When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez burst into Congress, a twenty-nine-year-old bartender and socialist defeating a fifty-seven-year-old white male, beneficiary of longtime voter quiescence, a narrative was born: insurgency!

And she wasn’t the only one that year. That same year, Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also joined Congress. In New York State and around the country, young challengers (many of them socialists or serious progressives) enjoyed similar success in state and local elections, beating long-entrenched, mostly mediocre-to-awful incumbents. Insurgency has been a great PR coup for the Left. It’s also invited some inspiring optimism about the political process; perhaps it need not be as closed off, as resistant to change, as many of us have assumed.

But sadly, there’s nothing inherently radical about insurgency. Centrists, once bitten in the ass by the rhetoric of newness and change, are warming to it. Now they’re getting revenge by borrowing the narrative in service of their own banal candidates. It turns out throwing the bums out isn’t an ideology, nor is it even a left or progressive goal in itself. Some of these new centrist youngbloods are significantly more conservative than the old white guys they’re challenging.