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

whether you should endorse that criticism

criticism that came from _a portion_ of Sanders' supporters on _Twitter_, the universally agreed-upon pettiest, silliest place on the internet, all while Warren was lobbing pretty sharp criticisms at Bernie on a regular basis *in real life*, all while Sanders himself said absolutely nothing negative about her at all, while actively condemning the former camp.

she can continue to support her principles within her capacity as US senator, without supporting Bernie. this small fact escapes you. Bernie is not a principle. he's a candidate

she sure can! I wonder which of those positions can do more to advance those principles and keep them in the discourse at the very least

I wonder which of those positions can do more to advance those principles...

Well, as senator, she has 1 vote in 100 on actual bills and can introduce legislation, seek co-sponsors, and lobby the other 99 voters. As an endorser she has the capacity to publically state her support for a particular candidate for the presidential nomination of her party. How does one measure 'doing more' and 'doing less' in regard to such disparate positions of power/influence? It beats me.

...and keep them in the discourse at the very least

I doubt the channel of the discourse will be greatly affected by that pebble thrown into its massive flow.

You left out the part of the calculation that factors in "who will be signing or not signing this legislation" and "what agenda does the party leader set."

Right, one senator vs the President, who can say who wields more influence?

Warren is of course free to do whatever she wants and she is under no obligation to anyone. But it's fair to doubt her commitment to her stated principles if she declines to help elect the last remaining presidential candidate with whom she shares a LOT of very difficult-to-accomplish goals just because some people who weren't him were mean on the internet.

xp

xp - Finally, a sensible response. Yes. She definitely should consider those factors in making her decision. Among others.

i don't honestly know what bernie is supposed to do about the ongoing phenomenon of ppl who support him being mean on twitter, considering that twitter is basically just a step or two up from a fuckin' online comments section on youtube or something. considering that bernie didn't know what the term "cancel culture" meant i think he just doesn't really get this stuff. warren's suggestion, that campaigns should hire people to pay attention to their supporters and then intervene whenever someone says something offensive, struck me as interesting but also not really something that would actually work--how are you supposed to respond to everything that's out there? tbh i basically blame twitter for existing.

she can continue to support her principles within her capacity as US senator, without supporting Bernie

Yea, and she could also do both!!! And endorsing her closest and only ideological contemporary left in the race for president of the United fucking States of all things(the same contemporary who supported and urged her to run back in 2016 and has been as gracious and supporting of her and her candidacy as anyone since then) could be a good way of promoting and furthering those principles and interests! Instead of... doing literally nothing and just returning to her position of senator like this race isn't and never happened and won't have major ramifications for the things and groups of people she professes to care about. Because as you pointed out, Bernie is still a candidate for the position which she has conceded running for, and that position is a pretty influential and important one when it comes to passing legislation and promoting policy in this country! Ergo supporting the one guy left who could assume said position to help you accomplish those goals and support those principles on the broadest scale possible with an endorsement... might be a good idea!!!! That's all anyone's saying, no one's in actual proximity to Bernie or his campaign is asking let alone DEMANDING she do anything.

xp Yeah Twitter is the ultimate "no one knows you're a dog on the Internet," that kind of suggestion is ridiculous. If she was frontrunner and a million MAGA Chuds changed their profiles to SLAY KWEEN and started hurling racial abuse someone's supposed to be able to stop that?

the important thing for all of Bernie's supporters to remember is that, no matter what you say on the internet or who you say it to, if that person doesn't know you there are no consequences, nope, not ever, it's like you never said it and nothing ever comes of it.

(I use that example because some of the abusive Bernie Bro media coverage has used MAGAs as evidence - even when they're not pretending to be Bernie supporters and explicitly calling him anti-Semitic slurs)

"all of Bernie's supporters"

Uh huh.

You know most bernie supporters aren't white dudes, let alone white dudes on twitter, right?

It's important to keep trans kids in line with their anger.

I feel like the object lesson of her campaign should be "never hire Hillary 2016 campaign staff."

meanwhile, the NOW is to feminism what those rich fairies at the Human Rights Campaign are to gay rights

The National Organization for Women (NOW) has urged Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren not to endorse Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Democratic race.

In an interview with Associated Press, NOW President Toni Van Pelt urged Warren not too “rush into” anything. “He’s really, as far as we know, done next to nothing for women and for our issues,” the NOW chief claimed.

ftr, I'm not on Twitter and never se tweets apart from those posted here. I do read much of what Bernie's supporters on ilx say. while very little that is said by Bernie's supporters on ilx about Warren is directly abusive toward her, the level of expressed entitlement to the support of all progressives for Bernie and Bernie alone as the one true progressive, and the anger at Warren for not early on bowing to this presumed requirement of fealty to Bernie, so as to boost him before Super Tuesday, when it became clear that Biden was pulling ahead of Bernie in the delegate count, primary wins, and media narrative, was remarkably prominent. Apparently the millions of Democratic voters were not to blame for Bernie's slide, instead Warren was.

And I say all this as someone who will willingly vote for Bernie in favor of Biden, whether the delegate count is close or not by the time mid-May rolls around. That sense of entitlement and anger still runs like a persistent bass note in this thread. It's there. I wish it weren't, but I see it, feel it, and it feels sucky.

You're willfully not getting it - no one gives a shit about "fealty to Bernie." He happens to be the candidate who has stood strongest for the longest on a long host of proposals. We want Warren to drop out because her endorsement would have helped those proposals become reality.

If the situations had been reversed, Bernie should have dropped out after Nevada and endorsed her, but that wasn't the reality. I would like to some day have hernia surgery. I would like to not sit up at night worried about my senior citizen mother's future ability to have a roof over her head. I would like my friends choking under college debt to not be. I would like my friend who's been in and out of the hospital for 15 months to not be contemplating bankruptcy. I would like my undocumented neighbors to never fear the authorities.

Two candidates, in my lifetime, have presented themselves as proponents of policy that would assuage those desires - and now one appears to be turning her back on those ideas because of snake emojis. Pardon me if I question her commitment to the cause.

I think the word I needed instead of "sucky" was "coercive".

She's rich and powerful, she'll be fine. I don't know about anyone else in that list.

milo otm

if you think Warren is as progressive as Sanders, your politics aren't mine

People should feel entitled to basic needs and human comforts, and should be angry that they aren't getting them, and are well within their rights to act out those emotions on messageboard threads, imo.

something i don't understand in this pointless argument: how is warren's electoral position vis-a-vis bernie's likelihood of winning different from the positions of the centrists who dropped out to support biden? i presume bootyjudge and klobuchar had some positions and said some shit that implied that biden was not exactly their dream candidate (including, relevantly, things about their identities), BUT that they broadly shared values or principles or whatever shit centrists have going on. so the only obvious difference there seems to be internal party incentives to coverge on a frontrunner to strengthen them. is warren's choice to endorse or to decline to endorse now supposed to be the mirror of those centrists' choices, or could it be that bernie's 'non-member' status (according to the party insiders) and warren's solid inclusion in the party are having an impact apart from the stupid argument about supporter civility?

No morbs, I don't think that. Ideas belong to anyone who wants them. If the most progressive ideas were all that mattered here, then there are probably hundreds of thousands of US citizens out there who could out-progressive Bernie and he'd be out of consideration. Milo, if he were 35 and eligible, could probably lay more claim to your vote than Bernie. Or you could just vote for yourself and have your vote align perfectly with your ideas.

As things now stand, practicality demands I vote Bernie or Biden and I know how that one goes. I rather think that Warren should arrive at the same conclusion, but I ain't her and she has a much more complicated relationship to power, because she has much more power than I do.

well within their rights to act out those emotions on messageboard threads, imo.

and of course, as I said, since it is the internet and a message board, there are no consequences to that at all, none, ever. It is like shouting angry words down a well. There's a faint echo and it is gone.

i don't really blame warren too much for not dropping out before super tuesday, klobuchar and buttigieg dropping out was too late and too suddenly to really react to, though i think she made a huge fool of herself accepting the superpac money which now seems like it was probably a deliberate attempt to keep her in the race just to split the sanders vote which she fell for and against her principles too.

Lectures on civility and “practicality” are going to kill us all. Except for the rich and powerful.

I don't expect Warren should do what I'd like her to. Because she presumably wants a future in the Democratic Party, and I think it is a toxic pile of shit.

I dunno. Impracticality doesn't generally produce excellent results. As for civility, it is better than anti-sociability ime.

warren's solid inclusion in the party are having an impact apart from the stupid argument about supporter civility?

well, she's the enemy, so what do you expect, amirite?

the frustration people have with warren is she wasn't the enemy at the start of the campaign and didn't have to be

but now she is, amirite?

Evidently!

warren's endorsement now that bernie has almost certainly lost the nomination is a very different thing that her endorsement would be if biden and sanders were neck and neck and she was likely to have some meaningful effect on who becomes the nominee. even if she had mind control powers over her devoted followers, it wouldn't be enough of a margin to swing the election.

so she endorses him now and:
it does a little bit: she potentially helps sanders get a positive news cycle and helps extend a divisive campaign where he loses anyway and it's a shitshow like last time
or
it does nothing: she weakens her own influence in the party and her potential influence w/ the biden campaign. right now her chances of being picked for vp are probably higher than sanders' chances of winning the nomination.

if you look at this outside of the perspective of 'literally the only thing that matters in the world of progressive politics is bernie sanders becoming the democratic nominee', which I can think it's safe to say is not her perspective, there are some pretty good reasons for her not to attach herself to a dying campaign, even ignoring the bad blood and snake emojis. you can frame her as a bitter irrational woman, but rational actors don't tend to attach themselves to sinking ships.

Whether its a) The 'toxicity' of the Bernie campaign, or b) The 'over-sensitivity' in the Warren camp, at the end of the day doesn't it amount to the same thing? That there just isn't a shared 'there' there, regardless of who is at fault. The division between the two groups of people isn't insignificant, as we can see on this board as well as out there. Up until a year or so ago you could argue the case, but the divergence isn't recent, and its wide.

Its just different ways of seeing the world, thats just how it is. The idea that Warren supporters would just switch en masse to Bernie has been a stretch for months. What Bernie needed were a bunch of endorsements around the time Biden got all his. It was the cumulative effect of those rather than any particular one. He got Di Blasio and Williamson and he needed bigger fish.

Agree with iatee here, at this point a Warren endorsement just doesn't make any sense. But Bernie shouldn't have been relying on a Warren endorsement. He needed to be pulling multiple names out of the hat in the event of Biden's rivals folding their flags and endorsing him. Didn't necessarily need to be Warren, which was always going to be a push anyway

Everyone seems to agree that it doesn't make any sense or much difference now.

Nor is anyone "framing her as a bitter irrational woman" but it's kind of de rigeur to frame any criticism of Warren at ILX in the most horrifying terms possible so w/e.

She's also not going to be VP (she's too old, too white, too much someone who finished third in the state she represents that's not a swing state, too easily replaced by a Republican at least temporarily).

We'll see if she endorses or not, for whatever it matters, and we'll see what concessions she wrings out if she doesn't. I think the answer is no and none but we'll find out!

Do you realize you’re just talking to yourself?

Crushing, just crushing. Warren may not have won many delegates but she definitely ran the table with the most insufferably high-handed ILXors.

I am actually sort of impressed that you would call anyone else “insufferably high-handed” but I guess self-awareness is a trait that doesn’t pop up much in the Bernout demo

Liz has been explicit in identifying as a capitalist seeking to protect capital from its own excesses. She's literally just a Keynesian liberal. Calling her 'progressive' is just obfuscating. Positioning her as an ally to Bernie is naive. They have fundamentally different goals.

— BernBot #33 (@57ankhs) March 7, 2020

the important thing for all of Bernie's supporters to remember is that, no matter what you say on the internet or who you say it to, if that person doesn't know you there are no consequences, nope, not ever, it's like you never said it and nothing ever comes of it.

― A is for (Aimless), Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:59 PM (one hour ago)

how many of those ppl in my last link did Biden denounce?

while very little that is said by Bernie's supporters on ilx about Warren is directly abusive toward her, the level of expressed entitlement ... was remarkably prominent.

if it's really this prominent, you could list all the Bernie supporters on ILX in one column and then the... two or three of them? who have been angry at Warren about not dropping out five days ago in another column, so we can all see what proportion qualifies as prominent

Just wanna say that I've been enjoying milo z's posts and think he's been getting a lot of undeserved flack in these discussions.

Just wanna say that I've been enjoying milo z's posts and think he's been getting a lot of undeserved flack in these discussions.

Other than posts which tell other people not to post (which are easy enough to tune out) I've got some value from almost everyone's posts!

xxxp

i'd actually strongly disagree with that. despite sanders' revolutionary rhetoric and talk of socialism, the social democratic policies he advocates for are ultimately about reforming capitalism and restraining its excesses. i don't think it's wrong to call warren a 'progressive' either.

1973 Bernie was 100% cooler than 2020 Bernie politically.

There was the Trot dalliance in the early '80s but whomst among us has not had a lost weekend

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_Y41LbpBOM