I’m not #FeelingTheBern anymore. I’m on Bernie Sanders’ side policy-wise. I agree with many more of his positions than I do Hillary Clinton’s. I donated money to his campaign last year and I intend to vote for him in the Ohio primary in March. Still, the “Berniebro” phenomenon has left me feeling, well, Berned-out.



I am referring to a certain demographic of Sanders supporter – white and male – who accuses anyone who’s not #FeelingTheBern of being a member of the “Establishment.”

It’s gotten bad enough that Bernie Sanders’ campaign rapid response director had to speak up about it on Twitter. It’s gotten bad enough that, among my circle of friends (who are mostly millennials about evenly split between supporting Clinton and Sanders in the primary), the “Berniebro” phenomenon immediately comes up whenever the election comes up.

It’s not a new pattern. Remember the Obamatons back in 2008, who declared Hillary Clinton to be everything from a reincarnated Margaret Thatcher to Ronald Reagan in a pantsuit – despite the fact that Clinton had a near identical voting record to Obama’s and actually ran to his left on issues like healthcare.

The worst trait of fundamentalists is their insistence that anyone who’s not on board with their revolution is part of a coordinated conspiracy to silence and suppress that revolution. You can watch in real time as any progressive public figure who refuses to openly endorse Sanders – whether or not they also endorse Clinton – gets bombarded by wave after wave of accusations of being on the take.

Their hypocrisy, too, is distasteful. When black activists were singled out at a political rally for being “potentially disruptive”, many Bernie supporters were silent. And when detractors criticize Bernie about his record on gun control, or the fact that his healthcare agenda, unlike Clinton’s, never directly addresses reproductive rights, those people are often accused of being disingenuous shills using “identity politics” to enact the agenda of the big banks.



If people find it off-putting or troubling that Sanders seems persistently unwilling to pivot away from his one-plank platform of attacking income inequality to talk about any other issue – be it police violence against black Americans or violence by Daesh overseas – they’re No True Leftists, because it’s self-evident to any true leftist that all issues should come back to economics.

Hell, even when the Sanders campaign does something unambiguously and unarguably bad, like when one of their staffers gets caught accessing Clinton campaign data and is summarily fired for it, you hear Sanders people grumbling about how that staffer came from the Democratic National Convention and may possibly have been a plant.

It’s a problem when a movement cannot accept criticism or dissenting views. When Sarah Jeong, a journalist and Bernie Sanders supporter, said she saw racist comments on Twitter linked to a #FeelTheBern account, a mob of trolls tried to chase her off the internet. Another woman, who said she personally likes and identifies with Hillary Clinton, was sent death threats. These are not isolated cases.



The worst part is that I don’t think it is entirely confined to jerks on the internet – it’s been percolating its way up through the campaign, and has now even tinged the rhetoric of the candidate himself.



Consider that Bernie Sanders called Planned Parenthood “The Establishment,” despite being primarily an organization that provides healthcare for the poor. That was after the group had been on the ropes for months from vicious, false attacks that culminated in a mass shooting last year.

But when you’re fighting a “political revolution” and the entire atmosphere of your campaign is dripping with revolutionary zeal, then pretty quickly anyone who’s not with you is against you. It’s disappointing that Planned Parenthood’s choice to endorse Clinton over Sanders was a reason for Sanders to dismiss Planned Parenthood as yet another adversary to “take on”.

What I’ve liked about Sanders as a person and a candidate so far has been that he’s better than his fans. In his time in the Senate he has done the hard work of making things happen within the existing system rather than piously opining on how the system is corrupt. He also started this campaign with a no-mudslinging pledge and the intention of improving the Democratic party rather than merely proving himself separate from and superior to it.

I like the Bernie Sanders who, after his tiff with #BlackLivesMatter, went and listened to their concerns, listened to Sandra Bland’s family and #SaidHerName. I don’t like the version of him that reared his head when they first confronted him at Netroots Nation and in Seattle, storming out as though he’d been wronged.



Many of Sanders’ supporters are young, impatient college graduates who love to see someone with a clear-cut set of beliefs running roughshod over the triangulating phonies.



But if you’re one of the people being run roughshod over, and you feel you have legitimate concerns that don’t fit into that ideological model of progressivism, the revolution is a lot less appealing.

Democratic politics does not work if you just talk and never shut up and listen. And right now the Sanders campaign isn’t doing that great a job at listening.