attacks on workers at home and militarism abroad.
The consequences of self-described socialists signing up to be the left wing of Biden’s imperialist agenda have been made starkly apparent over the past ten months, as a US-Israeli war on Gaza has claimed tens of thousands of Palestinian lives. AOC’s willingness to betray Palestine in the name of party unity has been clear since 2021, when she refused to vote against funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile system. Months of waffling about the war, evading and criticising protesters have alienated many in the Palestine movement.
More than five years on from the shock election of the Squad, there is a need for a serious critique of their project. The Democratic Party is the world’s oldest and most established capitalist party. Its list of crimes is the longest of any, given the party’s central role in administering one of the most brutal capitalist states on the planet—a state that has spent 80 years as the largest and most aggressive empire the world has ever known. The Democrats are the party of slavery and segregation, of Hiroshima and the wars on Vietnam and Gaza, of union-busting and austerity.
The very name “Democratic Party” is an oxymoron. Its structures are profoundly undemocratic, and it’s not really a party. Rather, it’s a series of fundraising cabals controlled by a powerful wing of the US capitalist class. No genuine socialist could operate politically within its institutions.
The best representatives of the socialist movement have always understood this. The American revolutionary Eugene Debs once said: “There was a time in my life, before I became a socialist, when I permitted myself as a member of the Democratic Party to be elected to a state legislature. I have been trying to live it down. I am as much ashamed of that as I am proud of having gone to jail”.
The balance sheet of the Squad’s first five years shows that a group of aspirational, progressive political careerists can comfortably exist in the swamp of the Democratic Party despite occasional ideological tensions and policy clashes. A real socialist movement is something different—it will have to be built based on an implacable hostility to the oldest, most powerful capitalist party on the planet.
