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.
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