How about going with Occam Razor, and believing we’re hostile for exactly the same reasons that Clinton supporters are hostile? You know the ones, who tell us they hope we are murdered by Trump goons if we promise right this very second to vote for their candidate, since be All Our Fault he wins. Or the ones who posted child porn in Bernie Facebook groups, then reported it to Facebook in order to get the groups taken down, and bragged about it on Clinton groups? Or the ones who got up a Twitter storm to fat-shame Jane Sanders… because bullying a woman for having an imperfectly sculpted body shape isn’t misogynist at all, of course. (And neither is insisting that the only reason women might vote for your opponent is to attract the young men who are with him.)
I’m not just trying to show you that Clintonites are responsible for their fair share of the aggressiveness in this campaign, though you really could stand to be more aware of it. I’m trying to answer your question, because I know perfectly well what drives some of the Clintonites to the kind of desperation which makes them attack other Democrats, and it’s the same thing which drives Bernie supporters to the kind of desperation which makes some of them attack other Democrats.
They’re terrified. They are absolutely convinced that the country and even the world are in mortal peril; that whether their candidate wins or not is a significant factor in their survival and their children’s survival. In Clinton’s case, most of her supporters seem to think that Sanders supporters are planning to throw the election to Trump out of spite, and that from there, he will either become a dictator or start a nuclear war or both. In Sanders’ case, many of us believe that if we can’t make the revolution happen through political means, it will happen shortly anyway, in blood and fire. They consist Sanders the LEAST radical possible form of change, because any attempt to keep the corporate power structure in place will only lead, in fairly short order, to a time when the corporations and their wholly-owned politicians have taken so much that the people have to choose between violence and starvation. And when that happens, Americans will fight.
We don’t want ourselves or our children to have to fight a civil war because you didn’t like the tone in which we tried to warn you of the danger. We don’t want to have to repair the environment from twenty or thirty years more damage because a spokesperson for the fracking industry who has already also gone back on her promise to end the use of coal was able to convince you that she’d be an aggressive protector of the environment. We don’t want to see our kids come home in body bags because the president has never met a war she didn’t like except the class war… the only one which really needs fighting.
We’re frightened of the disaster we consider inevitable if Clinton wins, and we hold you and other Democrats responsible for failing to hold HER responsible for any of the long list of ways in which she is corrupt or dangerous. Yes, that makes us hostile. You don’t need to agree with our view about what is so dangerous in order to recognize that there is no hidden or bizarre reason for the hostility, just as I don’t need to agree with the belief that Bernie supporters who won’t obediently vote for someone who has done nothing to earn it are going to be responsible if Trump is elected rather than the candidate who was able to alienate so many voters being responsible.
I can still recognize that the people who *do* believe that Bernie’s voters will be to blame for the likely destruction of their country might be just a tad hostile toward us because of this. You would do well to consider that people who believe — whether or not you agree with them — that Hillary’s voters are to blame for the likely destruction of our country might be a wee bit hostile over this, too; and that we don’t need or have any more obscure or outlandish reason.
