But the absence of deference didn’t mean they were hostile to government itself. “The need is not bigger government, but better government,” explained Class member Phil Sharp. They were a “‘new breed’ of legislator,” one commentator wrote, “young, brash, independent of its elders and their system, rejecting cronyism and parochialism, [imposing] a new order of ethics and independence.” “We believed government could be a force for good,” says Jim Blanchard, a Class member from Michigan who later served two terms as governor. Ideologically, “we were the products of the inspiration of JFK more than the Vietnam War.” Their goal, a New York Times reporter summarized, was to open up the legislative process, to “restore Congress to its proper constitutional rank as a co-equal branch of government [and] to staunch the systemic corruption that seemed to be the price of a bloated presidency.”

I can imagine that describing the current cohort of legislators, with the substitution of Iran (or the Middle East at large) for Vietnam and Obama for JFK. I hope it does at least, only without the subsequent conservative media takeover.

Though I do think the social media and meme battleground was already taken early by republicans and the democrats are only now finally catching up. And there are already a bunch of newts Gingrich we’ve been dealing with for the last decade (although one is terminally ineligible for future political roles as of last year).