Last week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered a master class in the aggressive yet disarming use of social media that has defined her early political career. An anonymous account tweeted a video of a cheerful, college-aged Ocasio-Cortez dancing on a rooftop, intended to depict her as a “clueless nitwit.” The recently inaugurated congresswoman, recognizing an opportunity, responded by politicizing the social-media skirmish, accusing her sternest critics in the Republican Party of believing that “having fun should be disqualifying or illegal.” She later went a step further: “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous,” she tweeted, along with a video of her grooving outside her new office on Capitol Hill.

Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet immediately went viral, thanks to the potent combination of shameless dancing, millennial nostalgia-bait “Lisztomania,” and a throng of friendly digital-media companies that promptly agreed that conservatives had, indeed, “lost it.” Multiple Web sites declared that Ocasio-Cortez was the target of a “smear campaign.”

The charge spread rapidly online, despite Republicans’ insistence that nobody really cared. “No one thinks this is scandalous,” tweeted Rep. Dan Crenshaw, himself a burgeoning conservative media darling, adding that the Breakfast Club-inspired dancing “was actually pretty good.” Non-politicians went further, claiming that the mainstream media was trying to distract voters from Ocasio-Cortez’s more radical policies (a 70 percent marginal income tax on the wealthy, for instance) by ginning up imaginary right-wing haters. “There is literally no evidence that any human Republican shamed AOC over her dancing video,” wrote the Daily Caller’s Benny Johnson, in response to an article bashing conservatives for obsessing over the video. Fox News media reporter Brian Flood lamented the “slew of misleading stories claiming conservatives were outraged over it, despite virtually no supporting evidence.”

It appears Republicans have finally learned, after nearly seven months of lobbing relentless attacks at the 29-year-old for largely superficial reasons—like whether she went to a fancy high school, or if she was just some Instant Pot liberal who wears designer clothes—that criticizing Ocasio-Cortez only makes her stronger. Republicans first recognized the obsession with A.O.C. had backfired in November, after a conservative journalist commented on the clothes she wore in Congress. “I personally think that stuff is wrong, and you shouldn’t do it—because it negates your argument, and it only kind of solidifies her status,” media critic Stephen L. Miller told me at the time. But even then, it was too late—the newly minted congresswoman had already been elevated to a position of Trump-like power within the Democratic Party, capable of resetting the political agenda with a tweet, or triggering her own media spin cycle. No wonder, then, that conservatives pulled their punches on the dancing video, and protested so forcefully when they were accused of taking the bait. If earlier tussles with Ocasio-Cortez had been counterproductive, the prospect of attacking her for an innocent homage to a classic 80s movie would have been catastrophic.

As Ocasio-Cortez has become a social-media force, garnering awkward imitators among her progressive colleagues, the right has constantly worried that she may be demonstrating some of the no-fucks-to-give political sangfroid displayed by Donald Trump: ill-informed but aggressively charismatic, adept at overcoming traditional political gatekeepers through social media, impervious to the dissonance between political promises and fiscal realities, and, most importantly, an avatar of our populist moment. Trump himself was able to use that relentless outreach to pitch once-controversial ideas to the public: build a border wall, renege on international trade deals, and unilaterally withdraw America from its foreign wars. On a recent 60 Minutes segment, Ocasio-Cortez clamored for universal health care, free public-college tuition, and an ambitious plan to transition America to green energy that simultaneously addressed the country’s mounting income-equality gap. Like Trump, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t appear overly bothered with the details or the reality of such a platform. She was just the messenger. “It only has ever been radicals that have changed this country,” she told Anderson Cooper, adding that she was happy to be called “radical” herself.

But perhaps Ocasio-Cortez’s most Trumpian political skill is her ability to deflect. Trump was able to portray his left-wing critics as cogs in an elitist, anti-working-class machine. Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez has (often appropriately) characterized criticism of her politics as personal attacks driven by an obsession with her age, race, and gender. (Republicans themselves continue to walk straight into these blunders, as demonstrated when a G.O.P. strategist called her a “little girl” on Fox News last weekend.) She has used her popularity and charisma to effectively grant herself immunity from inaccuracies, big and small. “If people want to really blow up one figure here or one word there, I would argue that they’re missing the forest for the trees,” she told Cooper. “I think that there’s a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right.” Shortly after the interview aired, she took to Instagram to tell her followers that if she’d made any flubs on television, it was because the format was difficult for a novice like herself to master.

This had been evident to a growing section of the right-wing commentariat for the past several weeks, particularly as Ocasio-Cortez began using Instagram in a novel way to reach out to constituents. What should terrify them more, however, is that her talents are encouraging fellow Democrats to embrace her increasingly progressive views. “There was a time in this country where the top marginal tax rate was over 90 percent; even during Reagan’s era in the 1980s it was around 50 percent,” former Housing and Urban Development secretary Julián Castro told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. (“And woosh goes the Overton Window,” as Washington Post political reporter Dave Weigel wrote on Twitter.)

For now, those visions have run up against political reality: when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the formation of a select committee on climate change, for instance, many of Ocasio-Cortez’s activist-driven demands were not included. The committee would not focus on enacting the Green New Deal, which called for the country to run solely on renewables, nor would it have subpoena powers or “the authority to vote on legislation and send it directly to the House floor for a vote.” But outsiders’ demands, it appeared, were slowly trickling in. “There’s some fabulous proposals in the Green New Deal, and I’m excited about all that. You may see some similar language. Clearly, the focuses are going to be the same,” said committee chairwoman Kathy Castor.

The immediate changes that Ocasio-Cortez and her democratic-socialist allies are demanding may not take place at the pace they envision. But if anything could fuel their momentum in this charged partisan climate, it would be the increasingly desperate, consistently lame attacks coming from the far right. As the “Lisztomania” clip reached peak virality, the Daily Caller posted a widely mocked video of Ocasio-Cortez dancing to the Soviet national anthem (“That feeling when you’re first in line for bread,” read the caption), and on Sunday, the popular fringe Web site the Gateway Pundit published an article accusing the congresswoman of embroidering her past by lying about her nickname (“Yorktown Elitist and Bronx Hoaxer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Went by ‘Sandy’ Well into College at Boston U”). The base, after all, cares little for optics, and even less for restraint as a political strategy. When conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson tweeted a version of the video that was uploaded in November, modified to depict Ocasio-Cortez dancing to lyrics calling her such a fucking ho, his followers ate it up. If the right truly fears that Ocasio-Cortez will turn America into Venezuela, where even more sunny socialist proposals led the formerly wealthy country down the path to complete economic collapse, they might want to stop helping her look so cool.

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