Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Friday that the American Revolution was fought against the “billionaires of their time,” casting the country’s founding as a revolt against concentrated wealth and power as she spoke at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
“I want to talk about how this is in the heritage of our country, because America was founded… you look at Thomas Jefferson writing to Madison in revolt of British aristocracy,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “The American Revolution was against the billionaires of their time. And we are declaring independence from such an extreme marriage of wealth and power and the state that the voices of everyday people did not exist.”
The comments came a day after the New York Democrat told an audience on Thursday that “you can’t earn a billion dollars,” adding that a person can get market power, break rules, abuse labor laws and pay people less than they are worth, but “you can’t earn that, right?” She said that is why wealthy people and the public build a myth around how fortunes are made. Ocasio-Cortez also said critics were pushing a “red herring” by assuming she believes all billionaires are immoral.
She argued that her comments were being framed as an attack on American values. “They like to talk about American ethos as though it's an attack on American values, an attack on our idea of success,” she said. “And first of all, I mean, call me crazy, but I don't think that every single American aspires to be a billionaire. I think that our idea of success, they might not object, but I don't think it's the universal American ideal.”
The debate sharpened immediately on Friday. Utah Sen. Mike Lee wrote that the American Revolution was not “against the billionaires of their time,” saying it was instead a fight against “a large, distant, overly intrusive government that recognized no limits over its own authority to tax, regulate, and eat out the substance of the citizens it claimed to serve.” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz also criticized the remark, saying that if a “9th grader” wrote it on a history test, “she gets an F,” and calling the revolution “literally” one against oppressive government.
The clash lands at a familiar fault line in American politics, where the meaning of the revolution is often pulled into present-day fights over taxes, markets and power. Conservatives argued that wealthy citizens, including George Washington, helped lead and finance the fight against Britain, not against aristocrats in the abstract. Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, used that same founding language to defend her criticism of extreme wealth and to suggest the country is still arguing over who gets to shape it. The question now is less whether the comment will fade than whether it becomes another test of how far she can push populist language before her critics turn the founding itself into the counterargument.
