Post-debate, my dad - Boomer born in 1950 - called me to ask why Sanders appeals to the young. He’s supporting Bloomberg or Pete after supporting Bernie in 2016 for reasons that pretty much boiled down to misogyny. While I don’t ‘Feel the Bern,’ here’s what I told him. [Thread]
First, full disclosure, I’m an ‘older’ Millennial - born '88 - a white, college-educated guy and a Warren supporter. I was a tepid Hillary supporter in the 2016 primary and general but my sympathies have always been on the left. Still, I’m a New Deal liberal, not a Dem Socialist.
So, my Boomer father asks, "Why does Bernie have so much appeal?" Simply, the complete failure of previous generations to reckon with the crises they caused and perpetuated, have left young people very, very angry.
Just in the last 20 years, I’ve seen the people who were supposed to know what they were doing and do the right thing fail over and over again. Starting with the Supreme Court discrediting itself in the 2000 election and then intelligence failures leading to 9/11 and Iraq...
...and then Katrina and then the Financial Crisis and the housing crisis and the student debt crisis and now the election of and then acquittal of Donald Trump. There are many more crises and failures I could add in there, too.
And that’s ignoring rampant inequality, the continuation of policies that treat people of color as second class citizens, the war on voting rights and democracy more generally, and the refusal to even acknowledge the existential threat to humanity that is climate change.
People who were supposed to be the serious and sober experts - the elites - have failed again and again and now a large movement of people are in thrall of an ideology that pretty much boils down to a “fuck you” to the suggestion they listen to or compromise w/ those same elites.
Over the last forty years, there have been opportunities to address these issues - most of which are not partisan - with small ball or moderate solutions. They could have turned the ship of state 5 degrees at a time which, over decades, ends up being huge. But they didn’t.
And now we’re left in a place where young people are tired of waiting and believe we must make dramatic changes all at once because we didn’t make small tweaks over time. This is especially true with climate where the science suggests catastrophe w/o massive efforts.
Bernie’s “revolution” and, to a lesser extent, Warren’s appeal is mainly premised on exhaustion with the status quo that has failed to address crisis after crisis with even half-measures. Sanders has the additional appeal of being viewed as an outsider who is not a capitalist.
This is genuinely a crisis and I don’t think older people on the center-left or those in the DC-NYC elite have really grappled with how much of a role they’ve played in getting us here. Compromise is foundational to democracy and a large, angry constituency is turning against it.
There was thought that Trump’s election might wake people from their complacency but even the #Resistance is only pining for a return to ‘Good Old Days’ of the early Obama Administration, which still saw a failure to address so many of the structural issues plaguing America.
(And I say that as someone who agrees almost entirely with what the Obama Administration did from ‘09-’11. I can quibble with a few things, but there wasn’t much else the administration could have done with the system and Congress they had at the time.)
When people wonder why Biden’s candidacy of restoration doesn’t appeal, it makes sense. Same with Bloomberg and Pete, who both represent an ideology that pairs social liberalism with minor tweaks to the status quo. Democrats have been trying that for decades with little success.
Young people, specifically college-educated ones, are ready for a big change. It seems like the plurality of the Democratic Party is as well. Polls suggest otherwise for the nation as a whole. And people of color, long accustomed to only marginal improvements, seem skeptical.
And, regardless of the outcome of the election, this anger will continue to boil until these crises are addressed in significant ways. A sizable chunk of the Democratic electorate won’t accept half-measures. What that means the future of democracy or capitalism is hard to say.
With that in mind, the appeal of Sanders is understandable, maybe even reasonable. That's why he should probably be favored to win the Democratic nomination. And the sooner the rest of the party and the elite come to grips with what has inspired Sandersism, the better we'll be.
One thing I neglected to mention is explicitly was that some of this anger is driven by the failure to hold any elites accountable for all of their failures. Here’s Sanders going after just that dynamic:
I should also note that my father was very upset by all of this, tried to cut me off multiple times, and said “we don’t have to talk about this right now.” He’s pathologically conflict averse and, like much of his generation, refuses to see his role in any of this.
