I promised a pro-sanders Diary, where I’d call out the nonsense targeting both of our candidates. This is that post.
I figured the Ides of March is a good time to post it. If Bernie can sustain his campaign all the way to convention, I think he should. I don’t just say that because I live in DC, and would like to feel like my primary vote actually matters for once, I say it because I think it’s good for the Democratic Party and the country.
I think the comparison of these candidates with their Republican also-rans is a good thing.
I also think that what’s happening in caucus states is fantastic. Killer Mike said something about “Political Revolution” that I agree with rather a lot. A political revolution means voting in every single race, every single time. He said that people came out for Obama in 2008, but didn’t come out in 2010. That this is what people are going to do differently. I would be overjoyed if that happened.
First off, there’s an argument that voting for Bernie Sanders isn’t rational. That’s a stupid argument.
I do not think that the true believers, on any side, are ever good representatives for the things they believe in. Especially if they turn combative and aggressive. To focus on what’s said and done by that vocal minority is both deeply problematic, and hard to avoid.
The larger group of Bernie Supporters, which includes a fair number of my best friends, are entirely rational in their support for Bernie. You want a single sentence about why voting for Bernie is rational? If we don’t start voting for the things we want, we’ll never get them.
Bernie has a lot of important ideas, and those ideas need to be heard. I want to hear his ideas from candidates in the future. At the very least, the Democratic Party needs to be on notice about economic inequality and the student debt crisis. We need to respect our roots as a party for people that work for a living (in addition to being a party for a lot of other groups) or we’re going to be in trouble. My support for Clinton exists because of issues I care about that aren’t related to economic inequality, as well as her stance on financial regulation. But that doesn’t mean that I think that Bernie is somehow wrong. In a lot of ways he’s right, and we must recognize that, and must take him, his supporters, and his ideas seriously, especially if Clinton wins the nomination.
Notice I said “If.” I do not believe that it is a foregone conclusion that Clinton has won the nomination. Not until she has the votes she actually needs.
The Democratic Party must not make the same mistake we’ve made in the past. We cannot act as if the people who are backing Bernie don’t matter. In fact, we need to adopt a lot of Bernie’s policies as standard party policy.
If Bernie has lost the primary by the time it gets to DC, I might seriously consider casting a tactical vote for him as a Clinton supporter because I want him and his ideas taken seriously. I want the Democratic Party to pay attention to the issues that he, and his supporters, are raising, even though he’s my second choice. In that circumstance I’ll get to vote for Clinton in November anyway, so I’ll have been able to support both of the candidates that I genuinely like.
Some people are assholes. To go meta for a second, some people here are assholes. There are loud and aggressive Clinton supporters, and I’ve tried to do my part to self police. I’ve seen a great many sanders supporters trying to do that job as well. I hope that with the descent of the banhammer, clintonista instigators who are also a problem are going to get turfed out as well. Markos has said as much.
I also expect that a great many excellent Kossacks will still be around. And rather than calling out negative behavior, I want to call out two folks who I think are exemplary. TomP as an example of someone I disagree with but deeply respect, but consider to be entirely fair. He’s a critic of Clinton in areas where Clinton needs to be criticized. Ideally, the primary is a crucible into which candidates go, and the rhetoric is burned away to reveal the person beneath and their actual beliefs. That can’t happen without criticism. TomP and others who criticize Clinton on solid, intellectual bounds are doing us all a service. In that vein KatieC is particularly frustrating to debate because she’s so often right, and in arguments has a great skill at focusing in with laser precision on the issues we need to talk about. If you want to know why Sanders needs to be taken seriously on economic issues, talk to her and read her diaries. Whenever she says that Deficit Hawk thinking is a problem, she’s right. I know there’s anxiety about the banhammer, but I do not believe that either of these people will be affected, or indeed, the vast majority of Bernie supporters and diarists. Kos has said as much, in this interaction with TomP.
I would be very upset if either of these people were banned for doing any of the things I’ve seen them do, all of which I think falls well within the bounds of what DailyKos ought to be about: community. This is one of only a handful of places that I’ll be comfortable creating free content for as a writer, because it’s about political activism, community, and organizing more than it’s about content. But again, I don’t expect to see any of the great and wonderful Sanders supporters out there banned. I expect to see a small group of people from both sides turfed out. And I think most of us agree that they need to be.
Every political candidate, campaign, and idea attracts true believers. While the ones that support sanders are particularly loud and insufferable, they’re no worse than the ones who support Clinton. It’s just that the true believers in Clinton (who again, are equally insufferable) tend to be older. Old people, generally speaking, do not have the same presence in social media spaces as younger people.
The BernieBro meme is the result. It’s destructive, damaging to our party, and needs to die. I saw a very similar thing happen with the Scottish Independence campaign. I am apparently a “Cybernat” according to British State Media. That is, I’m someone who both uses twitter and supports Scottish Independence. This slur of overly aggressive Bernie/Independence Supporters being used to attack the campaigns they believe in is a portent of things to come. In future primaries, we will have true believers on every side posting hate memes about the other candidate. Unless we as the democratic party find a way to deal with that, we’re going to be in trouble. It’s not just the sanders campaign that needs to figure that out, it’s all of us. I don’t fault the Sanders campaign for that, especially when they have repeatedly reached out to try and stop this, going so far as helping get negative stories about Hillary Clinton banned from the Bernie Sanders Reddit Page.
DailyKos, when the banhammer descends, will actually still be LESS restrictive than /r/BernieSanders. And I look forward to that, because I think there’s a small group of trolls and insufferable douchecanoes on both sides that are keeping us from having the rational conversation we need to have. I don’t know why hate memes — against either of our candidates — were ever allowed on this website to begin with.
I don’t know what else Bernie could have done about the Brogressives. Bernie has spoken publicly against these guys, his communications directors have done a lot of hard work targeting them, and the sanders campaign has tried to self-police. I think that we’re going to need to figure something out going forward, because that problem is not one that will go away. I think that takes two forms.
1) Do not slur a campaign because of their online supporters, it just pisses off the rational majority.
2) Develop a series of tactics designed to target and silence dickishness, or allow people to manage their interactions on webpages.
Ignorelists are a great idea, actually. There’s a way to “mute” people on twitter. There are right wing trolls who’ve screamed at me for days or even weeks whose voices I’ve just not heard. Honestly, I think offering an “Ignore” option to dailykos users would go a long way towards making our interactions more civil. Especially if that came with an “Ignore until” option, so that someone you otherwise like but are fighting with vanishes from your feed until after the convention, when everyone can be friends again.
I think I have participated in No. 1, and for that I’m sorry. As I’ve been thinking about this, and talking with Scottish Independence folks, I realize that this slur against Bernie supporters is the same as the one used against me. Just because some of Sanders supporters are insufferable douchecanoes doesn’t mean that all of them are, or that we should take a negative view of a given candidate because of it. In fact, of all my close friends, a slim majority of whom are Sanders supporters, only one of them is a jackass. And he was a jackass long before he’d even heard of Bernie.
Again, as we move further into the age of the internet, this is going to be a problem for all of us. It won’t be going away any time soon. Sanders Supporter, Kossack, and excellent human being Wil Wheaton has a rule about this. Wheaton’s Law, put simply, is “Don’t be a dick.” We as a society need to collectively embrace Wheaton’s law. He’s called out the Bernie Bros while also arguing in the strongest possible terms for his candidate. What he wrote was an excellent read.
I think Bernie is a great candidate, I think the vast, vast majority of his supporters are fantastic, rational people, and I think we need a way to mute the insufferable true-believers on both sides that are making this primary process so frustrating.
This should be a time of rejoicing for our party. We’ve got a fantastic president, we have one of the most issues-oriented campaigns we’ve ever seen, we’ve got an opportunity to have a real debate about the future of the democratic party. I still haven’t been able to have the kind of conversation about this race that I’ve wanted to have. At least online. In the real world, I’ve had that conversation plenty of times. And I think that’s a good thing.
I want Bernie to stay in the race because of what it means in Caucus States. I talked about this on Irreverent Testimony, where we also discussed LGBT issues. A lot of the young organizers who are supporting Sanders in caucus states are being elected as delegates. That means that they’re becoming part of the party establishment. They are, themselves, gate crashing.
That’s something I want to see. If younger people become comfortable with the way the party system operates, then they can do something I’ve argued for since occupy: taking over the Democratic Party and making it work for all of us, not just the people who know how to run it.
I see folks getting involved in the political process that never have been before, and getting involved on a level I once thought impossible. And the thing is, applying the Scottish movement-politics model to this, genies don’t go back into bottles. The people who are organizing for Bernie aren’t likely to pack up shop and go away if the democratic convention endorses Hillary Clinton. They’ll likely keep agitating for political change, as well they should.
The future of the Democratic party is this: Sanders Supporters who’ve found themselves parts of the Establishment, Black Lives Matter candidates like DeRay Mckesson, people of disparate gender expressions and sexual orientations, and activist groups that we haven’t seen yet will guide the Democratic party to the left, and make it a party that puts all of us first.
With Occupy, with the Sanders Campaign, with Black Lives Matter, with Moral Mondays, the trendlines of history are showing us what the Democratic Party will be in the future.
And what it might be in the present.
Bernie Sanders isn’t a once in a lifetime candidate, and having someone like Bernie leading the Democratic Party isn’t some far off dream. It’s inevitable. Whether he wins the convention or not, he’s showing us where the Democratic party is headed.
I do think Clinton is the better candidate for the job. But I don’t think Sanders is at all irrational in the things he argues for. I think he’s a good man, with great ideas. I think that if the Democratic Party wants to have the future, it’s going to have to take ideas like these seriously. And I think that the process of this primary, despite our often frustrating interactions in this place, are actually having a positive effect on the Democratic Party.
So if Clinton all but wraps up the nomination tonight, I want to see Bernie take this all the way to our primary here in DC. It will be nice to feel like we matter, for once, sure. But I don’t like the idea that Early states have an influence on our party that the rest of us don’t. I’d rather we held the primaries all on the same day, that we decided together, that all of our voices matter. Taking the primaries forward even if we reach the point where he can’t win, because Clinton has achieved the nomination in terms of delegate count, will still be a good thing.
And again, Clinton’s nomination is not something I think that we should consider achieved until it is actually achieved.
I am looking forward to November. I still say Bring On the Republicans. But I know for a fact that the vast majority of Bernie supporters share the same vision for our country that I do. And I know that going forward, we’ll all be working together for the kind of country we want to see, and that will be true whether they win or lose.
As for tonight, I’m watching the Irreverent Testimony live feed, and will likely be jumping on to talk with them soon via Skype. They’re Sanders supporters by the way. Because in the real world, we recognize that we’re all part of the same party, who are fighting for the same future.
Nothing has been called as of the time of writing. (Scratch that, Florida, for Clinton.)
As for what I’d like to see?
I want Bernie to have a better night than predicted. Because again, the more the caucuses actually matter, and the more young folks who find themselves elected to the convention as delegates, the better off we are in the long run, from a structural perspective.
I wish all of you good luck, and a great night.