Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!
I'll say that name with pleasure. I'm genuinely delighted. There's no sign of a Republican challenger for the general election, so we're getting an Abolish ICE, Medicare for All, affordable housing, Marshall plan for renewable energy, genuinely anti-war Congresswoman. I believe she's a good egg. Also, there were stars aligned that brought her out that aren't common enough across the country to count on, on their own.
The linked article is less optimistic but it has some points that'll need to be addressed:
"It turns out that both elected officialdom and the Democratic party are institutions, and institutions change individuals way more often than the other way around. Some of our folks backed away from their commitments little by little, others frankly flipped, some were isolated and outlasted till they could be outspent. Despite the phrase being on everybody’s lips, we never figured out exactly how to hold anybody’s 'feet to the fire,' to enforce any sort of accountability."
We've had candidates with great talking points that didn't deliver half of what they talked about, not because of impracticality of their campaign promises, but because they got on board with economic fascism (elite-controlled corporate-government-finance fusion) which does have firm ties to the the social and military parts of fascism as well. Compromise with that to keep the bankers happy one day, war criminals will be getting pardons and the investigations into what happened curtailed the next, because the same old power structure is getting its way; its members will be shown that crimes in its name are not punished.
That's how you get banks even more too-big-to-fail than they were when they last crashed the economy and lined up for $16 trillion in loans and shenanigans on the people's tab. That's how you get torturers appointed to the CIA when they should have been some years into a prison sentence already. That's how you get wars in seven countries when the party line was to end wars in two.
To succeed, to do right by human rights and the environment and all these aspects of basic health and life necessary to pursue the other aspects of freedom and justice, the movement must not only elect promising candidates. it must abolish the ways that politicians have made careers of forgetting their agreement with the people and morphing into tools for dark money. The people need to be able to enforce integrity in the agreements they make with public servants. We need recall elections, referendums, a forum with power equal to a house of Congress, an honest election system, more ways to hold a crazed White House in check. We need to recapture and tame the institutions, or replace them outright.