One can partly understand why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the hilariously ignorant young socialist recently elected to a House seat from the Bronx and Queens, has soared to the top of the Republicans’ naughty list.

For one thing, the Democrats and their reliably obsequious media allies already have elevated her far above what one might expect for a safe-seat shoo-in from an abjectly Democratic district who has not yet served a single day in office: They’re already asking her about running for president, perhaps sharing a ticket with Robert Francis O’Rourke, the Texas Democrat formerly known as “Who?”

Politics in the age of the 120-second news cycle is an endless game of Whac-a-Mole, and Ocasio-Cortez is the one with her head currently above ground.

She is, to be sure, an attractive target. She is, to be charitable, lightly informed. At least that is the impression left by her public statements, in which she has communicated an almost spotless lack of understanding about things like what Congress does, how a bill becomes a law, the relationship between Israel and the Palestinian statelet, the federal budget and much more.

That in itself is an appealing irritant for Republicans, who resent being characterized as the stupid party, and the irritation is intensified by Republicans’ sensitivity to media double standards: They remember Dan Quayle once making a single spelling error and joking about using his high school Latin on a trip to Latin America and being forever branded a moron. Ocasio-Cortez’s amusing public displays of intellectual deficiency have received a rather gentler reception. Republicans can be bores on the subject of media double standards, but that doesn’t make those double standards any less real or meaningful.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is not yet 30 years old, probably does not remember much about Dan Quayle. And that, too, is part of why she drives Republicans a little bit nuts.

Nate Silver, the most predictable man in the predictions business, insists that Republican hostility toward Ocasio-Cortez is rooted in her ethnicity and sex. And he’s probably right — but not in the way he thinks.

If a demographically similar candidate — young, female, non-white, from an economically modest background — had been elected to the House as a Republican, you can bet that a bunch of old white guys from Kansas and Oklahoma would be executing joyous somersaults down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Republicans couldn’t even defend incumbent Mia Love’s seat — and she is a Mormon who was running in Utah while sharing a ballot with Mitt Romney. Republican leaders presented with a charismatic young Latina in Congress are not consumed with racism but with envy.

Ocasio-Cortez, seen from that point of view, presents Republicans with a lot of things they despise — her far-left politics — wrapped up in a package that they very much want but cannot have. She’s everything they want and everything they hate at the same time: Odi et amo, RNC chairman Ronna Romney McDaniel might well say.

About those politics: Ocasio-Cortez describes herself as a socialist, a declaration mitigated somewhat by the fact that she doesn’t seem to know what the word “socialist” means. She is a reflexive practitioner of identity politics, immediately suggesting that any criticism of her is racist or sexist or both. And she is an unapologetic authoritarian, threatening to abuse congressional subpoena powers to retaliate against Donald Trump Jr. for posting something mean about her on Twitter. An avowedly socialist practitioner of identity politics and social-media bully: that, and not her views on marginal tax rates, is what gets up Republicans’ noses. Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, too, but he’s a grumpy old Muppet from Vermont — a useful cat’s paw to maul Mrs. Clinton, but otherwise old news.

As a purely tactical matter, Republicans would probably be better off keeping Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer as their leading partisan archnemesis, inasmuch as neither of those candidates can deride the GOP as the party of rich old white folks without inspiring at least a little bit of a giggle.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may personify much of what Republicans despise about the distinctively millennial brand of censorious progressivism that currently dominates the Democratic Party, but, if they were smarter, they’d be grateful for that: If this callow dilettante is the best the other side has to offer, then maybe the Republicans — no strangers to callow dilettantism — still have a chance after all.