THE UNBEARABLE WHITENESS OF #FEELINGTHEBERN

Summary: Despite the efforts of certain Sanders supporters to spin to the contrary, what we’re witnessing with the Bernie Sanders campaign is a lot like John Anderson’s failed third-party campaign in 1980. Bernie's supporters, like Anderson's tend to be well educated, urban or college town liberals, generally speaking strong in the Northeast and weak in the South. But the elephant in Bernie’s living room, the one his acolytes would like us to ignore, is that his support base is overwhelmingly white. Bernie has not been structurally positioned to understand the dynamics of the African-American community, because it is largely nonexistent in the Green Mountain State. Because he has not had the opportunity that Hillary Clinton had, coming from a state with a substantial African-American population, Bernie, and his supporters, have been curiously ham-handed and tone deaf in making the case for his candidacy to the African-American community. Apparently, to #feeltheBern, you have to have experienced the unbearable whiteness of being. Bernie deserves better messengers.  Much better messengers.


As the numbers continue to get crunched following Super Tuesday, we start to see a profile emerging for Bernie Sanders supporters. They’re either millennial, or they’re well-educated liberals living in largely liberal constituencies, or some combination of the above. His support comes much more out of college towns than out of farm towns, and what else we know about Bernard Sanders’s supporters is that they are overwhelmingly white.

We know that Sanders crumbles in primary states where large portions of the electorate are African-American. That’s not surprising. Anyone who was at all familiar with Bill and Hillary Clinton knows how close the relationship is between the Clintons and the African-American community. Before anyone had ever heard of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton was often referred to as “America’s first black president.” The explanation for that is simple. Bill Clinton, and by extension, Hillary Clinton, had an unerring, nay, preternatural, ability to reach out to the African-American community, to understand that communities fears, its hopes, in short, to know what made the African-American community tick.

Bernie Sanders, for all his appeal to liberal Democrats (full disclosure: I love what Bernie says; I love the way he says it; I’d like to see Bernie Sanders as Vice President to Hillary’s president; I think they’d be an unstoppable team, with Vice President Sanders holding President Clinton’s feet to the fire on the progressive issues that mean very much to us,) has not been able to close the sale with large sections of the African-American community. I think part of the problem that Bernie, quite bluntly, is that he has spent the last 30 years representing one of the whitest states in the union. Because he represents the overwhelmingly white Green Mountain State, he hasn’t had the opportunity that Hillary Clinton had in Arkansas of becoming acquainted with and sensitive to the concerns that animate the African-American community.

And because he hasn’t had those opportunities, he has made some unfortunate mistakes in his African-American community outreach. He hasn’t been able to command the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, and aside from a few endorsements from people like Cornel West, whose value as an endorser is open to grave question, he’s not demonstrated broad and deep African-American community support. Now, that’s not to say that he wouldn’t have much greater support if one of two things happened; either he gets the nomination of the Party, in which case I do believe the African-American community will rally to him in preference to Donald Trump, or he will, in the relatively short time remaining before other primaries take place, learn to make a case to the African-American community that is both cogent and convincing.  The success of his campaign will depend on it, and on his ability to control his obstreperous followers.

For the thing that will militate strongly against Sanders being able to make a cogent and convincing case the African-American community is the condescending and dog whistle racist tone of a disturbingly large number of his supporters. Most Sanders supporters are white. That’s not an indictment, it’s a simple statement of fact. Most Sanders social media supporters are under the age of 30. That’s not a demographic calculated to be able to speak with any kind of empathy or authority to African-Americans. What’s worse, is that an astonishingly large number of Sanders supporters come from what can be charitably described as “white privileged” backgrounds. And when you read social media postings from such Sanders supporters, the white privilege oozes from every pixel. You don’t have to be a semiotician or a semanticist to be able to deconstruct the textual cues in the language of Sanders supporters. A law degree or graduate work in English will more than suffice.

The texts and comments from Sanders supporters not only breathe misogyny, they also conceal deep undercurrents of racial animus. When a millennial Sanders supporter takes to his keyboard and lambastes an African-American activist who has been working Democratic campaign since long before he was born, suggesting that she is too stupid to understand the dynamics of this campaign, or that she is a corporate shill, or that she is a sellout, we may wonder just where all that privileged white rage comes from.

And it would not be too great a leap of faith to infer, based on the texts we are seeing any evidence they represent, that Bernie Sanders, from no personal fault of his own, has managed to tap in to a kind of Trumpian racism of the left, in which the Other is defined as all those silly African-Americans who don’t know enough to #feeltheBern, presumably because they are foolish and easily deluded by the blandishments of Hillary Rodham Clinton. That kind of analysis is, let us shame the devil and tell the truth, racist. And it’s made worse because it’s racism that comes from within the Democratic Party.

We vaunt, and usually quite rightly, a sense of moral superiority over Republicans because after the great flip that occurred post-World War II, it was the Republicans who adopted the ideology and methodology of Jim Crow racism, while the Democrats repented of their sins, cast off the fetters of racism, and, beginning with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, opened their arms to embrace the African-American community and, as a practical matter, the untapped political potential of the African-American vote, not only in the great industrial cities of the North and the Pacific coast, but also throughout the South as well. 

Thus, when I see angry white supporters of Bernard Sanders speaking in the kind of coded phraseology of racism, sexism, and Othering that we have come to expect from Donald Trump and his supporters, I almost despair of my Party. I had thought that over 50 years, my Party had grown up; that like Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, my Party had had its conversion experience, and that something like scales had fallen from its eyes, Acts 9:18, and that it had been given to us to see the light so that we might give ourselves over to the great task of making America whole again, building that more perfect union that our forebears envisaged in the preamble to the Constitution.

I despair of the atavism that I see coming from Senator Sanders’s supporters, who seem prepared to burn down the country rather than accept the possibility of having an imperfect friend in the White House, rather than a deadly enemy. I’m too old, and too damn ugly, to put up with absolute tests for absolute purity. Unfortunately, too many of Bernie’s supporters don’t seem to realize that that’s what they are demanding. Utopia will never be secured in a single day, no matter how much Bernie Sanders white, bright, millennial supporters may want it. And to the extent that they believe that they can attain utopia in a day, or make the revolution happen with a single election, they merely validate Mao Zedong’s dictum: too much study makes you stupid. It’s time for Sanders supporters to climb down off their high horse, drop the racist, sexist rhetoric, and get right with their millions of fellow Democrats. Bernie’s message is good and worthwhile, but Bernie deserves a lot better messengers.

IS PARIS BERNING?

Summary: The elections of Super Tuesday demonstrated that Bernie Sanders’s momentum is not what it had been thought; the Vermont Senator may not be unstoppable, and his path to the nomination may have just gotten a lot narrower. What we’re seeing is Bernie Sanders own setback, like the setback of the Germans at the river Marne in 1914, when the unexpected resistance of the French and British armies jolted German hopes of a swift victory and brought France safely into 1915. As Bernie’s campaign begins to hit roadblocks, his supporters have become, not to put too fine a point on it, more frightened about the outcome and consequently more strident in their denunciations of Hillary Clinton. Their rhetoric has become nihilistic, and they now talk of defecting to Donald Trump, presumably because America doesn’t deserve their greatness. If Bernie Sanders can’t get his more unhinged adherents under control, he will drive people into Hillary’s camp, and the Sanders campaign will go glimmering.

 The elections on Super Tuesday produced the results many prognosticators and political animals expected. Solid wins for Hillary Clinton in most of the South, together with a somewhat unexpected primary win for Bernard Sanders in Oklahoma and in states with caucuses. Perhaps the biggest surprise of the evening, however, was that Hillary Clinton took Massachusetts, a northeastern, heavily liberal state with an all-Democratic congressional delegation.

With super Tuesday now over, or as the British might put it “all over, bar the shouting,” the apparent momentum the senator had had after Mrs. Clinton’s equivocal win in the Iowa caucuses and the trouncement she suffered at Senator Sanders’s hands in New Hampshire, seems to have evaporated. Despite Senator Sanders’s efforts to put a happy face on the outcome of super Tuesday, the fact remains that his path to the nomination of the Democratic Party for President of the United States has gotten significantly narrower in the last 72 hours.

If yesterday morning Senator Sanders had seemed unstoppable, today may represent for him his own Marne moment; in September, 1914, Germany’s seemingly unstoppable advance on Paris was stopped at the Marne River, when the hard-fought French Army and British Expeditionary Force rallied before Paris, attacked the German flank, saved Paris, and helped bring France safely into 1915. I would imagine this morning but the mood at Sanders headquarters is somewhat similar to that prevailing at OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung), or German army headquarters on the day following the battle of the Marne.

As it becomes depressingly clear to Sanders supporters that the path to victory has become less and less obtainable for their candidate, their mood and rhetoric have become increasingly nihilistic. We now hear so-called Bernie or Bust adherents openly declaring that they will either sit out the election in November or that they will cast a protest vote for Jill Stein, the perennial, unsuccessful Green Party candidate, or worse, they’ll vote for Donald Trump on the theory that somehow by having nominated Hillary Clinton the Democratic Party, and by extension, the country, will deserve whatever Trump inflicts upon us.

Let me now unapologetically go all Godwin: all this “Protest Vote for Trump” talk merits comparison with Adolf Hitler’s frenzied demands that occupied Paris be destroyed, rather than conceded to the free French and the other Allies when it became clear that Paris must truly be liberated from four years of Nazi occupation. I had not thought that it would be necessary to go all Godwin on Democratic candidates and their supporters. 

But when I see supporters of Senator Sanders saying things like “if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, I’ll vote for Trump and what the country burn,” or “I’ll cast a vote for Jill Stein and accept four years of Donald Trump in the White House,” I’m reminded, far too forcefully to remain silent, of Hitler’s directive for the destruction of Paris. I’m reminded how he is reported to have wandered around his headquarters in East Prussia asking “brennt Paris?” Is Paris burning?

Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. All you have to do is look at just about any social media outlet or digital news source which even mentions Hillary Clinton. And that’s not even conservative sources. Left-wing sources are full of nihilistic rhetoric that appears to be intended to accomplish a number of things. First, it’s intended to rally the base, by putting as positive a spin as possible on Bernie’s poor performance in the South, and upon polling numbers which now suggest that not only would Secretary Clinton defeat Donald Trump, but also that she is opening up significant numerical leads in states which have yet to run their primary elections.

Second, there is a kind of child-throwing-a-temper-tantrum quality to all this, as if by stamping their feet and waving their arms and trotting out every discredited right-wing trope that has ever been deployed against Hillary Clinton, the Sanders campaign can somehow stave off the inevitable. Unfortunately, the angrier Sanders supporters get, the more they drive the undecideds into Hillary’s camp. 

I warned about this months ago, in a post entitled “Bernie Sanders’ woman problem” in which I suggested that as the primary season developed further, Bernie’s supporters would do him a real disservice by pissing off women who would in their turn kiss off Bernie. It’s unfortunate that this seems to be the case. I was one of the early commenters on this phenomenon, but it’s become so pervasive that it has now received numerous instances of coverage in both digital and mainstream media.

Third, the nihilistic tone of Bernie’s supporters also indicates that a not insubstantial number of them are willing, in fact, to betray the Democratic Party and what it stands for because of sheer antipathy toward Hillary Clinton, and by extension, toward Hillary Clinton supporters. This troubles me deeply. Democrats, or at least left-wing Democrats, have apparently forgotten the virtues of loyalty and perseverance. By being willing to give the country into the hands of Donald Trump and his supporters, these “Bernie or bust” Democrats illustrate what political treason is all about. 

Apparently, none of them understands, or they refuse to understand, the ramifications of Republican victory this November. No matter how hard you try to reason with them, the Sanders irreconcilables are ready to stab the Democratic Party in the back, while loudly proclaiming to all with ears to hear that they, themselves, alone, are truly principled Democrats, and that the rest of the party, those of us who are willing to fall in line loyally behind whoever is the nominee, including, by the way, Barack Obama, are “sellouts.”

For the life of me, I cannot understand why any self identified Democrat would call a president of his own party a “sellout.” That kind of disloyalty will ensure that Donald Trump is inaugurated president on January 20, 2017, unless loyal Democrats rally around the party’s candidate, who at this stage of the game, looks like Hillary Clinton.