[Alexandria] Ocasio-Cortez told me that she treats Republicans like buffoons because that’s how they’ve behaved for as long as she can remember. “Even before I was of voting age, I saw Republicans accuse the Obamas of doing a ‘terrorist fist bump,’ so they’ve been clowns since I was a teen,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez is twenty-nine. I have two decades on her, and she’s hardly alone in wondering when was this supposed golden age of Republican reasonableness.
Was it when Republicans under Reagan were running the southern strategy? Was it when Republicans were accusing the Clintons of murdering Vince Foster? Was it when Bush II lied us into a war and the Republicans debuted “Freedom Fries”? Was it when Republicans called market-based healthcare reform “socialism”? Was it when Republicans capitulated to the Tea Party? Was it when Republicans wouldn’t even consider Merrick Garland? Was it when Republicans nominated Donald Trump?
I turned eighteen in 1987, at the end of the Reagan years, and yet even I can use Ocasio-Cortez’s “even before I was of voting age” construction.
Spare me the pleadings of the combined forces of centrism and civility. All that’s changed in the Republican Party since at least eight years before I became an adult is that they’ve grown far more comfortable saying the quiet parts out loud, and that’s entirely because centrism and civility allowed Republicans to pretend they were reasonable as long as they kept the ugliness and the hate comparatively quiet, or hand-waved it as being the fringes of their party, and so year after year the Overton window slid a little bit more.
For at least forty years, the Republicans haven’t been reasonable. It’s unreasonable to expect us to keep pretending otherwise.