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I understand Bernie Sanders has a huge flock of male chauvinist supporters. That seems implausible, doesn’t it? I’m not disputing that someone is posting offensive sexist responses to comments by Clinton supporters on various websites. What I’m skeptical of is the claim that such comments are coming from Sanders’ supporters. I’m not saying there is no such thing as a genuine leftist who is also sexist. They exist. The British are particularly prone to this personality disorder. I doubt, however, that there are many British who are all that involved in online debates among the supporters of various candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination in the U.S.

The purported “Bernie Bros” movement is about as plausible as a group called “Vegans for Trump.” In fact, “Bernie bros” sounds very much like an invention of some public relations firm hired by the Clinton campaign. You remember the public relations industry, the people who invented equally implausible fake “grassroots” groups such as the “National Smokers Alliance,” “a supposedly independent organization of individual smokers which claimed that bans on smoking in public places infringed on basic American freedoms” (Trust Us, We’re Experts, p. 239), and the “Wise Use” movement, a fake grassroots group opposed to environmentalism (Trust Us, We’re Experts, p. 20).

The Bernie Bros have been charged with “mansplaining” political issues to Clinton supporters. It wasn’t clear to me, at first, what “mansplaining” was, so I looked it up. It’s apparently a type of explanation that is condescending or patronizing, typically made by a man to a woman whom he assumes may have difficulty understanding what he is trying to say because she is, well, a woman. Now that, of course, is bad. From what I have been able to gather, however, the “mansplaining” of Sanders’ supporters is characterized not by condescension or contempt, but by factual references and valid inferences. That is, Bernie Bro “mansplainers” use sound arguments as rhetorical clubs to beat down the specious arguments of people who claim that the facts, and the valid inferences that can be drawn from them, are not relevant to the issue of Clinton’s fitness to hold the highest office in the land.

I have to tell you that, as a woman, I take offense at the implication that sound arguments are somehow inherently masculine and that using them to defend one’s political position constitutes a type of bullying. It can indeed be humiliating to have one’s errors in reasoning publicly exposed, and I have a certain sympathy for the plight of Clinton supporters for whom this ordeal must seem unrelenting. No one is forcing them to go to the barricades, however, for someone whose record makes her effectively indefensible.

Polls suggest that Clinton’s main supporters are older women. That makes me wonder whether the teaching of critical reasoning is a relatively recent pedagogical development. Learning to recognize fallacious arguments and non-argumentative rhetoric, takes some training (see philosopher Stephen Stich’s “Could Man Be An Irrational Animal”, Synthese 64 [1985] 115-135”). Perhaps many older women failed to receive that training.

Madeleine Albright appears, in any case, never to have taken a first-year critical reasoning course. Albright rebuked female Sanders supporters at a rally for Clinton in New Hampshire. She reminded everyone that the battle for gender equality had not yet been won, that there was still much work to be done before it would be, and that part of that work involved supporting Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. “Just remember,” she concluded, “there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

Really, Madeleine? Do you really think women should support other women simply because they are women? Where would you draw the line? Should women always support other women who seek political office, not matter what their views? Should all the women in the U.K. have supported Margaret Thatcher, simply because she was a woman, even if they disagreed with her conservative views? So women don’t get the same freedom of choice as men do? They don’t get to vote their consciences? And if they dare to do that, they’re bad people?

That sort of effort at persuasion is, in fact, a very specific form of informal fallacy known as “peer pressure,” which is itself one of a family of informal fallacies referred to as “appeals to emotion.” When you can’t get people to agree with your position on its merits, just try making them feel really bad about disagreeing with you. So instead of Clinton supporters attempting to use sound reasoning to persuade women that Clinton is the better Democratic candidate, they hurl invectives at them such as “You’re betraying women!” or better yet: “You’re going to hell!”

Really, Madeleine? Do you really think this generation of educated young women is going to be taken in by such transparently underhanded rhetorical tactics as that? Really, Hillary? You’re not going to denounce that kind of tactic?

If you want an example of bullying, there it is.

There was a time, way back in the early days of feminism, when some cognitively challenged feminist scholars argued that logic was inherently masculine, that while men made decisions based on reasoning and logic, women made them based on intuitions and emotions and that this was an equally valid way of making decisions (see, for example Carol Gilligan’s In A Different Voice). Fortunately, this view has few followers nowadays. Years of increased access for women to high-quality education has made it glaringly obvious that men do not have a monopoly on rationality and that the whole logic versus emotions view of reasoning was itself a false dichotomy based on an inadequate understanding of the complexity of rational thought.

Albright is right, of course, in her observation that women’s fight to “climb the ladder” of equality with men is not done. Bullying them to vote for a candidate against their own better judgement is hardly going to advance that cause, however. The Clinton campaign’s knee-jerk “feminism” is creating a hell of its own, and not just for women who refuse to jump on the Clinton bandwagon, but for all women, because it will only confirm in the minds of horrified onlookers that women are not actually so rational as they claim and hence will set the whole feminist movement back decades.