Washington Post: Opinion: This Gen Z Democrat is deftly skewering right-wing fantasies
Rep. Maxwell Frost, the first Gen Z member of Congress, had numerous breakthrough moments this week during hearings run by House Republicans. The Florida Democrat’s performance did more than unmask the folly of GOP investigations, though it certainly did that. Subtly but unmistakably, he signaled a generational turn in the Democratic Party.
Young, rising Democrats such as Frost and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — whose own big moment this week revealed Twitter’s special treatment for Donald Trump — are putting their stamp on the party by modeling how to break through the informational clutter.
“Oftentimes, our party has a problem with having a simplified message that’s able to cut through all the noise,” Frost told me in an interview. “This is something I think Republicans are actually good at.” He added: “It’s something we can get better at.”
During a Tuesday hearing on border security, Frost used his backbench seat on the Oversight Committee to get two border police officials to overturn the entire premise of the GOP argument on immigration, that Democrats want “open borders”:
Note the “Dick and Jane” quality here, as though Frost were asking these officials to explain these truths to a child. This highlights a key move: While Democrats sometimes respond to things like the “open borders” claim with high dudgeon, here the tone is one of mockery and contempt.
Asked about this, Frost said he calibrates the tone of his responses to the seriousness of the underlying assertion.
“You match the energy of the claim,” Frost said, noting he hopes to “dismantle the other folks’ arguments but also really show people how absurd they are.” Outrage risks “elevating” weak claims, whereas mockery “diminishes” them, he said.
Similarly, Frost mocked Republicans for obsessing over Twitter’s treatment of a 2020 story about Hunter Biden. Frost pointed out that Republicans are angry that the story didn’t help Trump win in 2020, dryly noting: “That’s the point of this hearing.”
To drive home this idea, Frost also questioned a Twitter executive about the Trump White House’s pressure to take down a tweet by model Chrissy Teigen that attacked Trump in a highly colorful phrase:
Frost went out of his way to get the explicit phrase “p---y a-- b----” into the congressional record. This made the moment viral and underscored the absurdity of the whole affair.
Older Democrats sometimes seem beholden to a picture of the GOP as it existed in the 1980s (or earlier among certain much older Democrats). In their nostalgic vision, bipartisanship was an ideal that could be maintained through outrage and shaming.
By contrast, younger Democrats came of age in the aftermath of Newt Gingrich’s scorched-earth politics, conspiracy theories about the Clintons, the partisan Supreme Court’s handing of the presidency to George W. Bush, Karl Rove’s Iraq War propaganda, and the deranged “birtherism” directed at Barack Obama.
Frost also chalks up this generational difference to younger Democrats’ experience of defining events such as police killings and mass shootings “via social media,” which he described as “unifying moments” of national “trauma.” Previously, Frost was an activist in the segment of the gun control movement organized by social-media-savvy young people.
He uses a harder-edged approach when warranted, such as when he went after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reactionary use of government power to limit free expression. During the Twitter hearing, Frost underscored the absurdity of the GOP’s stated concerns about free speech with this detour into DeSantis’s suppression of it:
The generational difference goes only so far. Frost’s safe Democratic district in Orlando liberates him to adopt an approach oriented toward viral information warfare. Other youngish Democrats who represent tougher districts — such as Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia — are moving the party forward in a more conventional way, stressing bipartisanship and national security experience.
What’s more, older Democrats have had their own viral moments, such as when Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.) offered Republicans a brutal lesson on the First Amendment. Even here, though, you can discern a difference between Raskin’s party-elder-like approach and Frost’s archly detached internet-savvy mockery.
As media critic Jay Rosen notes, the sheer absurdity of these GOP hearings poses a challenge to our discourse: It’s hard to talk about them at all without lending them more validation than they merit.
If so, perhaps Frost’s approach offers an answer: Treat the hearings with the ridicule they deserve while marshaling the viral reach that this contempt facilitates to supplant bad information with good.
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By Greg Sargent