END TO END BERNERS: The Official Bernie Sanders 2020 Crew thread

the tweet and essay are both bad. I kept looking for the end of the essay because it just

If the point of the essay is, "Elizabeth Warren is not the standard bearer you're looking for as a feminist," then congrats, dude! You won!

That was... not the point of the essay.

It was very long so you might have missed the last five paragraphs.

(But I can only imagine the reaction if a bunch of Berniebros dismissed an essay defending liberal feminism out of hand.)

Well, it's one view of feminism.

I know you defend Sanders, which is fine, but I didn't know you defended spurious ideas about Warren's commitment to feminism.

It doesn't do that.

The underlying critique is how feminism and corporatism are irreconcilable, which I've heard too as a queer person of color. That's one way of looking at the world, it's true.

i just went back and am pretty sure I read the entire thing. It starts out with a point that I kind of was interested in but then went off in whole another direction, rambled, she made some of her own types of "microagressions" and then went into I guess the real reason of campaigning.

Is Current Affairs like, the mainstream magazine for leftists now?

magazines are edited

To use the double negative approach, she's not unsympathetic to Warren but AND LET ME EXPLAIN WHY.

(But I can only imagine the reaction if a bunch of Berniebros dismissed an essay defending liberal feminism out of hand.)

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Thursday, March 5, 2020 5:50 PM (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yo dude wtf are you talking about

i kind of thought it was a college thing but i see nathan j. robinson is older than what I thought.

Bunches of Berniebros had dismissed Warren's candidacy out of hand.

yo dude wtf are you talking about

Who can guess when now we've moved on to the eye-rolling "oh gosh, writing in Current Affairs"? How can you take a woman seriously who writes in such a rag?!

i personally don't know a lot about it. I only see it ever mentioned here. And I noticed Robinson writes things in the Guardian now.

It's on Facebook quoted by my Sanders die-hard friends.

Who can guess when now we've moved on to the eye-rolling "oh gosh, writing in Current Affairs"? How can you take a woman seriously who writes in such a rag?!

― Greta Van Show Feets BB (milo z), Thursday, March 5, 2020 6:01 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

absolutely no one said this

Who can guess now that we've moved into the eye-rolling "oh gosh, xyzzz posts tweets when he should be posting in the film and book threads?"?

i just remember that people here really seemed to like his super long Buttigieg is bad because he went to Harvard (+++ other things )and I totally got caught up in Robinson also being at Harvard.

absolutely no one said this

magazines are edited

awful person imo

Today is a hard day for so many people who love and respect @ewarren and admire her campaign - and I include myself in that.

Elizabeth Warren is a progressive lion, a champion for working families, and her commitment to inclusivity is exemplary. Thank you for being a role model. https://t.co/E9iZzo4Dwt

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 5, 2020

worth mentioning that Bernie has never said anything remotely negative about Warren that I can recall

milo you are reading way more shit into my post than is there, but i guess you're a better feminist than me

bernie made a very nice little speech about her

yes i loved that speech

he didn't say she was hermione or a cool mom even once

let's keep criticizing Elizabeth Warren's chances in the next Democratic debate

i guess you're a better feminist than me

thank you for that clarification

¿?

As expected, Trump hits Biden on trade at the FOX town hall in Scranton, PA: “Joe Biden made a deal, NAFTA. He approved it, he was pushing it. It’s the worst trade deal ever made.”

If there’s a Sanders comeback, it involves persuading voters trade will sink Biden in PA/WI/MI.

— Holly Otterbein (@hollyotterbein) March 6, 2020

Of course, if Bernie hits him hard on that and Biden still wins we get to hear about how Bernie tanked him in the general.

Bernie is a mensch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFjEUxbUiVg

Get real, Joe. One of us has a history of not only fighting cuts to Social Security but working to expand benefits. And that’s why we are the campaign best positioned to defeat Donald Trump. https://t.co/WyQfY5IQyi

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 6, 2020

there have been a lot of recriminations and imputations of bad motive by disappointed warren supporters to others this week, and obviously both andrea long chu's tweet thread and the lyta gold article are pushing back on the political characterizations being promoted by (whomever exactly we're talking about). among other things those characterizations appeal to latent/overt sexism (holding warren back / restraining her support / outright harming her) and to (weirdly) allegations of racism by proxy (wrong assessments of minority support for someone else's candidate, not even the candidates whose supporters are all pissy at each other this week!).

i'm not too partial to the gold article but its approach is similar which presumably is why xxxxxyyzyzy thought to post it—to come at warren's politics via the way it has seemed to invite, and has secured, the engagement of her supporters, via an image of super-competency and a moralized aura of underdog-against-unfairness. the analysis is pretty loosey goosey but i think it's not hard to understand the intention (in order to follow the route to the conclusion), which is to say that the 'liberal imaginary' invoked by warren's campaigning has the effect of excusing and muting a variety of things that were politically and morally unfavorable to her prospects and should tend to defuse easy explanations and blame-shifting about why she did not gain as much ground as her supporters dreamed she might.

i think that chu's tweet thread is more useful in that it focuses an analysis of this sort on an opposition of principles. you can dispute the earlier part of it, where she starts out in territory closer to what gold was doing, characterizing the style of political engagement warren's campaign was inviting, and further the kind of explanation/blame-shifting it naturally encouraged people to proffer after she withdrew—the part about the lens of merit-based sexism. but the contrast offered here

opposing sexism bc women aren’t getting what they deserve is different from opposing it bc women aren’t getting what they shouldn’t HAVE to deserve. one is denial of privilege, one is abrogation of right. and imho this was a real diff between bernie and warren’s visions all along

seems like it may be a productive way of distinguishing them, or if not, of constructing less blame-gamey explanations. for one thing, i think the idea of a just desert as opposed to a universal right is one that is very attractive to centrists and to right-wing adversaries, so IF warren's political critique laid greater emphasis on supporters' sense of women not getting what they deserve, this would explain why warren was regularly perceived as wavering in that direction or as genuinely appealing to values of parts of the electorate further to her right.

i also think that bernie's and warren's platforms seemed close enough together, as many people have said for the past year (less so in recent months), that it was in fact not always made very articulate why hers was supposed to be the superior choice. it needn't just be scoffing at the capitalist-to-her-bones or at the former-republican to think that maybe it has something to do with warren, whether for more principled or more strategic reasons, actually separating out in her politics a zone in which people getting what they deserve, or not getting what they deserve, ought to have a priority or urgency over other considerations. against that possibility, i think it provides clarity to distinguish rights (to some set of basic civic/life goods) as having to do with what everyone is owed or entitled to, regardless of desert. and again, since the latter is territory that has been prone to be operationalized in politics in terms of overreach and welfare-queen-ism and not-pulling-their-fair-share-ism and all the other hits you can think of, one can see a number of reasons that warren's politics/principles would incline her to steer away from that territory rather than into it.

To sum up your (excellent) summary, j, Warren spoke to many professional bourgeois women overlooked or condescended to, and addressing the worries of these women/LGBT folk has been a problem of the left.

i.e. "Why do you worry about this?"

which is one major reason why Warren's endorsement or lack thereof would be a big deal

their politics are ostensibly similar but their bases are absolutely not the same demos

"Addressing the worries" should be a two-way street - bourgeois feminists have not proven to be reliable advocates for non-bourgeois women quite often (see also: if not for the wage gap women could just fly to where abortions are legal, all the things Gold details).

You can call that a "problem of the left" in terms of electoral politics, but it's a moral problem for the bourgeois as well.

I agree.

"I'm not too partial to the gold article but its approach is similar which presumably is why xxxxxyyzyzy thought to post it"

It unpacked some of content on the twitter thread. I guess it starts from that picture posted on twitter and as a lot of people here don't engage in it..

I wouldn't say it was that long - sure it wasn't edited to New Yorker standards and it probably needs re-shaping because I was also looking for the ending too at one point before it suddenly ending, but anyway its good that it made all the points that everyone appreantly knows and we can just keep on going like we are. I guess the bourgeois feminists can turn out for Biden instead.

Lovely hit piece on page one of the NYTissue of Lies today: "Papers Detail Soviet Hopes for Sanders" (1980s sister-cities nothingburger). But AT LEAST IT'S NOT BERNIE BROS, amirite?

Gorbachev announced Glasnost in 1985, and proposed a ban on all nuclear weapons by the year 2000 in 1986; the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. This is all just so pathetic and historically illiterate. https://t.co/JeIoVFjuyV

— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) March 6, 2020

The Sister Cities Program was literally praised by the Reagan White House in 1986. Give me a break.

— Nikhil Pal Singh (@nikhil_palsingh) March 6, 2020

We interrupt your regularly scheduled discourse

Eventually she handed him her "Baby Bear," a gesture of tremendous trust in a strange man, as any parent of a toddler attached to a stuffed animal can confirm. Bernie took the bear, smiled, and asked her to tell him about her backpack. It was an incredibly sweet moment. pic.twitter.com/kLo1qpApiz

— Andrew Bissell (@arbissell) March 6, 2020

ban the 80s
who gives a fuck about Reagan and the Cold War?

Online bullying is bad you know

this is the reaction of twitter user "bernie sanders rape fantasy" to footage of *an actual Nazi flag* that someone brought to bernie's really tonight. does anyone in the media want to do a story on this maybe pic.twitter.com/46V1G0RB45

— Rob (@robrousseau) March 6, 2020