Bernie Sanders’ support isn’t millenial drivel

Lazy critiques of Sanders’ support miss how his candidacy understands young people in a way that Hillary’s doesn’t

In the run-up to New Hampshire, conventional wisdom in the pundit class about Bernie Sanders seems, in some respects to grow ever more dismissive. Not of the Senator himself, he of the unflappable wild hair, but of his supporters. Such an attitude seemed to begin in the realization that in the wake of the Iowa caucuses, that a clear generational divide can at least be seen in this particular contest, at least initially, between the young and old. Younger voters in Iowa seemed to strongly support Sanders, whereas older ones broke for Clinton. There is clearly some unrest within the Democratic party, a certain dissatisfaction with Clinton as the de facto nominee, in such a way that it strangely reminds me of 2008, where similar dynamics happened between older and younger voters. In 2008 younger voters supported the alternative challenger candidate in Barack Obama, and the establishment supported Hillary Clinton.

Though this divide is even starker than before. Many young first time voters seem to either be leaning towards or are very much Sanders supporters. The supposed glut of youth support for Sanders in the data in Iowa’s aftermath, has seemed to cement the notion, at least for now, that young people don’t trust Hillary Clinton.

Sound familiar? This same problem happened in 2008. Clinton’s assertion then, was “It’s time to pick a president,” almost reading subtextually as a plea to voters to stop flirting with Obama and to pick the person with the most experience, rather than the one who was advocating as a progressive candidate. Such critiques, again, have surfaced. But Clinton is only tangentially running on her measures of practicality as of late, choosing to emphasize her disagreements with Sanders as mere battles over semantics and to emphasize that they have the same agendas. But the condescending implication is that supporters of Sanders are too impractical, that they risk becoming just as bad as the tea party candidates who have voted in people hell-bent on shutting down government.

I started to hear this critique go from mere implication to verbalization within Slate’s Political Gabfest, where David Plotz earlier this week seemed to imply that the reason why young people, particularly college students, were supporting Sanders was out of a sense of hedonism, rather than a sense of genuine activism:

I think you always have to remember, especially in primaries, especially where the campaigns are intense, simply the pleasure that young people take in participating in political action. If you’re a young progressive and you look at the other side and you see all these white people motivated and animated by this crazy Republican primary and you wanna have some fun. Sanders offers the pleasure and offers the fun, in this campaign. I think I wouldn’t overread too much into it as a political movement. I would say like, he, yeah, offers kind of a skeptical take on captialism and he’s a much louder progressive, but I think a lot of what is animating the Sanders activity is the pleasure that young people take in being a part of a political process and that political campaigns are fun.

Plotz was later pressed by Jacob Weisberg, who pushed back on Plotz’s argument, saying that, unlike some of the insurgent campaigns on the left in the past, where the candidate might not have mattered as much, it does matter who the candidate is here:

Weisberg: Honestly, the idea of Sanders is ‘match up with a lot of the political sentiment you do hear on college campuses’ especially on the progressive campuses and if not a rejection of capitalism a feeling that capitalism is not an equitable system, you know, a preoccupation with all kinds of injustice, racial injustice, social injustice, economic injustice…

But Plotz doubled down on his previous sentiment:

I guess I just don’t think that it’s that deep. I think where is that felt more strongly? It’s felt with people who are actually being screwed by what’s happening in the economy, people who aren’t in college, people who don’t have college degrees, people who are poor, who are in prison and who are shut out of the economy, those are the people who I feel like those resentments matter. College students, they’re going to graduate into jobs and prosperity. It’s slightly a clothing for them. A robe to put on.

Perhaps Plotz was being a bit of a troll, as he does sometimes play devil’s advocate for the sake of keeping the conversation interesting. Whatever the case, Jamelle Bouie, one of the best political reporters working today, was on hand to push back against this kind of thinking:

I’m not so sure about that. Just when you look at sort of all political movements not just this particular political movement, but kind of all kinds of political movements, y’know oftentimes the people directly affected are very passionate but oftentimes the people just above them are also very affected and very motivated by what they see. So in the case of the rise of people like Donald Trump, Donald Trump’s voters aren’t necessarily the people being shafted by the economy, they’re the people just above them who feel anxiety by what they witness in the sort of social stratum below them. There are working class Bernie Sanders supporters I’ve talked to. I’ve met quite a few of them. There are lots of college kids [who are Sanders supporters]. There are lots of college kids who have working class families, which is an important distinction from sort of the, y’know, college kids going to very competitive or elite schools. Kids whose parents are teachers, police officers [...] These are kids with a lot of student debt, and they’re generally worried about their future, and they see it around them in their lives, people are hurting in the present economy and that’s what’s motivating them. So I’m not sure I would make such a clean distinction between young people who might be engaged essentially as fashion and those who have some tangible connection to the issues.

I mean, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

But this dismissive attitude seems to persist in discourse within and without the political left, this idea that young people’s concerns are overly idealistic, or that they are just engaged in the political process for the pure pleasure of it in order to explain why this generational divide might be happening in the Democratic party. There’s also been an unwise implication from the Clinton campaign about Sanders, that his proposals are unworkable, even as Clinton has been pushing herself ever closer and closer to Sanders in her political positions in an attempt to leech off more Sanders supporters.

And I feel like such a cynical notion has taken hold among many pundits. Rather than evaluate how these policies of universal healthcare might work, which frankly is a really good question as to whether it could or not without fundamentally changing how our healthcare system is currently run, such claims seem to occasionally smack with the rank odor of smarm against Bernie’s younger supporters, as though their idealism is somehow inherently invalid based on their lack of life experience and not being ground into the dirt by the so-called “real world.”

I was actually going to just stop right there and wrap things up by saying that retreating into such thinking is small-minded, but then I saw this piece in the New Yorker that I couldn’t help but hate read because it crystalized the subtext I’ve been hearing for a while now.

I did not expect that publication to be the New Yorker. And man, if you wanna feel the smug come off of the screen, you can read this little ditty right here in a piece entitled “Should Millenials Get Over Bernie Sanders?”:

So purity, a highly useful principle to make use of while running for office, is all but useless to politicians who actually arrive there, and the voters least likely to see that are young ones. The belief in the possibility of true purity might be a delusion for most voters, but it’s a privilege of youth, the province of people for whom the thrill of theory hasn’t yet given way to the comparative disappointment of practice.

Allow my millenial self to burst forth for a second and insert an appropriate reaction .gif, because honestly, this quotation needs one:

If you agree with such sentiments wholeheartedly, congratulations. You are officially old and I will personally come by to hand you a metaphorical cane so you might wave it at those pesky youths who gallavant upon your lawn.

On the surface, such an argument sounds reasonable. But pulling at the threads of it show how it fundamentally lacks insight. What about the older white voters who collectively frothed at the mouth when they hear the dog whistles of talk radio and elect ever more intractable congresspeople? Aren’t they also subject to this delusion? Isn’t ideological purity too, why John Boehner is no longer Speaker of the House, because the Republican Party’s base has chosen to make itself ever more insular, punishing anyone who deviates from the orthodoxy? And who voted the Republicans in there who constantly threatened to shut down the government in the first place? I’ll hazard a guess that it wasn’t large swaths of young people.

Isn’t this same quest for ideological purity the reason why Ted Cruz, a man who by all accounts has been abhorrent to everyone he has personally worked with, just won the Iowa caucuses? To ascribe such aspirations to left -leaning youthful indescretion is to ignore the last six years of Republican politics in this country. That or such reasoning relies on the notion that millennial voters are somehow uniquely predisposed to delusion, and that they should “grow up” because their Santa Claus socialist uncle isn’t going to give them everything they want for Christmas.

That same line of reasoning also ignores the fact that young people turned out twice to vote for Obama, despite the fact that he violated that supposed “ideological purity” that millennials have apparently come to love so fervently.

They just need to grow up, right?

I sense a whiff of historical fetishism in the young love for Bernie, a yearning for an imaginary time of simpler, more straightforward politics that aligns with other millennial tendencies toward false nostalgia for past purity, in fashion or food, for instance.

The notion that the striving for that false nostalgia for authenticity is somehow uniquely endemic to millenials is also a laughable assertion. Also, isn’t that false nostalgia the province of our elders?

But there again, is that old lazy generalization about young people. Written by one of our own, no less. Such is the way of millenial trend pieces.

Speaking for myself, I wasn’t entirely disappointed with Obama’s presidency. No politician can ever get everything on thier wish list, and with the Republicans not letting go of the House this election cycle, the Democratic race becomes more aspirational than ever in its primary stage.

The reason that Hillary still gets hammered on the authenticity front is that she fundamentally refuses to admit when she’s been wrong in the past. Sanders admits when he’s made mistakes, or if he hasn’t, he at least seems genuinely invested in his current positions.

Hillary never does that, and if she ever does, support for her would likely be a lot more enthusiastic amongst younger voters. Or at the very least, less tepid. She always tries to say that her record has been the most consistent record ever. But honestly, that’s simply not true. For example, Hillary didn’t support marriage equality until it was politically convenient for her, but she never ever wants to admit it. Case and point:

Had she said something about people making mistakes, and how she had evolved on the position, these issues could go away. But they don’t. She could make the great argument that because she’s made mistakes she’s also had the opportunity to learn from them, that people change and grow over time, and that it’s not always the most pleasant thing. But instead, nope. Just flat out denial, and even accusing her questioners of twisting her words, when quite frankly, there are no words to twist. One can only replay them.

But of course, the piece has to go all in on waving its cane and applying for its AARP card as it attempts to couch itself in historical precedent by comparing youthful aspirations for Sanders to a young Wordsworth speaking about the French Revolution. Really? Come on. You can call me later when we start having mass executions by guillotine.

But this is the that tsk-tsk that I’ve been hearing trickles of for this whole primary season thus far from both the Clinton campaign and pundits. This piece merely is the coup de grâce.

the ultimate point is to have the Party come together to win in November, a point that she repeated in her Iowa narrow-victory speech. For that to happen, a lot of young Democrats may have to learn how to embrace compromise.

You could easily swap out Democrats for Tea Partiers and have this paragraph apply to Cruz.

Activists are always idealistic and agitate for change. Even young activists understand that they won’t win every single fight. But good activists know better than to simply quit and acquiesce. To be dismissive of young voters is to be dismissive of the future. Obama knew that and sought to mobilize young people. His team saw what Hillary didn’t, and she paid the price by losing in 2008. Why else is Clinton emphasizing the similarities between herself and Sanders? She clearly doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of her 2008 campaign, where her husband disingeniously compared Barack Obama’s success with that of Jesse Jackson’s. Such a comparison wasn’t well received.

It’s a rank form of condescension to say that young voters are merely naïve and totally believe that their crotchedy uncle with wild hair will give them free college tuition when they elect him. That these crazy kids are unaware that such things might not come to pass because of political gridlock is foolhardy, as gridlock is inevitable.

As for millenial trend pieces regarding political candidates, can we just swoop them all together in a rocket ship and launch them into the sun, please? Condescension is rife within discourse on the left. But Hillary supporters condescend to young Sanders supporters at their peril. They could be losing people who, if they’re pushed enough, disengage entirely. And with a party that needs a winning coalition in the face of stout opposition, that’s something Democrats can’t afford to do in this election cycle.

UPDATE: Now Gloria Steinem has joined in. Really? Keep it classy with the facile critique, Gloria.