[ERIC.FOLTIN]

The Squad. Four politicians who somehow turned Twitter discourse into an entire governing philosophy. Humanity really looked at cable news food fights and said, “yes, let’s elect the comment section.” Still, if I’m picking the public figures I disagree with the most, it’s probably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib as a collective political force. Not because they’re loud. Politics has always been loud. Not because they’re progressive. America has room for every ideology short of “maybe raccoons should run the IRS.” It’s because they often seem more interested in performance than practical outcomes.

Back in the 90s tech era, there was this unspoken engineering rule: if your system crashes every ten minutes, it doesn’t matter how flashy the interface looks. Function mattered. Stability mattered. Results mattered. You could have the coolest glowing CGI intro on your website, complete with MIDI music and “under construction” GIFs spinning like a slot machine designed by caffeine addicts, but if the page took four minutes to load on a 56k modem, people bailed. Politics feels similar now. The Squad mastered the aesthetics of outrage culture before most politicians even understood the internet had escaped AOL chatrooms.

What frustrates me is the substitution of slogans for systems. Real governance is ugly, tedious work. It’s database maintenance for civilization. Nobody claps when the infrastructure patch installs correctly. Nobody trends hashtags over balanced budgets or functional transit systems. But that’s the actual job. The Squad often approaches politics like social media firmware updates pushed directly into public consciousness without regression testing. Every issue becomes a moral spectacle, every disagreement gets framed as existential warfare, and compromise gets treated like corrupted code.

The bigger issue is how this style infected everybody else. Republicans became more theatrical. Democrats became more theatrical. Cable news became an endless loop of emotional overclocking. The political operating system now runs entirely on engagement metrics. Rage is profitable. Nuance dies instantly because nuance doesn’t fit into a viral clip squeezed between ads for erectile dysfunction medication and reverse mortgages. Civilization built the Information Age and somehow used it mostly to scream at strangers holding fish-eye phone cameras in parking lots.

I also think The Squad represents a broader misunderstanding of economics and human behavior. You can’t simply declare idealism into existence. Incentives matter. Markets matter. Human beings are irrational little goblins who will absolutely exploit loopholes if you leave them open long enough. Any political worldview that ignores trade-offs eventually collapses under its own weight like an overclocked Pentium processor with no cooling fan. Sparks everywhere. Smell of melted plastic. Entire room smelling like regret.

That said, disagreement isn’t hatred. I don’t think these women are evil. I think they sincerely believe they’re improving the country. Intent matters. But good intentions alone are how you end up with software updates that delete entire hard drives because someone skipped quality assurance testing at 2 AM after six energy drinks and a motivational TED Talk.

The deeper problem is that modern politics rewards emotional branding more than competence. The Squad didn’t create that culture. They optimized for it better than almost anyone else. And honestly, that’s the most terrifying part.