Bernie’s failures modulo DNC shennanigans, is really a failure of his movement rather than a personal failure of leadership. The movement could not gather as much mass as it needed. It thought its core grievances were more widely shared than they were.
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I can’t put a finger on it but hard core Bernie supporters seemed to assume like 2.5x political legitimacy than they actually had, in terms of the number of people they could be considered as speaking for. Like 20% presumed to be 51%.
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There was an assumed consensus in how they spoke to everybody else who self-classifies left of center. “Of course you agree with us about everything otherwise you’d be for the corrupt party amirite?” attitude I found grating. It’s possible to dislike the party AND be center-left.
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A weakness of the Bernie mob vs Trump mob was grievances focused on future rather than the past.
“You’ve destroyed our future” from a 20-year-old seems like premature eager embrace of victimhood.
“You destroyed our life in the last 25 years” from a 55 year old seems more real.
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Even if true, there’s a temptation among older people (like me, Warren guy) to wonder... how can you declare failure/foreclosed future before even trying.
Perhaps unfair but that was my gut response.
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It kinda half recovered but people acted like it was booming. Even people who knew what an actual boom looks like from the 1990s
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It’s not that it’s impossible to succeed, it’s that the tools of success used by previous generations have been dismantled.
Premature to say new tools won’t be developed. But apt to say that success is far less straightforward than it once was.
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If the "you destroyed our lives" attack had that kind of weight, a coalition of unemployed autoworkers and foreclosed farmers should have kept Reagan and Bush 1 well away from the White House - and yet!
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