Why Are Millennials Feeling the Bern?

I find myself perpetually fascinated with how people form their beliefs; specifically, with how people can form beliefs that exist in stark opposition to my own. I think my interest in politics stems from this; how can a handful of different factions in the same country see things so radically differently?

Some recent developments in the Democratic primaries launched the presidential race towards a phase that forces all of us liberals to confront the kind of existential political questions we have been laughing at the Republicans for botching. “Look at those stodgy conservative elites!” we thought, laughing. “They’re so out of touch with their base!”

But now here we are: a Democratic leadership that also doesn’t control or understand its base; a base of angry, intelligent, abnormally politically engaged young people. Not rebelling with LSD, free love, and rock and roll, but with campaign donations and viral Facebook posts and political movements that get derided and labeled “aimless” instead of “strategically disruptive.” Should anyone have expected anything less from the Baby Boomers’ children?

Apparently, they did.

The youth is often more left than their elders, but the numbers being reported right now trump the similar youth groundswells behind Howard Dean and Barack Obama. And a lot of political insiders are having a hard time explaining why. This crotchety old man should not be the youth candidate, they argue, he doesn’t speak their language or understand their culture.

Any pundit that concludes Bernie and millennials are an odd couple is fooling themselves. The youth are rejecting the mainstream and embracing the counterculture? Not exactly a new millennium innovation. But this match made in heaven goes much deeper than a bunch of kids trying to be cool, it’s a symbiosis that spans social, economic, and academic spheres. What about this candidate, and this electorate, at this time, has led to such a drastic fracturing of opinion? While arguing that any one reason is central to Bernie’s pull with young people would be insufficient, considering many factors together paints a fuller picture of a blossoming electorate that knows exactly who it wants.

His Socialism

I’m not sure when it was that I first heard the word “socialism.” Whether in a history class or from my parents, I have vague memories of understanding it as something akin to communism. At least, that’s the impression I was given by whatever it was I had heard.

But my first real memory of the word “socialism” has a very specific association, born in the last eight years of relentless messaging from the right about President Obama. “He’s a socialist!” they screamed on Fox News and Tea Party rallies and Freedom Caucus meetings. It was constant, and it blended with birthers and Benghazi into a black hole of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Consciously, I see the word as a poorly-understood talking point that doesn’t actually reflect the president’s policies. It has lost meaning and importance through overuse.

Unconsciously, I associate the word with Obama.

The story for my parents and their parents is a very different one. It can be hard for someone like myself, born in 1992, to understand the enormous psychological toll The Cold War had on this country. I still don’t understand it. But for decades in the second half of the twentieth century, The United States knew no greater enemy than “creeping socialism.” We fought endless proxy wars in an attempt to curb it. We lived in constant fear of the nuclear winter that could come from it. We let our country become hawkish and our politics more conservative, all in the struggle against this Red Scare.

Older generations who leaned left, and still do, were conditioned by lifetimes of this rhetoric, and while they may not fundamentally disapprove of “socialism” themselves, they are terrified of what will happen to a Democratic Socialist general election candidate. To them, they fear Bernie might as well be calling himself a Democratic Nazi.

To millennials, “socialism” was just one of the many words used by right-wing politicians to make hyperbolic attacks against Obama. Until Bernie reclaimed it.

Our Media

The way we get information about these candidates has a constant effect on our opinions about them. The forms of the media we consume color the information we receive: watching a debate on TV is much different from reading an article about it the next day, which is itself much different from following Donald Trump’s live-tweet commentary.

The media habits of millennials versus older generations share a great deal of overlap, but in general terms, millennials get their information from the internet, while the older folks have stuck to tried-and-true TV. Political coverage on TV is a 24 hour cacophony that awards space to the highest bidder. Political coverage on the internet is an infinite expanse of echo-chamber niches, crafted to cater to every imaginable degree of belief on any conceivable subject. One is consensus building, the other is polarizing. One is mainstream, the other is countercultural. One is Hillary, the other Bernie.

If that sounds reductive, that’s because it absolutely is. However, the correlations between these coalitions and their media choices are strong, and can help us see how these liberal fault lines formed.

Consider the effect a month’s worth of this sort of media consumption has on these two different constituencies. An older liberal Democrat might read The New York Times or some other establishment-left paper, and perhaps watch a blend of CNN, MSNBC, and their broadcast network of choice. These are big, lumbering institutions backed by huge money and years of history, and they’ve typically measured their success by how wide they can spread their appeal, not how deep it can run. So they offer a sliding scale of palatable, reasonable positions that will provide the satisfaction of confirmation to the most number of people, without turning away too many potential viewers. The point is not that these outlets are shills for Hillary due to her establishment ties, the very philosophies that run their institutions match the philosophies that lead to a Hillary nomination. They’re making their own right choice.

Meanwhile, the internet satisfies that desire for confirmed opinions to a hedonistic degree, allowing us each to burrow ourselves into our respective circles. Instead of a steady drumbeat of centrism, we follow the compelling carrots of the culture war. Even while we entertain opposing viewpoints and explore our options, we are digging ourselves further into our own beliefs, by virtue of the many voices we can find in agreement. This is further enforced by the social media bubbles we inhabit, where we get a totally inaccurate litmus test of the country’s opinion. No matter how often we remind ourselves of this bubble, we are largely incapable of stepping outside of it. This doesn’t just happen in the places where algorithms help determine what you see, such as Facebook — we do most of this curation on our own. What the internet does is give everyone a platform for their views, as well as complete control over which views they see. This effect explodes when an issue is divisive and fuels passions. Our passionate anger fuels a rapid search for confirmation of that anger, which leads to posting our passionate thoughts, which triggers a friend to do the same. This positive reinforcement cycle allows us to accumulate positions that occupy further and further ideological extremes.

His Authenticity

If you want a great way to find out about what millennials are interested in, see what the marketing people are saying. While that may seem cynical, when it comes to capturing the minds and wallets of millennials, there are few as well funded or motivated as advertisers. And one of the biggest trends in millennial advertising today is authenticity. That’s why brands care more about content marketing than ever before, why companies are measuring what we say about their products on social media, and why this year you saw more super bowl ads leverage advocacy initiatives than ever before. All of these tactics are attempts to earn authenticity — through copywriting, through crowdsourcing, or through activism.

So no one should have been surprised that the Bernie approach has worked with young people in ways Hillary never could have. Infamous tweets from team Hillary, such as:

demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of what young people like and want. We didn’t love Obama because he was cool, we loved Obama because he seemed real. Bernie’s been giving the same speech for 40 years, and controversially stood against some widely bipartisan initiatives. He doesn’t speak eloquently, but he does speak truthfully; not even his detractors could doubt his conviction.

Meanwhile, millennials have grown up watching a never ending parade of crumbling institutions and corrupted power. It’s led us to seek intimacy with our heroes — talking to them on Twitter and checking in on their Instagram feeds. The “it” girl of the last four years branded herself on relatability and awkwardness. Thousands of YouTube mini-celebrities sit in their rooms and talk to dedicated audiences that tune in every week. These new celebrities aren’t sleek and impenetrable, they’re real and familiar.

Enter Bernie.

Our Naïvete

Bear with me here for a moment, fellow millennials. I’m not going to sit here and condescend to you about our hopeless hopes and our inability to see reason. But we can’t look at the current Democratic schism and not talk about the things the fogies have seen that we have not.

What sort of things? They’ve seen political revolution at home and abroad, and they’ve seen the backlash. They’ve seen candidates rise and fall — some like Bernie and some like Hillary. They’ve seen the country transform — at some points faster than anyone was prepared to deal with, and at others so slowly they only realized decades down the line. Our parents and grandparents lived through all of that, and a good majority are voting for Hillary. I can’t say that they’re right, but I can see why they’re sure.

The historical framework that stretches across a person’s life casts shadows on their entire self identity. The culture wars we wage amount to battles over a narrative we can barely get a hold on, but that we are intrinsically a part of. While it’s easy to see that the story we’ve lived so far informs our expectations and predictions for the future, it’s hard to say that any one snapshot of history provides more wisdom than any other.

We’re all naïve in the prediction game, ultimately. What has more weight in analyzing and predicting things about the world of 2016 and beyond: half a century of lived history, or an innate connection to the cultural momentum of the moment? The answer will affect more than this election cycle; liberal America stands at a crossroads, and all the new signs are pointing left.