Is anyone in power responsible for anything?

I’ve never thought it very useful to poke and prod everything Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, mostly because I feel like criticism of her often takes on a strange disproportionality, and is a proxy for deeper ideological disputes. AOC Discourse also seems to forget she’s not the leader of the Democratic Party; she’s one of 535 members of Congress. But she may be the most famous progressive in Congress, and a favorite punching bag of Fox News. This doesn’t, in and of itself, necessarily entail any added moral burden. But Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s comments last week on the topic of Gaza during the Democratic National Convention ranged from insipid to actively harmful. They are worth discussing because they are a useful example of a mode of politics that has completely captured the far-right and the far-left wings of the Democratic Party, and Ocasio-Cortez playing into this mode of politics shows just how total their dominance over liberal discourse has become.