Show caption ‘I didn’t like Sanders much at the last US election and I can’t pretend it was on policy alone.’ Photograph: Iván Alvarado/Reuters Opinion It’s never easy changing your mind – but I may do just that about Bernie Sanders Emma Brockes Despite the dent to my pride, I’m coming round to the idea that the Democratic politician is not as unlikable as I thought @emmabrockes Mon 3 Feb 2020 09.30 GMT Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

Share via Email 7 months old

If we allow that we live in times of unusual upheaval, then there are almost no certainties but this: that most people don’t like changing their minds. After committing to a narrative about something or someone, most of us will do anything to avoid having to revisit it. It’s partly laziness; when I think about how much mental furniture I would have to rearrange if, for example, it were decisively proven that ouija boards work (I’m kidding – of course they do!) I want to lie down. And then there is the dent it would make to my pride.

I wasn’t a Bernie person. Somewhere in there, the opinion had compacted down into identity

How much control we have over the direction of our thoughts, and by implication over the engagement of our feelings, has always been fascinating, but it is particularly so in the runup to elections.

I didn’t like Bernie Sanders much at the last US election and I can’t pretend it was on policy alone. He seemed to me, to borrow a phrase, unlikable – a charmless, barking presence during the primaries, who I could imagine alienating not only voters, but people with whom, if he won, he would be charged with working in government. I elided his style and supporters with the much weaker Jeremy Corbyn, and having written him off had no desire to reassess him.

During the early Democratic debates last year, this position held firm. He was too old; it was outrageous that his health scares were glossed over in a way Hillary Clinton’s hadn’t been; he was so much less engaging than Elizabeth Warren. I regarded male friends who loved Bernie with a deep suspicion, given the degree to which most of them had hated Clinton while remaining passionate admirers of her husband. And anyway, I wasn’t a Bernie person. Somewhere in there, the opinion had compacted down into identity.

I can’t isolate the exact moment when this started to give way, but I’m embarrassed to admit it was eased along by Larry David’s turn as Bernie on Saturday Night Live. It was also alleviated by female friends who love Bernie – not simply for his policies, but for the more numinous reasons that turn political admiration into something more personal.

Mainly, however, I wondered what would happen if I just decided to change my mind. I did this recently – an instantaneous, 180-degree flip – in two trivial contexts. One at Christmas when, after feeling flamboyantly miserable that we weren’t travelling to see family, I decided this was a dumb, self-defeating position and changed; and again, more aggressively, with the reversal of my opinion about someone in whom I had invested some time in deciding was great, but on further evidence forced myself to recognise was awful. On both occasions, the change of mind felt miraculous, like a defiance of gravity or a get-out-of-jail-free card.

So, to Bernie. To those of my friends who love him, he is a deeply principled politician who at the symbolic level triggers warm feelings, often because he reminds them of family. I get the same ping of recognition from Warren, but I recognise this alignment is arbitrary and that, with some heavy lifting on my part and should the need arise, a relatively painless switch can be made.