bernie, ron paul, that asshole who doesn't vote

There's a lot that I like about Bernie Sanders. It's increasingly difficult to stomach many of his supporters.

My beat's religion, not politics, so I'll be brief, but there are a handful of things bothering me.

The attacks on Clinton by Sanders supporters, especially over her centrism or that of Bill's presidency, feel like the latest example in decades of infighting within the Democratic Party that have consistently contributed to its weakness. The Republican Party somehow succeeds in creating a big tent for both war hawks and isolationists, and for all the talk that the Religious Right, the Tea Party, and the moderates are going to destroy the party in their efforts to tear each other apart, they keep sticking together out of fear of effective Democratic leadership. Even after facing the most obstructionist Congress in history, Democrats can't manage to see the big picture in the same way. This is not new. This keeps happening.

What Sanders supporters keep reminding me of is Ron Paul supporters. Paul and Sanders both present platforms that are simple to digest -- big statements, no dithering, four color palette. For perhaps this reason, they both attract supporters who have not been happy with the mainstream of their respective parties -- parties "tainted" by the necessity of compromise and the limits of what can actually be accomplished. In both cases, I keep seeing supporters -- not all, in Bernie's case, but certainly too many -- who are hostile both to "compromised" candidates like Clinton and, really, to the very idea of pragmatism. From this, it is not a hard leap to conspiracy.

Like with Ron Paul, Sanders attracts a share of supporters who are not usually passionate about candidates, which contributes to the frequency of conspiracy claims, both because of their naivete and perhaps because they feel so strongly that they don't understand how their candidate could perform badly except as the result of interference.

Maybe it's because I've both lived in New Hampshire and spent plenty of time online, and so have had ample opportunity to listen to Ron Paul supporters in many previous election years -- I just see so many comments from Bernie supporters that could be copy and pasted word for word from disgruntled Ron Paul acolytes of the past, and that should be bothering them. Christ, the fact that any of us know who Ron Paul is should be bothering all of us, but that's a whole nother thing.

There's another bothersome subset, too, of course, the "I haven't found a candidate I've felt comfortable voting for in umpteen years, so Bernie is the first one I'm voting for" guy (it's usually a guy). This is the lowest form of voter, inexcusable in anyone past college age: the voter who thinks his vote is supposed to be a form of self-expression.

Fuck you, self-expression guy.

We need to be more clear about this as a society, I think. We so often emphasize voting as a privilege, and that's important, but it's a responsibility as well. Part of voting as a responsibility is understanding that the office will be filled and that real, consequence-bearing actions will transpire whether you deign to participate in them or not. Lack of participation is still participation. Your responsibility is not to find the manner of voting that best expresses to us who you are as a voter. It's to spend your vote in the way that achieves the best results. I've read a million screeds justifying the power of not voting, because yes, I'm in my 40s and I fucking remember fanzines too, but they're all horseshit, lazy ridiculous Know Nothing horseshit.

The idea of sitting at home and avoiding most of the elections because you're waiting for your ideal candidate to come along, the one worth of your vote? Fuck -- oh, I said this already, fuck you, self-expression guy. It's worth saying more than once, because you know what? Here it comes again. Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck your favorite TV show, I hope it gets remade by someone really fucking shitty.

The idea of your vote as this precious thing that can only get spent on something that perfectly reflects who you are deep deep down inside, that is just so fucking shitty and ridiculous and unfortunately way too common. My reflex is to call it immoral. My gut feeling is that you are fucking us over, you are letting the rest of us down. You are dropping your corner of the couch while waiting to carry the couch that better reflects your needs and qualities as a furniture mover, which may make you feel good in the short-term, but leaves the rest of us with more to carry and doesn't change a fucking thing about how the room looks.

Because I have such disdain, such contempt, such moral disgust for this "I will wear this purity ring until I find the candidate worth of deflowering my vote" horseshit, my hackles instinctively go up when a candidate draws these particular flies.

Moving on from the discomfort I have with some of the outliers among Bernie's supporters, I have to say that the candidate himself isn't perfect either. Now, this doesn't bother me especially. What candidate is, obviously. But the "Clinton, tainted insider compromiser poopy head" vs "Sanders, progressive Democratic Socialist superhero" narrative, ridiculous enough in the first place, is only tenable if Sanders is a credible progressive superhero, and the first problems I ever had with Sanders remain the biggest ones: he just isn't progressive enough, he's more of a white-appealing class-focused populist. He certainly isn't progressive enough to be held up as a progressive ideal.

Look at Sanders' pie in the sky, a goose-that-lays-a-golden-egg in every pot, plans for half the issues in his platform, and then compare that ambition to what he says about climate change, which in the end is ... very little. The only reason he even sounds liberal about climate change, much less progressive, is because the United States is batshit fucking crazy when it comes to climate change, and we still have climate change deniers walking amongst us like they're regular fucking people. His plans, such as they are, are essentially conservative ones.

Worse, consider Sanders on racial justice. Ta-Nehisi Coates makes the succinct and damning point here (and expanded here): given that none of Bernie's plans for anything are practical and none of them come with an explanation for how he plans to get them past a rigidly obstructionist Congress, why are reparations singled out as the issue he dismisses as impractical, without further discussion? If you really consider yourself a progressive, this should bother you. Coupled with how little Sanders' supporters seem to care about his lack of support among non-whites, it should bother you a lot.