The Squad

October 15, 2023
Progressives come to Washington. Political reporter Grim, D.C. bureau chief for the Intercept, examines the rise, challenges, and influence of six aggressive left-wing politicians: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, and Ilhan Omar, branded by the media as The Squad, and the two representatives who joined them in 2021, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Covering the period from 2015 to the 2022 midterms, Grim sees this book as a sequel to his last, We've Got People: From Jesse Jackson to AOC, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement. He reprises AOC's transformation from a newly registered Democrat who was swept up by Barack Obama's 2008 campaign to an energized candidate for Congress, tapped by the organization Brand New Congress to unseat Joe Crowley, "widely considered the most likely replacement for Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she stepped aside." Once sworn in, AOC was quickly disillusioned. At a retreat organized in part by the House of Representatives, she texted the author, "this Harvard 'orientation' is a corporate indoctrination camp and it's infuriating." In D.C., she and the other Squad members faced challenges from within their party, especially from the inordinately belligerent New Jersey Congressman Josh Gottheimer; hostile Republicans; and internal disputes within the left, as they attempted to shape policy regarding immigration, climate change, health care, social spending, and the Middle East. The Green New Deal, for example, "was ridiculed by the right and dismissed by Democratic leaders as unserious." Yet outside of Washington, Grim notes, "it became a global sensation." As AOC became a prominent media personality, she and the rest of the Squad were increasingly targeted. AOC, whom Grim portrays as "a consensus builder and a people-pleaser," was "thrust into the role of rebel." Drawing on his own on-the-ground reporting, Grim creates a detailed account of seven tumultuous years. An insider's often dismaying picture of national politics.

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November 6, 2023
The celebrated coterie of congressional progressives—representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, and their glamorous leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—has started a civil war in the Democratic Party, according to this insightful political study. Grim (We’ve Got People), the D.C. bureau chief for the Intercept, recaps the Squad’s initiatives and controversies, including AOC’s flubbed introduction of a Green New Deal bill; Tlaib’s and Omar’s criticisms of Israel; and Bush’s sleep-in on the Capitol steps to pressure President Biden into extending the Covid eviction moratorium. Grim is sympathetic to the Squad’s politics, but clear-eyed about their shortcomings, especially those of AOC, whose clashes with mainstream Democrats and aversion to political schmoozing, he maintains, limit her effectiveness. He situates his subjects amid a larger struggle between progressive Democrats and the Party’s centrist establishment, led by a pro-Israel lobby that abhors the Squad’s pro-Palestinian leanings, and fought out in primary battles that he deftly analyzes. Grim skillfully elucidates the political substance beneath the bewildering complexity of congressional legislating, election strategizing, and influence peddling, conveying it all in prose that’s perceptive and pithy. (“Her ‘present’ vote was the epitome of Ocasio-Cortez’s effort to be the consensus builder and the radical all at once,” he writes of AOC’s vacillation on a bill to fund Israeli missiles.) The result is a fresh and penetrating take on a divided Democratic Party.