Americans just passed the T-minus-one-year mark before the 2020 election. And it is becoming clearer how the dynamics of the previous campaign cycle might replicate themselves in the battles to come. Take, for one example, the narrative that has arisen this week about Elizabeth Warren. Joe Biden, responding to Warren’s claim that his policy proposals are “repeating Republican talking points,” recently accused Warren of espousing “an angry, unyielding viewpoint that has crept into our politics.” Members of the media echoed his charge. The dynamic is extremely familiar. It is also instructive. When Clinton made her first presidential run, in 2008, she faced sexism of a swaggering strain. (In Salem, New Hampshire, just before that state’s primary, hecklers interrupted a speech Clinton was delivering. “Iron! My! Shirt!” they chanted.) The sexism of 2020 will be subtler. It will be sneakier. It will know better—but it will persist nevertheless.

The profound irony of Biden’s “angry, unyielding” accusation is that Warren herself is the first to admit to her own anger. A foundation of her campaign is that there is nothing wrong with being angry—and that, to the contrary, if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention. In an email to supporters late last week, Warren rejected the premise of Biden’s accusation, writing, as she has before: “I’m angry and I own it.”

But what Biden and his advisers seem to know all too well is that once an idea builds—once it becomes the stuff of sound bites and headlines and Overton-sanctioned debate—it becomes extremely difficult to counter. To tell someone “Don’t think of an elephant,” the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has suggested, is meaningfully identical to telling that person to think of an elephant. Biases are powerful things. So, in politics as in other fields, are emotions.

Anger may be an ethic of the moment. But anger, flung as an accusation at Warren, is not about economic disparity or racial injustice or environmental catastrophe. It is about the familiar standbys: “likability.” “Electability.” “Charisma.” Anger, rendered as a criticism, summons those ideas—without explicitly invoking them. It summons history, too. It is a targeted missile, seeking the spaces in the American mind that still assume there is something unseemly about an angry woman. It is attempting to tap into the dark and ugly history in which the anger displayed by a woman is assumed to compromise her—to render her unattractive precisely because the anger makes her uncontrollable.

The tensions of that situation—anger seen as a liability; anger seen as a point of pride—present a challenge for the media outlets trying to cover the candidates fairly. Late last week, The Washington Post published an article under the headline “Is Elizabeth Warren ‘Angry’ and Antagonistic? Or Are Rivals Dabbling in Gendered Criticism?” The piece did what campaign journalism will often do: It summarized lines of attack that have been used against a candidate, and assessed them. (One of those attacks came from Pete Buttigieg, who recently accused Warren of being “so absorbed in the fighting that it is as though fighting were the purpose.”) The Post’s article was nuanced; it cited experts describing how anger, used as an accusation against a woman, abets sexist ideas. It cited Biden advisers arguing that anger leveled as a charge against a female candidate is not, on its face, sexist. But headlines often have an outsized impact. And look again at the one the Post chose: “Is Elizabeth Warren ‘Angry’ and Antagonistic?” This is the question that lingers. This is the question that insinuates. This is the question that ends up asking, “Is she likable?”