America has found her new favorite socialist, and as a consequence, American conservatives have found their new most-relished bête noire. I refer of course to Miss Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the incoming New York congresswoman and self-professed “Democratic Socialist.”

Now on paper, conservatives’ disdain for AOC is perfectly unobjectionable. Not only are the freshman representative’s ideas, if taken seriously, a daunting threat to American liberty but she seems to have shunned the Acela train in favor of hopping all the way to DC from Brooklyn on one foot, the other embedded fixedly in her mouth as her public comments have suggested an ignorance of everything from basic economics to high-school civics and the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And yet… while I hate everything she claims to stand for, I can’t help but wince when I read conservatives on Twitter and elsewhere gleefully laying into Ocasio-Cortez. I can’t say that I’m rooting for her because I’m not, but I do sympathize for reasons I can’t entirely pin down. If you’d like you can stop reading here and assume that I’m a bitter Never Trumper, automatically endeared to any of the post-2016 conservative movement’s chosen objects of hate. (If I am, it’s because the previous choices have been so perplexing to me. Hillary Clinton, really? I’ve never seen a less inspired or more incompetent politician in my life. I’m supposed to go all Flight 93 over someone who couldn’t hijack a plane if she were Michael Palin with a fake gun?) Assuming that there’s more to it however, what follows, working from the most ephemeral to the more substantive, is a complete inventory of possible rationals for an anti-anti-Cortezismo.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that there’s some kind of latent millennial solidarity at work here. Certainly, there’s more than a whiff of the self-reverential boomerism that infects so much right-leaning commentary at play in conservatives’ attacks on AOC. In essence though I think this is just another instance of the fixation on style over substance that causes so many criticisms of Trump to get stranded on the rocks.

I find little to like about the president but in retrospect I’ve come to be grateful for the unfiltered style which has revealed the man’s psyche sufficently for me to develop an informed opinion. The scripted-platitude generators that used to pass for politicians in the US often came with nasty surprises once we actually got to know them; we shouldn’t mourn their loss. Ocasio-Cortez is no different. Her breezy let-it-all-hang-out twentysomething style and social media accessibility are positive goods in that they shine a light on the real defects in her thinking.

Secondly, it has to be noted that too many conservatives have crossed the line from attacking AOC’s policies to attacking her clothing and physical appearance. This not only violates all kinds of important civic norms but it’s also bad politics and gives credibility to feminist narratives about conservative misogyny. If you’re going to strategically anathemetize someone, at least try to make yourselves look better in comparison. For the sake of bipartisanship, I’ll say that I find Ocazio-Cortez to be both stylish and attractive. (Since I’m a male of the roughly the same age and demographic category I’m sure you could chalk my reserve up to biology or misplaced gallantry and stop reading here as well.)

And then there’s Bernie. It seems unavoidable that for the immediate future the Democratic Party is going to be dominated by a powerful left wing. That being the case, it’s all our interest that the torch of leadership be passed as quickly as possible away from the far left’s current guru, a man who honeymooned in the Soviet Union providing him with a history of genuine affinity with a hostile foreign power, which just happened to be the most thoroughly blood-soaked regime in all of human history. Cortez may be an unbearable naif and culpably ignorant of the misery which her ideology has inflicted over the last century, but culpable ignorance trumps culpable knowledge. “Real socialism has never been tried” is an idiot’s evasion but it beats the hell out of “I’ve seen the future and it works!”

And frankly, along these lines I’ve found conservatives’ attitudes toward the extreme left in recent years to be troubling. While figures like Sanders and Corbyn (who spied for Czechoslovakia) may be ceremonially invoked to indicate the evil’s of the great “them,” conservatives seem functionally content to play both sides against the middle and fixate upon the near enemy, whether May, Clinton, Cameron, etc. — a strategy which was a hallmark of late Roman Emperors. How many times did Trump express pity over poor Bernie’s treatment by the DNC during the presidential debates? Wake up people, there are actual reds in the world who we should be far more concerned over than dilettante socialists and career grifters.

Most significantly though, I think most AOC critics seem to forget that she’s been elected to the House of Representatives.

There are no cookie-cutter offices in our system and each has its own institutional character. The age requirement for the lower house is set five years lower than the Senate for good cause. One reason we have a House of Representatives is to give those who are young and stupid, but politically talented, a crash course in legislation before they can cause too much real damage, and maybe smooth off some of their ideological rough edges. Complaining over a freshman congresswoman’s lack of experience misses the point.

The house serves as both a pressure valve and a barometer. If batty economic utopianism is part of what’s going on in the mind of the great democracy sufficiently to get someone like AOC elected, we should know about it. More than that, we should give those tendencies a voice in the system, thus coopting them. This is how we avoid actually revolutionary tremors from shaking the superstructure (this is only my penultimate metaphor). After that, it’s up to the components of our mixed government system that are charged with constraining the popular will to take appropriate action. The lower chamber is meant to be, among other things, a democratic petting zoo full of demagogues and holy rollers, where one can observe all the variety of funky-smelling political animals up close. William F. Buckley, after all, endorsed radical socialist Allard Lowenstein on similar grounds.

I wouldn’t endorse AOC nor vote for her or anyone like her. But in a round about way I’m glad that she is where she is. The founders left us a great system and it’s usually working to repair itself even when it seems to be broken. In this case, the best way to let that system work would be to ignore Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, take away some of the media incentive for her to continue playing her present character, and check in sometime in the next decade to see what she’s become. Despite myself, I’m interested to find out.