Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rejects Aaron Sorkin's call for new Democrats to grow up

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has hit back at Aaron Sorkin after the Oscar-winning screenwriter said on Sunday that the young Democrats needed to “stop acting like young people.”

Sorkin, 57, told Fareed Zakaria in an interview on CNN on Sunday morning: “I really like the new crop of young people who were just elected to Congress. They now need to stop acting like young people, OK? It’s time to do that.”

“I think that there’s a great opportunity here, now more than ever, for Democrats to be the non-stupid party, to point out the difference,” Sorkin said. “That it’s not just about transgender bathrooms. That’s a Republican talking point they’re trying to distract you with. That we haven’t forgotten the economic anxiety of the middle class, but we’re going to be smart about this; we’re not going to be mean about it.”

Sorkin then talked about his father, a second world war veteran, who remembered a time when the US would be welcomed in other parts of the world and would greet refugees with “a hand and a hot meal and say, ‘welcome to the new world’.”

“That’s who we are, that’s who we should be,” Sorkin said.

But Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most popular of that new and notably diverse cohort of Democrats, took issue with Sorkin’s characterisation of equality as a political distraction.

“News Flash: Medicare for All and equal rights aren’t trends,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted on Sunday afternoon. Ocasio-Cortez is the youngest Democrat congresswoman, at 29, and a vocal left-wing figure in the party.

“When people complain about low turnout in some demos, it’s not because communities are apathetic, it’s because they don’t see you fighting for them. If we don’t show up for people, why should you feel entitled to their vote?”

Sorkin, creator of The West Wing, an acclaimed and entirely fictional prestige TV drama about the two terms of a Democratic president, was responding to a question about whether he felt Democrats were “speaking the way that they should” and if he felt the urge to dive in and write speeches for them.

“There are better speechwriters than me but … it depends which Democrats,” said Sorkin. “I like Kamala Harris a lot, I like Joe Biden a lot.”

In a long thread responding to a tweet on the topic from LGBT activist Charlotte Clymer, Ocasio-Cortez suggested acting “like adults” in this context had deeper implications.

“Let’s dig into ‘gravitas,’ because it’s an ambiguous word, selectively applied,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Ever wonder how expression that’s feminine, working-class, queer, or POC isn’t deemed as having ‘gravitas’, but talking like an Aaron Sorkin character does? Men have ‘gravitas,’ women get ‘likeable.’”

She continued: “We wouldn’t need to talk about bathrooms at all if we acted like adults, washed our hands and minded our own business instead of trying to clock others. Going by track record, I’d feel safer in a bathroom with a trans woman than a powerful male executive any day of the week.”

Sorkin was on Fareed Zakaria GPS to promote his new Broadway production of To Kill a Mockingbird.