bernie's bro problem
Bernie has a bro problem.
It’s not new, nor is it, I should say, the only thing we should be talking about when considering Sanders as a candidate for the presidency.
Nor, I should say, do Bernie Bros make up a majority of Sanders supporters. I know and respect a ton of Sanders supporters. The most gracious response I can summon for a Bernie Bro is an eyeroll, an unpublished clapback, and an early block. All Bernie Bros are Sanders supporters, but not all Sanders supporters are Bernie Bros.
Nevertheless, they persist. The bros. They are a problem. I almost didn’t publish this. I’ve got shit to do this week. But then I thought, isn’t that the whole reason a bro… bros? To discourage people from speaking up?
Whenever we have a public conversation weighing Sanders’ strengths and weaknesses, somehow they find us. Then they make every conversation not about Sanders’ policy or vision for America, but rather his loose affiliation with a cadre of gleeful trolls who flay strangers in the name of their leader. Gotta tell you, #NotMeUs sounds very different from the mouths of men I don’t know who have just called someone a stupid cunt. Like, slightly less inspirational, I’d say. More… you’ll be sorry when my friends get here.
Here’s the most popular maneuver in the Bernie Bro playbook:
Find folks who moved from Warren to Biden and also cited the toxicity of the most vocal wing of Sanders’ base as one of the reasons they didn’t go Sanders.
Then, accuse them of being too sensitive to care about babies in cages. Tell them they hate poor people, want chronically ill folks to die, and hope that immigrant families will be deported.
a sampling from a recent thread by a Warren to Biden voter
Look, I don’t have any numbers on how many Democratically-affiliated Twitter users who had an interaction with an abusive Bernie Bro suddenly decided to reverse course on all of their values. I guess it is possible that some Karen or Miranda criticized Sanders or expressed support for Biden, sashayed away for a midday creme brûlée, then opened her Twitter, saw a deluge of vitriol from users with rose emojis next to their names, and said to herself, “Well, that’s tears it. I’m in the Tea Party now. I’m going to buy guns for my kids’ teachers, put my four-year-old in conversion therapy, and drill Alaska while I cackle ‘How can it be global warming? I’m wearing a sweater in March!’“
I mean, I guess that could have happened. I think it’s more likely that some Warren voters were attracted to Biden’s likely ability to legislate effectively. I do think it’s possible that a lot of progressive white women reverted to a #notusme mentality once it became clear that Warren wasn’t viable, and decided to go pragmatic world-rebuilding at the expense of radical world-remaking.
I also think it is very likely that many Warren voters were turned off, alienated, and alarmed by the behavior of the Bros.
I’ll tell you true, when I first saw those memes, I did an eyeroll. A pretty big one. Luckily, I’ve matured enough to know that when I’m eyerolling, it sometimes means I need to check in to make sure I’m not reacting instinctively in a way that merits deeper analysis.
(Like the time someone said “Colin Farrell is one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood,” and I was like ooookaaaaay. But then, I said to myself, I said, Katie, was he not a revelation in In Bruges? Was he not unglamorously magnificent in The Lobster? Has this man, once a ten-cent piece of hottie-patottie workout-montage lady bait in such pictures as SWAT and The Recruit, not worked his ass off to create a career in which he gets to go weird, like, as much as he wants to? So I hereby retract my aforementioned eyeroll, and I say thee yea, Colin Farrell stans. I SAY THEE YEA.)
My reaction to the Bernie Bro memes made me realize that they merited analysis at least as deep as I dedicated to the filmography of Colin Q. Farrell, esquire, the dimples of our generation. So, here goes:
Bernie Bro abusive behavior may alienate voters by hurting feelings on an individual level, but the widespread abuse has far more damaging impact in that it fosters mistrust of the campaign’s values and tactics, distracts from the candidate’s message and valuable policy positions, casts doubt on the effectiveness of Sanders’ ability to build a coalition, and forces voters to question his commitment to genuine inclusiveness.
First, when the most vocal advocates for a movement are routinely abusive, and that abuse proceeds unhindered by the leader of that movement, it’s hard not to conclude that the movement has implicitly adopted abuse as a tactic to both bully supporters into compliance and recruit supporters who want permission to abuse others.
(CW: rape)
People who use abuse as a tactic to overthrow an abuser remind me of the people who make jokes about prison rape for Cosby and Weinstein. When your pursuit of justice finds you holding the weapon that you claim to be trying to eradicate, you need to stop. Maybe find a shattered mirror to gaze into for a minute.
When your pursuit of justice finds you holding the weapon that you claim to be trying to eradicate, you need to stop. Maybe find a shattered mirror to gaze into for a minute.
I am against rape and you are, too. (Right??) I’m against rape of everyone. I’m against rape in every situation. I’m against rape as a punishment. I’m against rape as revenge. I am unconditionally, 100% against all the rape.
(end cw)
In the same way that I’m against sexual violence, without exception, I am also against doxxing, gaslighting, sexism, racism, and constructing the illusion of unity by bullying anyone who disagrees with you into silence. I recognize the tactics, and the idea of validating those tactics by supporting the candidate scares the ever-lovin’ crap out of me.
Second, if this is how you campaign, how will you govern? Yes, I’ve heard Sanders condemn sexist, racist, vitriolic abuse, and more than once. But what has he done to curb the way these trolls have hijacked his messaging and campaign and used his own words to abuse people that Sanders claims to want to uplift?
I know it’s not his job to control other people. It is his job to lead a movement that is allegedly not about me, but us. It is his job to protect not just the intention of his message, but the actualization of that message in the world. It is his job to understand which “me” groups the most vocal “us” group continues to exclude, mock, abuse, and punish. I believe Sanders means “not me, us” as a promise to uplift the marginalized; you need to understand that Bernie Bros wield it as a threat, or at the very least, a closed-minded and exclusionary framework for silencing dissent in the name of unity.
It is his job to understand which “me” groups the most vocal “us” group continues to exclude, mock, abuse, and punish.
The problem isn’t that the tactics hurt my (or whoever’s) feelings, although they are designed to do so until I (or whoever) relent, pipe down, and get on board.
The problem is that the tactics fundamentally undermine the candidate’s message, and cast doubt on his ability to create an inclusive coalition. Which brings us to…
Third, as Brittany Packnett Cunningham brilliantly wrote on Twitter:
“Understand this: It’s not that people simply mean ‘you were rude to me so I won’t vote for your guy.’
It’s that people mean, ‘your movement doesn’t seem to want me, and your coalition doesn’t seem to be open to me. I’m worried the execution of your policy will be the same.’
... And again I repeat: inclusion is not about ‘coddling.’ That severely diminishes the experience of inequality in this country that Bernie supporters care about. Inclusion or exclusion in the movement signals to folks what will happen w policy.”
If I wanted an administration characterized by racist, sexist abuse, doxxing and bullying of people who disagree with people in power, furious swarms that create a culture of fearful silence around criticizing a leader… I could just stay home in November.
I already have a petty, vicious, goon-heavy government. I don’t need to vote for someone whose champions are going to behave much the same way, and then add insult to injury by trying to convince me that I’m too stupid to know they’re really on my side. At least Trump trolls never try to convince me that we’re palsies.
PLEASE KNOW I am not suggesting that anyone stay home in November, nor that Sanders would run a Trumpian policy agenda. I agree with most of his policies. I’m glad his voice is in this race, moving the Overton window to the left far enough that Medicare for All feels mainstream. Holy shit, when did that happen?!?! Senator Sanders, I want to say thank you, sincerely, for your uncompromising commitment to progressive policies.
But I am suggesting—nope, I’m flat-out stating—that the tactics employed by the most zealous Trumper look uncomfortably like the tactics employed by the most zealous Bernie Bro. Those tactics are rooted in zealotry, not progressivism or conservatism, or even belief in a candidate. They are rooted in desire to win, ideally something from someone else.
I could respond to these memes by putting words back in the mouths of Bernie Bros: “I can be as abusive as I want until the problems are solved in the only way I think they should be solved, by the only person I think should solve them.”
I could point out that flaying strangers on the internet does nothing to help the candidate of their preference, and while they’re claiming to do it because they’re selfless, the reality is that whipping strangers on the internet so you can feel powerful and righteous is selfish and ugly. I would and have said the same thing to people who supported a number of other candidates in this race. Yet these bros, they persist.
I don’t say those things online because I think there’s a more important conversation to have here. Bernie’s bro problem is bigger than individual bros and their individual posts on individual timelines and feeds. Either with or without the implicit permission of the leader (and I sincerely hope it’s without), Bernie’s message has been co-opted by a gang of sanctimonious bullies who drown out other voices, even those of other Sanders supporters who don’t resort to doxxing, bullying, sexism, racism, and other playground douche techniques. And the fact that this campaign’s character has been colonized so thoroughly does create a serious problem for Bernie. He’s got a bro problem.
Even though I’m not personally a Sanders supporter, I do respect and love a whole bunch of Sanders people. I know they’re sick of every conversation about their candidate getting sucked into the black hole created by the massive egos of these renegade bands of social media fuckmuppets. I know they wish they could say they support Sanders and get a follow-up question about Sanders, rather than about megalomaniacal basement trolls hell-bent on punishing every person who has the gall to disagree with them out loud. I remember feeling similarly irritated every time I’ve supported a woman candidate for president, and gotten the inevitable “Because you’re a woman, totes, I get it.”
I would love nothing more than to be able to evaluate Sanders on his own merits, but I can’t. Not while his campaign has done the bare minimum to address rampant abuse perpetrated in his name.
And that brings me to the final problem that the bros have created for Bernie: They’ve forced their candidate into a place where his sustained lack of proactive action leads me to think that he simply doesn’t care. They’ve forced their candidate into a place where I have to wonder if he understands how sexism and racism permeate the tissue of our lives—and as a white man endorsed by Shaun King and Joe Rogan, he was already working uphill on that front.
It makes me fucking angry that a minority of entitled douchebags has controlled the conversation on Sanders and led readers of my blog to ask if it’s the feminist thing to do to allow men to control the narrative.
It makes me fucking angry that if I chose to ignore their behavior to try to take the high road and evaluate Sanders on policy alone, they would come for me without giving a single mouse shit that I pointedly did not make the conversation about the bros.
This is the conundrum in which women often find themselves: identify sexism and you’re a whiner or a harpy. Ignore sexism and you’re complicit. I resent the hell out of these bros, who have hijacked too many conversations and put too many people in this untenable position. Doxxed if we do, damned if we don’t.
I hope I’m misinterpreting the campaign’s apparent apathy. I hope there’s a plan behind the scenes to manage Bernie’s bro problem. It would be an incredible shame if a candidate with so much to say goes down because he doesn’t take abuse seriously.
Lest anyone think I’m playing favorites, almost a year ago, I wrote a piece criticizing Joe Biden, far more pointedly than I criticized Sanders in this piece. When it comes to the two men duking it out in the Democratic primary, I am an agnostic observer, not a plant.
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