I Guess We'll All Just Have to Deal: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the tyranny of outrage

Two years ago, when our current President was just getting situated and the extent of this dumpster fire/lucid nightmare was only beginning to become clear, there was a distinctive murmur from the left. In addition to legitimate (and now realized) fears about specific policies and issues, the more general concern that we would need to stay focused, that he would try to drown us in a sea of distractions, headlines, and controversy to mobilize his base and obfuscate any really organized dissent.

Well, it has happened, and it has worked.

Right now we’re wading through the morass of a government shutdown and the negotiation behind it. We all have our (strong) feelings about the issue, but no one is really all that surprised that we’re here. This is, now, business as usual.

But for context: Imagine, for a moment, what would have happened if President Obama declared our broken healthcare system was a National State of Emergency and raided the Defense Department budget to establish a single-payer option. Now let it sink in.

Hunter Thompson said that it is impossible to have an honest discussion of where “the edge” is, because anyone who truly knows has already gone over it. And we, like slowly boiled frogs, don’t really understand quite how bizarro this bizarro world is.

Yet in this 24-hour cycle of manufactured controversy one non-story managed to surface for a moment with the promise of discord only to be received by both the left and the right with a collective shrug: freshman Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, apparently, danced in a college booster film, or something.

Ultimately the whole thing kind of just wound up being a meta-contraversy, where both sides point to an objectively innocuous thing and claim that the other side is outraged. Smells Russian. But anyway, it is probably the first instance of something that we are going to see a lot more of.

Consider that Ocasio-Cortez is the first Congressional rep who came of age with the internet. She is the first of what will be many federal representatives whose youthful indiscretions have an unprecedented chance of being documented online. I’m going out on a limb here, and guess that none of us would like to be judged forever by our goth phase in high school, or that night we got pretty drunk and threw up in the dorms.

It has been historically easy for us, communally, to sweep these things under the rug, to move on, to ignore them. Boys will be boys, right?

From here forward, we will be confronted with the choice of either electing representatives who are so robotic, connected, or anti-social that they somehow never made an awkward Instagram post, or we will collectively have to decide that we just don’t care that teenagers are idiots.

And a part of not caring that teenagers are idiots is thinking rationally about boys being boys, or, whatever. Getting popped for underage drinking high school is different from raping an unconscious woman, and being uncomfortable or offended is different from being unsafe.

As the Democratic party, and progressives in general, do our soul searching in coming years it’s probably worth considering that the best candidate will offend us. The best candidate will have said or done something stupid, irresponsible, or illegal, on video, on the internet, and they’re still the right person for the job.

And this will be hard for us, but it’s for the best. We will have to swallow a bitter pill now again again, and concede that universal health care is worthwhile even if the legislation is sponsored by someone whose sorority hosted an awkward Cinco de Mayo party. Or they were rude to an Uber driver once. Or whatever.

Humans are fallible, and while the publicity of our shortcomings will make for some awkward campaigns, I wonder if we wouldn’t all be better off if Roy Moore had had SnapChat growing up.