Then House candidate joined Democratic Socialists of America in 2018 but didn’t renew membership after a year

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has rejoined the Democratic Socialists of America after not renewing her membership for seven years, amid speculation that she might run for president in 2028.

The 36-year-old New York representative and one of the country’s most prominent democratic socialists renewed her membership in the group’s national organization after reports emerged earlier this month that it had lapsed. Ocasio-Cortez initially joined the group in 2018.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s co-opting of conservative language to discuss a movement against state-sanctioned killings of Black people is damning

August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.