Maybe the bullying is the point
What if the bullying is the point? What if the antagonism that Bernie Sanders and his supporters demon- strate toward all challenges is less of a means than an end? What if the baffled irritation so many of us feel in response to that belligerence is, for Berners, mere proof of concept?
Ideologues like Bernie are grievance peddlers, merchants of resentment who can only be appeased by onestop-shop fulfillment fantasies, the kind of miracle cures the late Czech president and writer Václav Havel once described as offering “human beings the illusion of identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.”
The Bernie Bros’ bullying of the neoliberal, Hillary-bot wine-moms of the world is obviously not meant to persuade their targets, to feel the Bern, but to signal dominance. It’s a performance, meant to communicate an aesthetic of unrelenting alienation, a coded dance of anger as ritualized, predictable and exhilarating as thrashing in a mosh pit.
Those of us who support most of
Sanders’ agenda, who would like universal health care to actually happen, understand that it will require a president with a capacious enough sense of her own and others’ flawed humanity to welcome challenge, a sense of compassion expansive enough to broaden mandates, someone capable of attracting allies, building coalitions and navigating fraught political waters.
Sanders has responded to questions about those sorts of qualities with an impatience that borders on physical revulsion.
For Bernie and his supporters, compromise presents a kind of existential crisis, instantly rendering their performative style of politics obsolete. A punk in sensible shoes is no longer a punk.
Berner politics are animated by the production of irritation on the one hand, and alienation on the other. The perceived authenticity of a political figure, like that of a disaffected teenager’s favorite band, is the amount of aggravation he causes on the other side of a slammed door. The more he rattles the normies, the more he cements his status as The One True Progressive.
For Bernie, every delighted cackle and admonishing finger, every refusal to answer questions, every dismissive wave in the face of a woman, every condescending lecture to a person of color, must signal unsubtle, clumsy, aggravated “realness” to the tribe.
The stark, binary aesthetics of the Sanders campaign are meant to express only exclusion or inclusion, to perpetuate a permanent state of us-vs.-them embattlement.
This is why his and his followers’ behavior can seem inexplicably selfdefeating. Sanders may indeed win the nomination, despite (or because of ) his efforts to undermine the Democratic Party. Like many who have sought the nomination before him, he knows that millions of Democrats have nowhere else to go, and that the people he and his followers sneeringly dismiss as practitioners of “identity politics” are likely to choose a candidate who is merely indifferent to, rather than actively opposed to, their concerns. If Bernie were to win the presidency, he would run into a brick wall of resistance from a Republican Senate, or (if he were able to flip the Senate while running on a platform of Democrats Suck) one controlled by a strongly Bern-averse cohort disinclined to help him pass his agenda.
Which would leave him in the same position he’s occupied for 40 years, and from which he has always derived his identity: the heckler, wagging a finger, casting blame and spewing invective and being rewarded for it, without ever having to bone up on the details of legislation or the social cues of other human beings.
Yes, Bernie is infinitely preferable to Trump and, if he wins the nomination, we should all work our tails off to ensure he wins. But with Elizabeth Warren still in the race, a candidate committed to achieving every one of Bernie’s goals yet ready and willing to listen and learn, why would we cast our lot with someone as “insanely consistent” as Bernie?
Unless change isn’t really the point. Birkenhead is a writer.