The waiting room for stress tests is filled with indispensable men.
Who but an immortal could possibly hope to pull this off at Bernie's age without damaging their health? And yet we know he will keep it up no matter what it does to him, because of the trust that people have placed in him and the burden history has thrust on him. That's what he will do. So what will you and I do to help?
Unless he does actually believe that Bernie is immortal, his argument is working against him.
The only way to tell without risking Bernie's life is to have him cut off someone's head and see if he absorbs their power.
3: Mr. Robinson would be first-in-line to volunteer.
[Acknowledging up front that both in 2016 and now, Bernie was/is my favored choice in the primary. Also acknowledging that he seems effectively out, so Warren then becomes my #1, but it's a long way to the voting.] I got to reading a that comment thread on Lawyers Guns and Money the other day and it turned into page after page after page of bashing Bernie Bros. I am not on twitter, and there's probably a lot I'm not aware of, but that got old and didn't click with me because the Sanders supporters I know skew female and not very bro-like at all. This guy quoted in the OP is obviously over the top. "Why is Current Affairs giving him a platform?" seems like a valid question. "This guy represents all the crazed cult of personality around Bernie" didn't compute.
I just don't understand why we want another Baby Boomer president. We've had three, all fuckups, and then we get one Gen Xer in, and he's like the best president* since forever, but now we have to go back to Boomers until they're all deid, apparently.
*Leaving aside all the drones and shit, but what're ya gonna do?
Sanders and Biden both appear to be pre-Boomers if one wants to stickle.
Aren't the most prominent post-Boomer candidates about as neoliberal on average?
6: Spoken like a true Tulsi Gabbard diehard.
Isn't Nathan Robinson the editor of Current Affairs? Which has obviously been in the tank for Bernie from go? Like him or leave him alone, I don't feel like he's ever dissembled about his position.
I like Current Affairs, honestly, partly because the online stuff has a fanzine-ish quality to it - it's mostly Nathan Robinson and his concerns most of the time. I follow him on twitter and I don't find him to be a bad actor at all. The things that creep me out politically are spite, misogyny and power-seeking, a sort of personal vileness, and I don't get those vibes from him or anything he's written. (While I do get those vibes from several pro-Bernie people who co-edit news sites I visit.)
I don't think there are "Bernie Bros" so much as there are incredibly shitty people stanning for the major candidates and the internet gives them substantial reach. I also think that because everyone has only a very partial, "curated" view of the internet, it's possible to experience the internet as "only Bernie Bros are assholes" or "there are no Bernie Bros, it's just slander" and still basically be truthful about what you individually see.
In my neck of the internet forest, women (especially queer women or women of color) who are pro-Bernie have gotten some incredibly awful, racist, homophobic stuff thrown at them from partisans of other candidates. I don't see as much vile stuff from Bernie supporters, but I assume that has more to do with my part of the internet than what's actually out there. Every once in a while, I hear reports of someone saying something really gross and racist about Kamala Harris, etc, and since I don't follow too much about the other candidates anymore, I assume that hearing about it once in a while indicates that it's happening regularly.
Actually, I've just had a thought - across the board, it's women who bear the brunt of the vile political abuse (okay, it's not a new thought). People say vile stuff about Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris, but are less vile about Bernie personally, instead being vile at women who support him.
5: I think that there is an online subculture of Bernie-bros that is not all that representative of his following, but its members do cause some real-world harm; LGM has settled into following and bashing that subculture in particular.
One of my recent podcasts is "Reply Guys" which is from two female Sanders supporters who connected on Twitter partially over the backlash to one of poking gentle fun at all-male leftist podcasts; now they have their own leftist podcast. Anyway, they're both non-dogmatic and open to Warren.
8: Jesus, don't even get me started. How the hell is she supposed to be a peacenik when she's a commissioned officer in the greatest war machine the world has ever seen?
In my neck of the internet forest, women (especially queer women or women of color) who are pro-Bernie have gotten some incredibly awful, racist, homophobic stuff thrown at them from partisans of other candidates.
Which ones? Presumably not Biden, who has very few extremely online followers afaict.
12: Hillary supporters. It's still 2016 in those regions of Twitter.
I haven't personally seen much BernieBro activity and I think it is worth keeping in mind that some portion of BernieBro annoyingness may have been Russian actors.
"This guy represents all the crazed cult of personality around Bernie" didn't compute.
Bernie douchebags are way over-represented in the media and the Internet at large. It's almost impossible for me to participate in a conversation online about Bernie without being annoyed by people who, like me, admire Bernie. (Though I would never consider voting for Bernie in a race that also includes Warren.) But yes, actual Bernie supporters that I know in real life are (mostly) not assholes at all.
12: Bear in mind that I mostly see this stuff and bracket it as "people are horrible" rather than catalog it, but I'd say I've seen some moderate nastiness from Warren supporters, some miscellaneous unpleasantness and some, yes, from "Biden is carrying on the legacy of Obama and what Hillary's legacy would have been had she won" people.
Some of it is vileness and misogyny, but some of it is because there are real stakes. Like, just yesterday I was reading some expose about a prominent progressive person who has, it turns out, a long history of advocating for charter schools and other shady educational enterprises. The person who wrote this apparently reports regularly on education, did very ordinary shoe-leather (internet shoe leather anyway) reporting to get the story and got all kinds of scurrilous attacks for it.
There's some possibility of a real political shake-up down the road, and that means that people with opposing views are going to fight for real, and it also means that there's lot of opportunities for enterprising journalists, wonks and non-profit directors - if there's a shake-up there will be plenty of kickbacks and soft graft, hiring consultants, people with national profiles getting into high-paying positions, etc etc. At least some of the nastiness is good old fashioned People Fighting About Access To Power and it gets passed off as people fighting about principles. I wish it were not so, but there are plenty of people who are very innocently doing politics right now out of desire to fight climate change, abolish prisons, close the camps, etc, who are going to be horribly disillusioned down the road when the ladder-climbing starts.
I have an inspiring speech for them.
who are going to be horribly disillusioned down the road when the ladder-climbing starts.
Same as it ever was. I have acquaintances though, who are at least open eyed about this sort of thing; jaded, but practical. e.g.: I'm here to do something worthwhile, and if gets any traction we'll try and get some of that done before the assholes inevitably take over.
huh. i've been away long enough I've forgotten how to quote here, it seems.
We're going to need the votes of people in the Sanders movement, no matter who the nominee is. In certain states/districts, anyway. I don't think over-generalizing to offer criticism is the most effective strategy.
I've come to understand that when Sanders talks about 'revolution' he isn't really speaking metaphorically: he's talking about something somewhere between 1787 and 1789. Maybe something like France with a strong President, no states that are a check on national power, etc. A faction of the movement understands this, that if they don't get the full-on revolution that not only overthrows the 47% of the country that votes Republican, but also the, what, 60%, of Democratic voters that support incrementalism rather than revolution, then they don't get anything beyond what Sen. Klobuchar is advocating. Maybe it's 30% of Democratic voters? Whichever, you still end up with a very tall order for a popular movement. But you can only have that kind of movement actually getting power if you have a guy on a horse. Occupy Wall Street was fine to change the conversation, but that doesn't change the constitution. In our current moment, I think it's reasonably fair and true to say that there's no Revolution without Sanders. (Now I also think that it's fair to say that there is no Revolution with Sanders, but that's a different inquiry). If that's true, what are the people in his movement supposed to do? What are they supposed to say?
Frowner makes an interesting point. Anyone of my generation is going to be baffled by the very idea that there is a lucrative career to be made in supporting the far left of potential Democratic Party positions. If you "sold out" in 2005 and started working for actual Democrats instead of being on the outside as an activist, it meant you were working for the goals of Rahm Emanuel. Even people like Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich weren't leading some sort of movement, they were lone voices. Now there are going to be people working for e.g. Elizabeth Warren who see themselves as cynical careerists who are part of the next big thing.
Even getting involved in city politics doesn't mean becoming part of the Machine like it did 15 years ago. Pittsburgh is a pretty clear case of a transition from good old boys to good government types. And everyone loves Peduto but I bet he only has a few more idealists working for him than the last guy did.
please replace "baffled" by "surprised" in the above. I'm not baffled! Why would everyone else be?
21: And the other piece is that people with dubious pasts are going to attach themselves to leftish movements when those movements get higher profiles. Do we assume that someone with a track record of supporting [undesirable corporate thing] has had a change of heart? Do we assume that they have no politics and are opportunists and thus useful as long as they're on the payroll? Do we assume that they're politically dangerous but that their skills make them valuable so better with us than against us? Also, where is the cut-off? If someone has reasonable politics in most areas but is extremely cozy with the prison industry, is that going to be okay*?
*My union organizes both clerical workers and prison guards. I don't feel especially great about this, not because I want prison guards to suffer in their day to day lives but because organized prison guards have a distinct interest in the expansion of the prison industry.
To the extent they ask for higher wages and staffing ratios, they are arguing for fewer prisoners.
not because I want prison guards to suffer in their day to day lives
C'mon, live a little.
||Speaking of bad guards, Escape at Dannemora is really good.|>
Totes peacenik.
I for one remain convinced that any incoming Democratic administration will take the current situation as an opportunity to institute much-needed reforms in the federal bureaucracy, and specifically the security forces, leading to a new era of true governmental transparency and openness. IN THIS BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS.
I feel you bro.
Will they still betray the Kurds? That seems to be one of those American traditions that just won't go away.
To me the definitive evidence about Bro-ism was the creation of what is now Pantsuit Nation: a secret FB group for (mostly) women who felt that they couldn't make positive comments about their preferred candidate without being harassed. There were literal millions of them, which is a huge fraction of people who are A. on FB, B. HRC supporters, and C. politically engaged enough during a primary to see/experience this sort of thing. Bernie supporters didn't need a group like that.
Furthermore, it turned out AB joined that group, even though she has a closely-curated FB friend group and mostly uses it for your standard Things My Kids Say purposes. She told me that an IRL friend of ours--a guy she genuinely likes--was unpleasantly aggressive on the topic (not that he was the only reason she joined, just that he was a real example, not some nutpicked second hand story). So I've always found lefty dismissal of the phenomenon kind of gross. Believe Women, but not, you know, these women.
And I have to say, nothing in Bernie's handling of all this reads as blameless to me. He was completely dismissive of IRL harassment within his organization in '16, and then for '20 he hired Sirota (and several others of the same ilk). Sirota brings no special skills or constituency--he's an online asshole, and that's all. You don't hire that guy if the message you want to send to your followers is "don't be an asshole online."
If Bernie were the only guy running on a left platform, all that wouldn't necessarily be a deal-breaker, but given that there are other choices, it pretty much is.
On a semi-related topic, did you see Jacobin citing a Soviet-censored novel as proof that the Soviets weren't as bad as Nazis?
And I have to say, nothing in Bernie's handling of all this reads as blameless to me.
Yeah, I've been working hard to avoid reaching this conclusion, but it's hard to avoid.
That said, no national politician is going to turn down support, unless it's from neo-Nazi's and it's prior to 2016.
34 to 32. It's my policy not to express preferences for the Democratic primary, although I've probably violated the policy before.
33: Oh yeah, I don't think he needed to disavow anybody, but there's a pretty big gap between disavowal and hiring.
Actually, it's possible the review itself is more thoughtful, but here's what Jacobin says about it:
This June brought the first English translation of Vasily Grossman's Stalingrad. While movingly illustrating the tragedies of wartime Soviet society, Grossman's epic novel is a powerful rebuke to those who equate Nazism and those who fought against it.and
One Side Fought for Freedom at StalingradAgain, the Soviets wouldn't let Grossman publish the book until he removed all the bits that made clear that Nazism and Soviet Communism were, in fact, mirrors of one another.
32 I think FDR made the right call on that.
31 Obviously, no candidate is responsible for everything an excited supporter does. But if you're leading a movement, it's fair to ask what kind of movement it is. My guess is that Sen Sanders lives in the kind of bubble where the berniebros are more a myth created of hostile forces than a plague on supporters -- often female* -- of other candidates. I think also that the difference between a campaign and a movement is part of the issue here. The Nevada convention was an example of this -- and, imo, disqualifying for Sanders. The two campaigns had agreed on rules and various procedural things before the convention. Some folks in the Sanders movement didn't like the rules, and pitched a fit. That, to me, was the moment for Sanders himself to step up and say 'look, you have to let me negotiate stuff' but instead they acted like law enforcement shutting the thing down was about HRC's latent fascism, rather than about a people's movement being inherently uncontrollable.
(Most of the Sanders people I know are utterly decent. Some are not. There's an ongoing discussion on the obligation of the decent people to try to rein in or call out the indecent people. I myself have a pretty low standard.)
* There are a couple of local bros prone to making misogynist comments. I find myself wondering what coalition they think they are in.
38: thanks. Unsurprisingly the translation seems to include pieces from the cutting room (I figured it was NYRB and the thought of them blithely recapitulating Soviet censorship was incongruous):
Indeed, additional text from non-published and withheld editions adds to the novel, while the translators' excellent description of what was excised from the official editions -- and why -- offer a fascinating insight into the minds of Soviet censors (the unprofessionalism inherent in talk of dirty hands, thievery, and tardy commanders could be as problematic as divisive political ideas).
I'd say it's a reasonably thoughtful review. I'm feeling charitable. I shied away from Life and Fate because I'm, um, sensitive, but maybe I should give it a shot.
The Jacobin review is a little strained in its points, but it does acknowledge censorship more than once; the headline is tanky in a way the body isn't.
There's an ongoing discussion on the obligation of the decent people to try to rein in or call out the indecent people
I think the obligation is strong, implicitly but not explicitly. For reasons alluded to above - the indecent ones can with relatively little effort undo a ton of good work. I am quite certain Bernie has lost a votes for lack of doing this, for example.
Also, he's 107 and just had a heart attack. One sympathizes with heart conditions, but it shows that he was too old 4 years ago even.
Anyway, the important thing is that Mossy be made aware of a newly-available 1000+-page novel by "the Soviet Tolstoi". When's your birthday?
I'll just assume Anna Pavlova's salon is instead a diamat theory session and therefore extends the entire length of the novel.
There's many varieties of exremely online sanders supporters and I think the most fanatical are mostly boomers of both sexes. The ones who doesn't seem super ideological, think nina turner should be VP and warren is owned by corporations. I have no way of proving this, but a certain people radiate what you might call boomer energy.
9: Yes, from what i can tell, Nathan Robinson is a bit excentric but a good guy and smart, doesn't have the mean streak of some other extremely online american leftists. I haven't followed his career in detail.
One looks forward to decades of fighting about Who Lost Bernie? and the proper allocation of blame for the missed chance to Make Them All Pay.
At last, progressives can be the Orange County Goldwater Club they've always dreamed of.
31.1: I have certainly had negative interactions with brocialist/BernieBro types, but I don't think that's in any way a fair characterization of Pantsuit Nation's genesis and growth. I just checked and it was started in October 2016, at which point it was a women's group for excitement about the election and wearing pantsuits to the polls. I feel like I got added to it dozens of times after I left it (mostly because I'm not one for giant groups) because every time a new friend found it she'd invite as many friends as fb allowed. It didn't seem to have a coherent politics and obviously because of the timeline, its biggest function was to help its members cope with the Trump election and the world we've lived in since. I'm sure it did serve the purpose you mention, but I don't think it's in any way fair to say that was the experience millions of fb women had.
44: VTSOOBC, I have already told Mossy this but northern Ohio boasts a restaurant (or at least advertises it as an amenity on the highway exit sign) that always makes me make Tolstoy-of-the-Zulus jokes.
Mostly Ohio restaurants make people want to make jokes about group sex.
Who is the shredded cheese of the orgy?
If you don't know who the sucker is, it's you.
There's many varieties of exremely online sanders supporters and I think the most fanatical are mostly boomers of both sexes. The ones who doesn't seem super ideological, think nina turner should be VP and warren is owned by corporations. I have no way of proving this, but a certain people radiate what you might call boomer energy.
I suspect there's something to this, though I also have no way of proving it. One of our most fervent local (not all that extremely online) Bernie supporters is a middle-aged guy who's been a notorious troll/gadfly around political circles for decades. He eventually got kicked out of the Democratic party for being such an asshole to women, though not in a BernieBro way (the accuser in the grievance that took him down was a fellow Bernie supporter and activist). He actually used to be a Republican back in the '80s but I think they kicked him out too.
Anyway, yeah, the BernieBro stereotype is a young guy but the movement also seems to attract a certain type of older guy.
I don't get the link between Tolstoy and 502 Bad Gateway, which is where Thorn's link leads me.
38, 40: Life and Fate is definitely worth the time and effort. Not sure what you're sensitive about, lurid, so that could temper my recommendation. Any honest writing about the Eastern Front is going to have plenty of horrible in it.
The headline and kicker of that review were enough to put me off of reading it (sorry author, go and kick your editor for misrepresenting your piece) but Stalingrad is on my wish list, and I am particularly glad to hear that the translators put excised bits back in and gave explanations about other bits of censorship. The main thing that gave me pause about Stalingrad was that it had been published and acclaimed in Soviet times; that made me wonder whether Grossman's toeing the line would make for a bad book.
If you want to sample Grossman without committing to a thousand pages, you can try A Writer at War, which has a good introduction and light explanatory interventions from the translators.
Here are a couple of things I wrote about Life and Fate:
http://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/06/10/life-and-fate-by-vasily-grossman/
Anyway, yeah, the BernieBro stereotype is a young guy but the movement also seems to attract a certain type of older guy.
I see it as the people who have been activists forever and seething that not everyone else is an activist, and now getting mad at latecomers to the movement. Since Bernie has stuck to his principles for an unreasonably long time he is the ideal candidate for these people who traditionally have no candidate (maybe Kucinich).
At least the two guys I know like this. Who are also the two people who spend half their time online defending Trump against attacks from the hated liberal hypocrites, because again, if you claim to be upset about Russia interfering with our elections, maybe you should have been upset about US interfering with other countries' elections over the last 60 years. And if you claim to not like Bashar Assad and Putin, maybe you should also not like (bad world leader that Clinton helped out). And if you don't like Trump sending refugees back to El Salvador to get murdered, news flash: this also happened under Obama and you liberals didn't want to impeach him. It's all about intellectual consistency folks.
I always assumed those people were paid by the Russians or were bob.
I guess plenty of people hate the middle class more than they hate fascism. I guess it's an ethos. But building a coalition that depends on those votes seems like a bad idea. Still, less annoying than the "moderate" Republicans calling themselves "Never Trumper" and demanding liberals agree with them every issue or they will, through no fault of their own, have to vote for Donald Trump.
Oh, these people are never going to vote Republican. They just don't want to see them criticized for the wrong reasons. Aka any reasons provided by intellectually inconsistent critics, which is everyone who doesn't spend 24/7 thinking about these things.
I encounter so many Bernie Bros online I have to actively remind myself that I voted for Bernie in 2016, and that I agree with his policies (at least in a big picture sense).
The David Sirota hiring really pushed Sanders down in my estimation. I don't know anything about his other hires, but Sirota is transparently a dumb asshole.
61: Those consistency critiques always seem to me to fall apart on the question of scale. Like, sure, Clinton was a warmonger who bombed Iraq, and killed literally dozens of Iraqis.
Obama kept unaccompanied minors in camps, when a wave of immigrants showed up that they weren't ready to process in a sanely timely manner. A college friend of Sally's, who crossed the border as an unaccompanied teen, was in one and says it was really awful -- locked up all day with nothing to do, uncomfortabe conditions, and miserable food. He was processed and released into the US, and is now a student at the University of California.
What Clinton and Obama did wasn't right. But the difference in the scale of the injuries inflicted means it's really not the same type of offense.
(My mother is completely one of those. Hates Hillary, hates Obama, pretty much hates any actually existing Democrat. But from the left.)
It's all about intellectual consistency folks.
I hated all that shit under Obama too and said so at the time and I hate all this shit under Trump now (and it's all far worse now). I'm consistent! I really don't get people like that.
Yes, foreign powers interfering in elections is bad both when the US does it to other countries and when other countries do it to the US. It doesn't seem that hard to dislike both.