There’s a tiresome ritual that seems to have started with the Trump era, which comes every time an older generation’s Republican dies. Like clockwork, as if every reporter was sent the same sheet of talking points the night before, a stream of articles, tweets, statements, and other ephemera spills onto the Web, telling us what a moderate force this man was, how he’s the last of an era of bipartisanship and civility, how different he was to the disagreeable, corrupt, and often extreme right of today, and wouldn’t it be nice to be back there again.

It happened with John McCain. It happened with Colin Powell. It happened with George H. W. Bush. Hell, it happened with Bush’s son, and he’s not even dead yet. And sure as the sun comes up, it’s happening again with former Senate majority leader Bob Dole, who died this past Sunday at age ninety-eight.

Here’s an obituary from his native Kansas, mourning his “spirit of compromise,” and his “legacy” of “tireless effort to find common ground with political opponents.” Here’s Dole as a symbol of “a better path not taken,” a man we should remember for how he “took governing seriously.” He “led to get things done,” the Washington Post editorial board tells us, spurred by his death to “wish there really was a bridge to the past.” He “came to epitomize a kinder day in an increasingly partisan Washington.” He “reminds us of an era in which the two parties were willing to work together.” His “faith in the possibility of collaboration and compromise seems all too rare now.” Even the New Republic got in on this tedious act, lamenting that Dole’s “pragmatism” made him “out of step with a changing GOP.”