Few figures in recent memory have scrambled the brains of conservatives and professional centrists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic Socialist from New York's 14th district who is almost certainly set to become the youngest-ever woman elected to Congress. She has made a few mistakes of her own, but Ocasio-Cortez seems uniquely capable of coaxing own goals out of, say, Fox News. She once incepted Sean Hannity into advertising her entire platform to his viewers—more on that later—and Tuesday morning, she struck again.

A Daily Caller writer attended a rally for a progressive candidate in St. Louis where Ocasio-Cortez was appearing, in order to try to get a sense of her appeal. First off, good on the writer, Virginia Kruta: she went and heard from people with whom she disagreed, in an environment in which she expected to be uncomfortable. As Kruta's subsequent appearance on Fox & Friends showed, that can have some intriguing results:

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Daily Caller writer recounts going to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rally on Fox & Friends: "They say things -- I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like if you are a parent" pic.twitter.com/bujOEbuLbD — John Whitehouse (@existentialfish) July 24, 2018

Clearly, Kruta didn't go into things with an open mind. But the juxtaposition of the message she took away, and the tone with which she shares it with her Fox hosts, is amazingly instructive.

They say things—I mean, they talk about things that everybody wants, especially like if you are a parent. They talk about education for your kids, healthcare for your kids. The things that you want. And if you're not really paying attention to how they're going to pay for it or the rest of that, it's easy to fall into that trap and say, my kids deserve this.

This is remarkable. Holding the belief that children should get a good education and have access to healthcare in the richest, most powerful society in the history of the world is portrayed as "falling into a trap." Politicians actually speaking to the needs of parents and families comes across here as some sort of scam. We've gone so far down the rabbit hole in this country that campaigning on Representing Your Everyday Constituents is seen in some quarters as a fool's game.

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The crank that Kruta uses to ratchet reasonable ideas out of reasonable people's consideration was an old favorite: How Are We Going to Pay for This? You may have noticed that's a vital question whenever a progressive policy proposal, like Medicare for All or debt-free public college, comes up. So surely all these same Citizens Concerned About the National Debt were up in arms earlier this year, when the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found the Republican tax bill will pile $1.9 trillion on the national debt over the next decade. And they must have blown a gasket when this year's $1.3 trillion spending bill passed.

Of course, conservatives loved the tax bill, and any protest against the spending bill was muted. That bill raised annual defense spending to $700 billion this year and $716 billion next—more than at least the next seven countries combined, most of which are, for now, allies. The $61 billion increase from last year is more than Russia spends in total. It is also more than the Pentagon requested from Congress. Part of that will go towards buying 90 more F-35s, a fighter jet model that seems to have an endless list of fairly critical failures. The Trump administration announced last year it was battling to get the cost of each individual plane down from $95 million to $80 million. How many textbooks or teacher salaries is that?

We've gone so far down the rabbit hole in this country that campaigning on Representing Your Everyday Constituents is seen in some quarters as a fool's game.

In truth, the Can We Pay For This question is really just a cudgel to beat down certain ideas. Very few people actually care about the national debt when funding something they care about is in question. It's just rhetoric, but where it's deployed indicates where a person's priorities lie. That's why conservatives frequently suggest cutting the National Endowment for the Arts, even though its budget is $148 million—.003 of the federal budget, or less than one-and-a-half F-35s. (Sometimes this is justified on the grounds that funding the arts is some sort of liberal propaganda ploy.)

On the flip side, even progressives significantly to the right of Ocasio-Cortez think we could spend some of that $700 billion in defense spending on healthcare and education, and that we don't need to balloon the deficit on the revenue side by passing a tax bill that overwhelmingly benefits not just the rich, but the ultra-rich.

Last month, Hannity presented Ocasio-Cortez's platform with the same tone of dismissal as Kruta did here. But it had a similar effect of throwing the gap between their attitude and the policies they're discussing in sharp relief. Are debt-free or even free public college really that ridiculous? They're available in nearly every other industrialized western country, none of which have the resources of the United States. So is universal access to healthcare.

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look at this pic.twitter.com/ePDHhAQpf4 — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 28, 2018

You start to get the feeling watching these displays that we as a society—and certain parts of it in particular—have been dismissing these ideas for so long that many people feel dismissing them no longer requires any evidence. It's just The Truth. The same went for Kruta's attitude towards her fellow rallygoers in St. Louis:

I was mostly uncomfortable because I was surrounded by a group of people who were talking about how they had gotten involved, because they were tired of being angry all the time.

So people channeling their anger and dissatisfaction into getting out and working for progress is bad now? What would you have them do, sit at home and watch Fox News, gorging themselves on resentment programming? The risk here is that our conversations have become unmoored from reality outside the performative partisanship of cable news and social media. The rallygoers apparently have to justify Volunteering for Their Preferred Candidates. Shouldn't someone have to justify spending 1,500 teachers' salaries on a single airplane that might not even work?

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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