If you’ve read the obituaries for even one old-guard conservative who died in the post–Donald Trump era, you know more or less how they’re all going to go: the anecdote of personal kindness; the humanizing, quirky details; the collection of sweeping platitudes packed with words like “legacy” and “service” that fail to mention anything they actually did; and of course, the endless tributes to the way this person embodied long-lost political values like civility, bipartisanship, compromise, and friendship.

So it’s gone with Orrin Hatch, the conservative stalwart and longest-serving Republican senator, who died earlier this week at the age of eighty-eight. As with every long-serving Republican, politicians and pundits have wasted no time in turning Hatch into the last representative of a bygone era of supposed political moderation and camaraderie — an era that, to the extent it ever actually existed, largely predated Hatch’s time in the Senate, and which he played a leading role in finally smothering.

Hatch didn’t really embody these values any more than did Bob Dole, John McCain, George H. W. Bush, or the countless other old-guard Republicans who’ve been held up as the same over the past few years. But Hatch did embody something else: the political shift from the values of the New Deal era to the long period of corporate-backed, anti-government nihilism that we remain mired in, and which has caused every simmering crisis that we’re currently staring down.