Message resonates in surprising ways with some of the president’s fans
Sanders’
The day before Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary last week, I was wandering the streets of Manchester. Donald Trump had just given a huge rally at the arena downtown, and floods of red-hatted fans were spilling out for the long trek back to their cars. Out of curiosity, I approached a number of them — the true die-hards who would still find a Trump rally novel at this point — to ask what they made of the field of Democratic candidates. Anyone they could conceivably tolerate? And in particular, what about Bernie?
The answers were all in a similar vein: They largely disagreed with the Sanders policy agenda. But, on some level, they kinda liked him — or at least, didn’t hate him. This could not be more different from the sheer, visceral loathing one universally found among Trump supporters in 2016 regarding the specter of a President Hillary Clinton. Rightly or wrongly, Hillary accumulated years and years of frothing resentment from conservatives (and many leftists) to the point that she was commonly viewed as something close to pure evil.
The same cannot be said for Sanders. Why? For one thing, Bernie is seen as a threat by his party’s establishment. In 2016, the Democratic National Committee did everything it could to thwart him, and being systematically maligned by the institutional party apparatus produces some degree of sympathy in Trump supporters who might otherwise find the abstract concept of “democratic socialism” mortifying. After all, Trump was (at least initially) maligned by the GOP establishment too.
And unlike Hillary, Bernie is largely invulnerable to charges of personal hypocrisy. There is almost nothing Bernie is saying now that you can’t find clips of him saying several decades ago in nearly identical language. It was the well-founded impression of entitlement, sleaze and corruption that engendered such intense animosity toward Hillary in 2016 — and Bernie exhibits virtually none of that.
The revulsion of Clinton also had a policy component; beneath all the pandering, focus-grouped pablum, she was ultimately a corporatist D.C. insider likely to drag the country into more wars and maintain the status quo on trade. Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Mike Bloomberg all evoke similar suspicion from the Trump faithful. Conversely, Bernie exists almost in a realm of his own — he will have the ability to channel some select “America First” impulses through a left-wing filter, without the baggage of scattershot, scapegoat-fueled Trumpism.
Of course, if Sanders is the Democratic nominee, the Republican Party infrastructure will dig up whatever they possibly can to destroy his image. It will accuse him of everything under the sun, and try to make him look like a dangerous radical. The point, though, is that he starts from a much more favorable foundation than did Hillary, who was never going to shed the perception that she was the embodiment of depraved elitist rot.
Even Trump himself has recognized Bernie’s formidability, especially in contrast with Bloomberg, who is currently in the process of executing one of the most staggering oligarchic interventions in the history of U.S. electoral politics — evidently in a bid to force a contested convention and purchase the Democratic nomination.
“Sanders has real followers, whether you like him or not, whether you agree with him or not,” Trump said recently. “I happen to think it’s terrible what he says. But he has followers. Bloomberg’s just buying his way in.”
The most vehement of these followquainted ers are well-known to anyone acwith social media. Often derided as “Bernie Bros,” they constitute a veritable online army. Democratic rivals who draw the ire of Bernie’s brigades (better to use a more genderneutral term, because Sanders is extremely popular among young women) often whine about the alleged uncharitably of these supporters.
But if you are whining about mean tweets, you are probably losing. And in a general election, they would be deployed in full force against Trump — a real campaign asset, as silly as it may seem.
Nominating Sanders is not without risks. One rabbit hole he’d have to avoid going down is giving over to the temptation to indulge in incessant, ridiculous activist-speak — which is popular among a narrow breed of young, overlyeducated Democratic Party operatives, but utterly unrecognizable to much of the public.
For instance, contrary to what some may demand, Sanders absolutely does not need to ever clarify “his pronouns.”
Everybody knows he is a man, and should be referred to with words he/ him. The candidates who have felt the need to put their pronoun information in their Twitter bios (most prominently Elizabeth Warren) have predictably plummeted into a consultant-driven identity politics death spiral.
Same with the term “Latinx.” Bernie’s campaign smartly doesn’t bother adopting newfangled jargon that professional advocates love, but working-class Latinos never use.
This, of course, does not mean that Sanders is insensitive to the needs of transgender people, or of Latinos; as president he will certainly enact policies that protect their rights. It simply means that he generally refrains from playing weird, alienating identity wordgames that electrify a small sliver of hyper-ideological activists but annoy pretty much everyone else.
Bernie’s task in the general election will be to present himself as a patriotic public servant who loves America (and Americana) but also happens to be a democratic socialist.