Bernie Sanders’ Vision of the Future as a Return to the Past

I hate this election. Seriously. I have already lost two friends, and I may lose more before it’s over. And that’s just our side of the aisle. I am a veteran of Woodstock and SDS and thought I’d seen everything. When the Supreme Court handed Bush, Jr. the White House in 2000 I really felt we’d had a coup d’etat that no one was talking about, and I scrupulously detailed our drift into fascism while friends and family told me that I was overreacting.

In this election I turned my attention to deconstruction the cult of Bernie Sanders. I thought I’d be done writing about Bernie by now. I wrote an essay about a week ago, but it seemed overkill to publish it. Surely Clinton’s mid-Atlantic wins had decisively settled the outcome of the primary. I wanted to extend the proverbial olive branch, start party building, and defeat Trump. I buried the piece. But a week later, perhaps I should resurrect it.

Bernie just isn’t going away.

While watching a Daily Show a year ago my husband saw Bernie’s steeliness and hunger for the limelight before I did. “He’s going to run,” he said. “Don’t be silly,” I said. I missed a lot that night.

I saw no appeal in Sanders. He seemed prim and disapproving, a New England Jew, a Vermont Jew, in fact, like my grandfather, Morris, someone superior and Puritanical. I saw his wagging finger and his compressed lips, and I wondered if he was a man who had ever known love, though his essays of 1972 make it obvious that he has focused on sex in an odd way. I found no generosity in his demeanor or in his dismissive attitude toward women, minorities, gun deaths, the need for stem cell research and the Amber law, just about everything I care about.

I missed a lot. I missed the fact that his immaturity, his rigidity, his narrow focus on ideology, his anger, his resentment, and his obsessiveness would be a dog-whistle for the likeminded and ring out through the night in decibels I just don’t hear. I do hear the coded sounds of misogyny that has created a culture of bros, a giant bouquet that will be given to Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s misogyny energizes women and disgusts some men. Bernie’s hidden hatred paralyzes women but ignites the hidden springs of unconscious misogyny in men.

Bernie’s vitriolic attacks on Hillary Clinton betray his dirty secrets: deep resentment of women and self-admitted hatred for the Democratic Party. Sanders’ refusal to moderate these attacks as the race winds down suggests a scorched earth strategy; he will burn what he cannot own, completely unmoved by the suffering he creates should Trump use his parting gifts to win the election. The victims will be women, whose concerns he has called trivial, and marginalized people of color, whom his campaign has attempted to return to their status as 3/5 of a human being given to our brothers and sisters by the Constitution. How else can we interpret Bernie’s disdain for their votes in southern states where Hillary Clinton demolished him? He has gone so far as to suggest that these victories be discounted, returning us to a world where the vote of a person of color should be worth only 3/5 of a vote or perhaps be worth nothing at all.

Is this refusal to moderate a constant denigration of the Democratic Party’s front-running candidate a vestigial reminder of Bernie’s bad old days as an independent when he unsuccessfully tried to block progressive Democrat Madeleine Kunin’s gubernatorial re-election bid? Is his current Democratic clothing a new costume or merely a disguise? Or has an outsized ego and simplistic ideology captured him? It’s hard to tell for sure.

One thing that is sure is that there are many stories the media is not reporting in its frenzied desire to keep the contest going. Bernie has suffered very little vetting by the press. Once circumstance that I can’t fail to note is that Bernie’s victories do not match the revolution he claims he is creating. (And where was this revolution before he had another handy female opponent? Can he only assert himself against women?) Besides a few Hollywood flakes, his revolution is built on the same materialistic concerns he decries. His followers want free college whether they can afford college or not, even though surveys have shown they would only be willing to pay another $1000.00 in taxes a year, far less than his social programs would cost. They want to express their disdain for women with gusto without limit. They want to revile the Establishment without any viable structures or plans to replace it.

His is not the revolt of idealistic workers embracing other workers in the world, of people reaching out to all the oppressed. His movement is comprised of angry “where’s mine?” folks, and snarky “I’m not with her,” folks. Rather than a progressive walk into the future, his future is a return to a rural past complete with misogyny and guns. He wins where men don’t want to give any of the reins of life to women and where gun control is most bitterly opposed. It matters not how gun violence destroys vulnerable and innocent lives, how misogyny robs half our citizens of opportunity and support, of how minorities are oppressed by institutionalized racism. These are all distractions to Sanders (and perhaps secretly desired by his followers.) It can only be in a very surrealistic world that inexperienced white Sanders supporters feel justified in critiquing the decisions of people of color and insist they don’t know what’s best for them without being excoriated by the media. Is this 2016 or 1916? I forget.

In the end, this is like many revolts we have seen in America (the Whiskey Rebellion for example) born of bad faith and the desire to return to the past. For Sanders perhaps this is a past in which a white man could be an expert on racism, like Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, guns created a lively male culture, and reheated, outdated rhetoric would make girls swoon. However, in 2016 people of color are the experts on their own futures and voted against Sanders. Guns represent Sanders’ hypocrisy about the influence of money and lobbies in politics. And girls are women who stand with Hillary Clinton.