One of the things that's clear tonight is there is a clear generational divide on Sanders/Biden. So many boomers rely on Facebook/tv/radio for information consumption, nearly entirely hostile to Sanders, vs under 45 very online leftists.
A clear distinction in who was based on policies, versus a sense of electibility, which is much more of a feature of American elections than elsewhere. Also a strong sense of loyalty plays for older voters -
who strongly prefer someone who is a 'democrat' and has earned that position - than a scary unknown. I think the effect of the Cold War cannot be understated - the word socialism has lost meaning for most people, but this pervasive threat of communism really does get to boomers.
Plus you add in accepted forms of voter suppression - cutting polls, bad technology since W, voting on a workday, superdelegates - and you can understand why younger/poorer/POC end up so frustrated with the political structures, which never work for them.
It's shown that Sanders vs Trump is preferred by voters generally, most likely because he attracts new/non-voters (underrepresented in primaries), and so even some pretension that electability matters disappears. Biden policies often conflict w/ exit polls.
Biden's support often coming from more conservative states, and the likeliness that he will just get destroyed by Trump ahead of the general, in debates/online, and I don't see a viable path for Biden.
It's showing how often we vote, it's the same as how we shop - it's more a play of our more gut feelings, as completely irrational as they are, with our attempts to layer meaning on top of them, post-hoc. It's nearly impossible to keep up with a hyper-active news cycle now.
Consistently we see that many (but not all) boomers still get their news from tv/radio/newspapers, and on social media, they're much more likely to share (and thus consume) misinformation. This represents a group very susceptible too to microtargetting, algorithms, etc.
It often takes a lot of work to disabuse oneself of the many lies told throughout our education system. Many of the horrors of our past - Indigenous genocides, slavery, sexism, US imperialism, child labour - were skipped over. I don't blame people for not knowing.
This is how the system is designed, and it's very hard to get off that treadmill for most people. It's no wonder they're resistant to changes they're not even aware of. But we don't realize how often so many of these past social movements were generational shifts too.
When we think back to the civil rights era, when a lot of young folks like Bernie were progressive then, we see that they were not fighting just conservatives, but also mainstream liberals. That's who Martin Luther King Jr was warning us about.
In the 60s, sit-ins, protests, freedom buses, etc were seen as harming the civil rights movement. I wasn't alive then, but we know from experience that polite society doesn't make way easily for most changes, if they're to inconvenience 'middle America' -
looking at modern indigenous rights, climate justice, human rights, anti-war, BLM, immigrant justice, prison justice, feminist, etc movements, we find that just as much as there's a left-right split, there's also an age split, as people begin to tie these issues together.
So when young people, who share none of the loyalty to, e.g., the Democratic Party or to even Obama, look at Biden's past during those times, where he was often a regressive force, they wonder why anyone would trust him with a vote going forward.
I think many centrists feel politically vulnerable, because they don't often have the tools of protest, and they don't control most of the arms of industry and media that props up the current system. So getting some political power back feels like a needed win for the team.
Because many see electing a president as having a hopefully benevolent king/queen for a while, that generally does what you want, and who you're prepared to defend. Whereas more younger leftists see the president as a political target - you get someone in who you can pressure.
For many people, politics takes up the same areas of our feelings as sports teams, it's a group self-identifying activity. Sometimes you want to win, sometimes you just want someone to lose. And so we're often generous in telling ourselves that policies or electability matters.
One of the only silver linings from the coronavirus might be that many Americans see the need for public health, and also reveal the cravenness of decades of austerity in the face of an actual disaster that even the rich aren't sheltered from, unlike climate change.
Otherwise, the hope is with the youth, as our teachings tell us.
@threadreaderapp unroll
