Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows: Bernie Sanders is the most progressive choice

Looks like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a “Bernie Bro” now. After months of speculation about whether the progressive congresswoman would endorse Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren for president, she is set to throw her weight behind Sanders at a campaign rally on Saturday.

AOC isn’t the only member of the Squad who is Team Bernie. Ilhan Omar endorsed the Vermont senator for president on Wednesday morning, with a video explaining that she is “one of the people that was inspired by the movement that the senator has built”. Rashida Tlaib is also expected to endorse Sanders.

The Squad are unashamedly progressive. Sanders is the most progressive candidate. The fact that Ocasio-Cortez, Omar and Tlaib are backing him should come as little surprise. And yet the idea that female politicians would endorse an old white guy instead of Warren, an old white woman, seemed to throw a number of people for a loop.

Jane Eisner, for example, director of academic affairs at Columbia Journalism School tweeted: “I find it fascinating that women of color overlook female and minority candidates to endorse a white guy. Is ‘identity politics’ over? Is ideology more important than race and gender? Genuinely curious.”

I’ll tell you what I find fascinating: the fact that the concept of “identity politics” has become so thoroughly distorted that people seem to think it means voting for the candidate that looks most like you, or shares your sexual preferences, their policies be damned. The idea that “women of colour” would align themselves with a candidate simply because of their sex or skin colour is incredibly condescending. You also can’t ask whether ideology is more important than race and gender, because the three are not separate, stand-alone entities. But as a “woman of colour” I can tell you right now that ideology is far more important than skin-deep representation.

Here’s the thing: if Sanders and Warren were completely interchangeable in their politics then it would make sense to get behind Warren because she is a woman. America is way overdue a female president. But while Warren and Sanders may be far more to the left than the rest of the Democrats, their politics are not identical. Warren has made it clear that she is a capitalist while Sanders describes himself as a democratic socialist. That difference isn’t a small question of semantics – it’s reflective of a fundamentally different world view.

I like Warren, don’t get me wrong. But, for me, one of the most important differences between the two is that Sanders is more progressive when it comes to foreign policy. (And I’d like to remind all the people who seem to think that Warren is far more of a feminist than Sanders that women outside America matter as well.) Warren isn’t a war-mongerer but she seems to be more concerned with ensuring the military is environmentally friendly rather than putting an end to American imperialism. Sanders, on the other hand, has spent his entire life speaking out about the horrors of American foreign policy. Which, of course, has done him zero favours politically: nothing makes you more unpopular with the establishment in this country than suggesting that America isn’t always a force for good in the world.

That AOC, Omar, and Tlaib are endorsing Sanders rather than Warren makes perfect sense from an ideological point of view. Their worldviews are far more aligned to Sanders than they are Warren’s. The more important question, perhaps, is just how significant this endorsement actually is. There are currently three schools of thought on this: 1 It doesn’t make any difference; 2 It helps Sanders because it makes him seem more relevant; 3 It helps Warren because it makes her seem less radical.

My own view is that, in terms of the primary, it makes very little difference. Sanders isn’t going to get the nomination because the Squad endorsed him, nor will it take a significant number of votes from Warren. But this isn’t to say that the endorsement isn’t significant. Having three prominent women of colour vocalize their support for Sanders makes it harder for the media to keep pushing the ridiculous idea that he doesn’t connect with women or people of colour. It makes it harder to erase his female following and pretend that his only fans are irritating Bernie Bros.

The Squad’s endorsement is also a reminder that Sanders has done more than any other politician to push America leftwards and make topics like Medicare for All and free education mainstream talking points. As Omar herself said, he has built a movement and inspired a new generation of democratic socialists. There are plenty of people itching for Sanders to drop out of the race and go away, but it’s not going to be that easy to get rid of him, I’m afraid. Bernie may never become president, but he has already started a revolution in America.

• Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist