BERNIE SANDERS AND THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF

Summary: Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been modeling the five Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stages of grief as their candidate’s momentum begins to fade. Those five grief stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Sanders supporters have been confronting the first two grief stages, denial and anger. The Sanders camp will soon divide into two factions. One, composed of reasonable people, will make their peace with Hillary Clinton as the nominee of the Democratic Party, accepting her primacy and working to get her elected. Senator Sanders himself appears to be a member of this group. The other group, the irreconcilables and the intransigents, will never reconcile themselves to Sec. Clinton as the nominee of the party, and so they will pitch a fit and migrate into the camp of that other insurgent candidate, Donald Trump. The Democratic Party would be well rid of them.


In the wake of recent East Coast Democratic primaries in which Hillary Clinton scored a number of substantial victories in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New York, one can sense a certain shifting of the tide.

The insurgent, once-imagined-to-be-unstoppable, campaign of Vermont Senator Bernard Sanders seems to have encountered a metaphorical roadblock or two. The so-called path to nomination has materially eased for Sec. Clinton but has narrowed significantly for Bernard Sanders. It now appears, if not inevitable, certainly strongly likely that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the nominee for president of the Democratic Party.

And as the tide begins to run in Sec. Clinton's favor, supporters of Senator Sanders find themselves modeling Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-recognized five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and ultimately, acceptance.

But right now, what we're seeing from the Sanders campaign is an almost perfect recapitulation of the first two stages of the grieving process.

First, we’ve seen a great many Sanders supporters engaging in vociferous, vehement denial both of Sec. Clinton’s electoral momentum, and in some extreme cases, of her essential legitimacy as a candidate.

For example, every time Bernard Sanders has been victorious in a small state caucus ---with a largely white electorate participating in a fundamentally undemocratic process--- Senator Sanders’s victory in such a caucus has been spun by his campaign as a game changer, as an event of earth shattering magnitude demonstrating his manifest entitlement to the Democratic nomination.

By contrast, when Sec. Clinton has won fair and square, supporters of Senator Sanders have come out in droves to attack Sec. Clinton and to assail the legitimacy of her electoral victories. When Sec. Clinton was victorious in the Arizona primary, the Sanders team and his supporters pitched a fit, claiming that Hillary Clinton had been personally responsible for an unprecedented campaign of voter suppression, going so far as to post a petition on change.org demanding a “do over” of the Arizona Democratic primary.

The same howls of dismay were heard in New York State when Hillary Clinton trounced the Senator there by double digits. Moreover, many supporters of Senator Sanders fell back on the risible “rotten borough” argument that because more acres had supported Senator Sanders, acreage should outweigh people in the election, and that thus, Bernie had “won” New York State.

According to the Sanders supporters, Hillary’s decisive victories in New York, Bronx, Kings, Queens, Richmond, Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Orange, Rockland, Onondaga, Monroe, and Erie Counties should not count because Bernie Sanders carried more land area.

The fact that Hillary carried the Five Boroughs of New York City and that to carry the Five Boroughs would itself alone be enough to carry the state seems not to have dawned on the angry diehard supporters of Bernard Sanders. It reflects a political truth that we have always understood in this country, even if the United Kingdom continued to seat acres, not people, in Parliament until “Rotten Boroughs” were abolished in the great electoral reforms of 1832.

In short, the fact that Hillary has been winning bigger primaries and amassing greater numbers of delegates then Sanders has become unacceptable to his diehard, intransigent supporters, who have been engaged in the unproductive enterprise of denying the legitimacy of Sec. Clinton’s victories in the loudest and most earsplitting way imaginable.

Of course, if the Sanders supporters are in deep denial about the way in which their candidate is starting to lose, they are also angry.  Vein-poppingly, friendship-sunderingly, lawsuit-inducingly, apoplectically, angry. In fact, they’re so angry that they are now engaging in organized libel and slander, as well as organized efforts to silence Hillary supporters on social media.

All one has to do is look at social media to see the almost stupefying degree of anger being displayed by certain of those more intransigent supporters of Bernard Sanders. Now I think it’s probably fair to suggest that a majority of Sanders supporters will pass through all of the five Kübler-Ross stages of grief and finally accept that an imperfect friend, as Bill Maher has said, is light years better than a deadly enemy.

And when that happens, that reasonable portion of Sen. Sanders's supporters should be accepted into the ranks of Hillary Clinton supporters without anger or recrimination. We should remember the counsel of sometime Texas Agriculture Commissioner and longtime Democrat Jim Hightower, who observed that on primary election night there comes a time when supporters of the loser need to take the so-called midnight train over to the headquarters of the winner. On arrival, Hightower suggested, they need to engage in some fence-mending, have a helping (or two) of humble pie, and then they need to put their name on the volunteer list and work their hearts out for the nominee of the Party.

Several months ago, I suggested that no matter who the nominee of the Democratic Party turned out to be, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, neither candidate would have the luxury of conducting extensive background investigations and loyalty tests. The Democratic Party, I suggested, would need to take a leaf from Spain’s book. When Francisco Franco died in 1975, and Spain began her long journey back to democracy, Spanish society developed a so-called Pacto de Olvido, or “pact of forgetting.”

It was agreed among Spaniards at the time — and up to the present day as well — but who one had supported during the Franquista years was simply no longer be a legitimate or admissible subject of discussion. Spain, the consensus ran, could not afford the recrimination and backbiting attendant upon some sort of purge of Franco supporters now that the apparatus of falangism had been dismantled.

The Democratic Party, having been almost as badly fractured this year as Spain was during the Franquista years, should avail herself of a similar Pact of Forgetting. We cannot afford, nor should we embrace, a policy of vetting fellow Democrats on the basis of their support during the primary season.

Now, I know that this will not sit well with certain hyper-partisans on both sides the primary divide. I have served on numerous Democratic boards and committees that got themselves altogether caught up in trying to enforce pre-existing loyalties, in trying to determine who has been the truest believer for the longest time.

Indeed, when we see Bernie Sanders supporters attacking Hillary Clinton for having supported Barry Goldwater more than half a century ago, before she saw the light and came over from the Dark Side and opted to spend the rest of her career fighting for causes which any Democrat should be proud to fight, we know that we are dealing with True Believers of the most reckless sort.

These True Believers are the people who are the most angry right now. These True Believers are the people who want to bully Sec. Clinton and her supporters. These True Believers are the people who will engage in all manner of libel and slander, who will engage in orchestrated efforts to silence Hillary Clinton supporters, uncaring of the enemies they make. These True Believers are the people who blow a gasket if someone has the effrontery to say “I am voting blue, no matter who.”

And these “Truly Believing” Sanders irreconcilables should perhaps constitute an exception to the amnesty which I have suggested would be the better course of action. For the irreconcilables, by engaging in nihilistic, “burn-the-country-down” behavior have rather sacrificed any claim to our consideration.

Because, in truth, the irreconcilable faction among Sanders supporters, what we may call the Green Tea Party, bears a disturbing resemblance to that other insurgent candidate in the presidential race, Donald Trump. And if the Republican Party can find the hardihood to cast out The Donald and The Donald’s supporters, we should not fear to take a leaf from their book and do the same in our Party with the irreconcilable supporters of Bernard Sanders.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was wrong to suggest that all differences of opinion are irreconcilable, but Ilyich was right to suggest that the unity of the Party is something worth defending. Even among Democrats, we should be able to require a basic consensus as to who is entitled to be called a Democrat. Right now, I don’t see that the irreconcilable Sanders supporters have earned the right to be called Democrats.