1. Agree 100%. AOC's instagram is channeling the (positive) populist spirit that animated Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), yet she's also updating it for the age of social media, and for an age when politics is no longer just the province of white men.
2. We need to recapture the sense that the House of Representatives is the people's house, the house that belongs to all of us. Sure, only 435 people get to occupy it at one time, but theoretically it is a place where every one of us belongs. Here's Paine's 1776 take on that. 
3. Formal politics will always involve insiders and arcane rules that most citizens don't have the time, inclination, or expertise to follow in all of its detail. That's the nature of a representative democracy...it's not inherently a bad thing.
4. What gives that "inside baseball" political world legitimacy, however, is the extent to which it is transparent to those whom it is supposed to represent, and open to being infused/revivified with new energy and new voices.
5. What AOC is doing here is making visible to her constituents and all American citizens what it's like to be a newbie in DC, to be kind of intimidated and in awe of the place, yet to unapologetically claim a stake on it.
For some reason Twitter disrupted this thread. Here's the continuation.
