Jonathan Cook: the Blog from Nazareth - www.jonathan-cook.net
How ‘Bernie Bros’ were invented, then smeared as sexist, racist and unAmerican
as borscht
9 March 2020
The Democratic presidential nomination race is a fascinating case study in how
power works – not least, because the Democratic party leaders are visibly
contriving to impose one candidate, Joe Biden, as the party’s nominee, even as
it becomes clear that he is no longer mentally equipped to run a local table
tennis club let alone the world’s most powerful nation.
Biden’s campaign is a reminder that power is indivisible. Donald Trump or Joe
Biden for president – it doesn’t matter to the power-establishment. An
egomaniacal man-child (Trump), representing the billionaires, or an elder
suffering rapid neurological degeneration (Biden), representing the
billionaires, are equally useful to power. A woman will do too, or a person of
colour. The establishment is no longer worried about who stands on stage – so
long as that person is not a Bernie Sanders in the US, or a Jeremy Corbyn in
the UK.
It really isn’t about who the candidates are – hurtful as that may sound to
some in our identity-saturated times. It is about what the candidate might try
to do once in office. In truth, the very fact that nowadays we are allowed to
focus on identity to our heart’s content should be warning enough that the
establishment is only too keen for us to exhaust our energies in promoting
divisions based on those identities. What concerns it far more is that we might
overcome those divisions and unify against it, withdrawing our consent from an
establishment committed to endless asset-stripping of our societies and the
planet.
Neither Biden nor Trump will obstruct the establishment, because they are at
its very heart. The Republican and Democratic leaderships are there to ensure
that, before a candidate gets selected to compete in the parties’ name, he or
she has proven they are power-friendly. Two candidates, each vetted for
obedience to power.
Although a pretty face or a way with words are desirable, incapacity and
incompetence are no barrier to qualifying, as the two white men groomed by
their respective parties demonstrate. Both have proved they will favour the
establishment, both will pursue near-enough the same policies, both are
committed to the status quo, both have demonstrated their indifference to the
future of life on Earth. What separates the candidates is not real substance,
but presentation styles – the creation of the appearance of difference, of
choice.
Policing the debate
The subtle dynamics of how the Democratic nomination race is being rigged are
interesting. Especially revealing are the ways the Democratic leadership
protects establishment power by policing the terms of debate: what can be said,
and what can be thought; who gets to speak and whose voices are misrepresented
or demonised. Manipulation of language is key.
As I pointed out in my previous post, the establishment’s power derives from
its invisibility. Scrutiny is kryptonite to power.
The only way we can interrogate power is through language, and the only way we
can communicate our conclusions to others is through words – as I am doing
right now. And therefore our strength – our ability to awaken ourselves from
the trance of power – must be subverted by the establishment, transformed into
our Achilles’ heel, a weakness.
The treatment of Bernie Sanders and his supporters by the Democratic
establishment – and those who eagerly repeat its talking points – neatly
illustrates how this can be done in manifold ways.
Remember this all started back in 2016, when Sanders committed the unforgivable
sin of challenging the Democratic leadership’s right simply to anoint Hillary
Clinton as the party’s presidential candidate. In those days, the fault line
was obvious and neat: Bernie was a man, Clinton a woman. She would be the first
woman president. The only party members who might wish to deny her that
historic moment, and back Sanders instead, had to be misogynist men. They were
supposedly venting their anti-women grudge against Clinton, who in turn was
presented to women as a symbol of their oppression by men.
And so was born a meme: the “Bernie Bros”. It rapidly became shorthand for
suggesting – contrary to all evidence – that Sanders’ candidacy appealed
chiefly to angry, young, entitled white men. In fact, as Sanders’ 2020 run has
amply demonstrated, support for him has been more diverse than for the many
other Democratic candidates who sought the nomination.
Mia Farrow
✔
@MiaFarrow
So important what @ewarren is saying to @maddow about the dangerous,
threatening, ugly faction among the Bernie supporters. Sanders either cannot
or will not control them.
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How contrived the 2016 identity-fuelled contest was should have been clear, had
anyone been allowed to point that fact out. This wasn’t really about the
Democratic leadership respecting Clinton’s identity as a woman. It was about
them paying lip service to her identity as a woman, while actually promoting
her because she was a reliable warmonger and Wall Street functionary. She was
useful to power.
If the debate had really been driven by identity politics, Sanders had a
winning card too: he is Jewish. That meant he could be the United States’ first
Jewish president. In a fair identity fight, it would have been a draw between
the two. The decision about who should represent the Democratic party would
then have had to be decided based on policies, not identity. But party leaders
did not want Clinton’s actual policies, or her political history, being put
under the microscope for very obvious reasons.
Weaponisation of identity
The weaponisation of identity politics is even more transparent in 2020.
Sanders is still Jewish, but his main opponent, Joe Biden, really is simply a
privileged white man. Were the Clinton format to be followed again by
Democratic officials, Sanders would enjoy an identity politics trump card. And
yet Sanders is still being presented as just another white male candidate, no
different from Biden.
(We could take this argument even further and note that the other candidate who
no one, least of all the Democratic leadership, ever mentions as still in the
race is Tulsi Gabbard, a woman of colour. The Democratic party has worked hard
to make her as invisible as possible in the primaries because, of all the
candidates, she is the most vocal and articulate opponent of foreign wars. That
has deprived her of the chance to raise funds and win delegates.)
Tulsi Gabbard 🌺
✔
@TulsiGabbard
.@DanaPerino I'm not quite sure why you're telling FOX viewers that Elizabeth
Warren is the last female candidate in the Dem primary. Is it because you
believe a fake indigenous woman of color is "real" and the real indigenous
woman of color in this race is fake?
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Sanders’ Jewish identity isn’t celebrated because he isn’t useful to the
power-establishment. What’s far more important to them – and should be to us
too – are his policies, which might limit their power to wage war, exploit
workers and trash the planet.
But it is not just that Democratic Party leaders are ignoring Sanders’ Jewish
identity. They are also again actively using identity politics against him, and
in many different ways.
The ‘black’ establishment?
Bernie Sanders’ supporters have been complaining for some time – based on
mounting evidence – that the Democratic leadership is far from neutral between
Sanders and Biden. Because it has a vested interest in the outcome, and because
it is the part of the power-establishment, the Democratic National Committee
(DNC) is exercising its influence in favour of Biden. And because power prefers
darkness, the DNC is doing its best to exercise that power behind the scenes,
out of sight – at least, unseen by those who still rely on the “mainstream”
corporate media, which is also part of the power-establishment. As should be
clear to anyone watching, the nomination proceedings are being controlled to
give Biden every advantage and to obstruct Sanders.
But the Democratic leadership is not only dismissing out of hand these very
justified complaints from Bernie Sanders’ supporters but also turning these
complaints against them, as further evidence of their – and his – illegitimacy.
A new way of doing this emerged in the immediate wake of Biden winning South
Carolina on the back of strong support from older black voters – Biden’s first
state win and a launchpad for his Super Tuesday bid a few days later.
It was given perfect expression from Symone Sanders, who despite her surname is
actually a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign. She is also black. This is what
she wrote: “People who keep referring to Black voters as ‘the establishment’
are tone deaf and have obviously learned nothing.”
Symone D. Sanders
✔
@SymoneDSanders
People who keep referring to Black voters as “the establishment” are tone deaf
and have obviously learned nothing.
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Her reference to generic “people” was understood precisely by both sides of the
debate as code for those “Bernie Bros”. Now, it seems, Bernie Sanders’
supporters are not simply misogynists, they are potential recruits to the Ku
Klux Klan.
The tweet went viral, even though in the fiercely contested back-and-forth
below her tweet no one could produce a single example of anyone actually saying
anything like the sentiment ascribed by Symone Sanders to “Bernie Bros”. But
then, tackling bigotry was not her real goal. This wasn’t meant to be a
reflection on a real-world talking-point by Bernie supporters. It was
high-level gaslighting by a senior Democratic party official of the party’s own
voters.
Survival of the fittest smear
What Symone Sanders was really trying to do was conceal power – the fact that
the DNC is seeking to impose its chosen candidate on party members. As occurred
during the confected women-men, Clinton vs “Bernie Bros” confrontation, Symone
Sanders was field-testing a similar narrative management tool as part of the
establishment’s efforts to hone it for improved effect. The establishment has
learnt – through a kind of survival of the fittest smear – that divide-and-rule
identity politics is the perfect way to shield its influence as it favours a
status-quo candidate (Biden or Clinton) over a candidate seen as a threat to
its power (Sanders).
In her tweet, Symone Sanders showed exactly how the power elite seeks to
obscure its toxic role in our societies. She neatly conflated “the
establishment” – of which she is a very small, but well-paid component – with
ordinary “black voters”. Her message is this: should you try to criticise the
establishment (which has inordinate power to damage lives and destroy the
planet) we will demonise you, making it seem that you are really attacking
black people (who in the vast majority of cases – though Symone Sanders is a
notable exception – wield no power at all).
Symone Sanders has recruited her own blackness and South Carolina’s “black
voters” as a ring of steel to protect the establishment. Cynically, she has
turned poor black people, as well as the tens of thousands of people
(presumably black and white) who liked her tweet, into human shields for the
establishment.
It sounds a lot uglier put like that. But it has rapidly become a Biden
talking-point, as we can see here:
Bo Erickson CBS
✔
@BoKnowsNews
NEW: @JoeBiden responds to @berniesanders saying the “establishment” is trying
to defeat him.
“The establishment are all those hardworking, middle class people, those
African Americans...they are the establishment!” @CBSNews
View image on Twitter
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The DNC’s wider strategy is to confer on Biden exclusive rights to speak for
black voters (despite his inglorious record on civil rights issues) and,
further, to strip Sanders and his senior black advisers of any right to do so.
When Sanders protests about this, or about racist behaviour from the Biden
camp, Biden’s supporters come out in force and often abusively, though of
course no one is upbraiding them for their ugly, violent language. Here is the
famous former tennis player Martina Navratilova showing that maybe we should
start talking about “Biden Bros”:
Bernie Sanders
✔
@BernieSanders
· Mar 6, 2020
.@JoeBiden must accept responsibility for his surrogate telling our campaign
co-chair Senator @NinaTurner that she doesn't have standing to invoke the words
of Dr. King. That is unacceptable and Joe must apologize to Nina and all the
people of color supporting our campaign.
Martina Navratilova
✔
@Martina
Sanders is starting to really piss me off. Just shut this kind of crap down and
debate the issues. This is not it.
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Being unkind to billionaires
This kind of special pleading by the establishment for the establishment –
using those sections of it, such as Symone Sanders, that can tap into the
identity politics zeitgeist – is far more common than you might imagine. The
approach is being constantly refined, often using social media as the ultimate
focus group. Symone Sanders’ successful conflation of the establishment with
“black voters” follows earlier, clumsier efforts by the establishment to
protect its interests against Sanders that proved far less effective.
Bernie Sanders
✔
@BernieSanders
Billionaires should not exist.
https://twitter.com/nytpolitics/status/1176459557473804297 …
NYT Politics
✔
@nytpolitics
Bernie Sanders is unveiling a proposal for a new wealth tax on the richest
Americans, including a steep tax on billionaires that could greatly diminish
their fortunes https://nyti.ms/2mm9QB9 ;
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Remember how last autumn the billionaire-owned corporate media tried to tell us
that it was unkind to criticise billionaires – that they had feelings too and
that speaking harshly about them was “dehumanising”. Again it was aimed at
Sanders, who had just commented that in a properly ordered world billionaires
simply wouldn’t exist. It was an obvious point: allowing a handful of people to
control almost all the planet’s wealth was not only depriving the rest of us of
that wealth (and harming the planet) but it gave those few billionaires way too
much power. They could buy all the media, our channels of communication, and
most of the politicians to ringfence their financial interests, gradually
eroding even the most minimal democratic protections.
That campaign died a quick death because few of us are actually brainwashed
enough to accept the idea that a handful of billionaires share an identity that
needs protecting – from us! Most of us are still connected enough to the real
world to understand that billionaires are more than capable of looking out for
their own interests, without our helping them by imposing on ourselves a vow of
silence.
But one cannot fault the power-establishment for being constantly inventive in
the search for new ways to stifle our criticisms of the way it unilaterally
exercises its power. The Democratic nomination race is testing such ingenuity
to the limits. Here’s a new rule against “hateful conduct” on Twitter, where
Biden’s neurological deficit is being subjected to much critical scrutiny
through the sharing of dozens of videos of embarrassing Biden “senior moments”.
Ben Collins
✔
@oneunderscore__
Twitter expanding its hateful conduct rules "to include language that
dehumanizes on the basis of age, disability or
disease."https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/hatefulconductupdate.html
…
Updating our rules against hateful conduct
An update on our hateful conduct policy
blog.twitter.com
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Yes, disability and age are identities too. And so, on the pretext of
protecting and respecting those identities, social media can now be scrubbed of
anything and anyone trying to highlight the mental deficiencies of an old man
who might soon be given the nuclear codes and would be responsible for waging
wars in the name of Americans. Twitter is full of comments denouncing as
“ableist” anyone who tries to highlight how the Democratic leadership is
foisting a cognitively challenged Biden on to the party.
Neera Tanden
✔
@neeratanden
· Mar 5, 2020
Replying to @matthewstoller
This is really beneath you.
Ryan Grim
✔
@ryangrim
Maybe the Dem insiders are all wrong, but it's true that they are saying it.
Some are saying it out loud, including Castro at the debate and Booker here:
https://twitter.com/reedzeta/status/1236028066968690688 …
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Russian ‘agents’ and ‘assets’
None of this is to overlook the fact that another variation of identity
politics has been weaponised against Sanders: that of failing to be an
“American” patriot. Again illustrating how closely the Democratic and
Republican leaderships’ interests align, the question of who is a patriot – and
who is really working for the “Russians” – has been at the heart of both
parties’ campaigns, though for different reasons.
Trump has been subjected to endless, evidence-free claims that he is a secret
“Russian agent” in a concerted effort to control his original isolationist
foreign policy impulses that might have stripped the establishment – and its
military-industrial wing – of the right to wage wars of aggression, and revive
the Cold War, wherever it believes a profit can be made under cover of
“humanitarian intervention”. Trump partly inoculated himself against these
criticisms, at least among his supporters, with his “Make America Great Again”
slogan, and partly by learning – painfully for such an egotist – that his
presidential role was to rubber-stamp decisions made elsewhere about waging
wars and projecting US power.
Neera Tanden
✔
@neeratanden
I’m just amazed by this tweet, which has been tweeted plenty. Did @_nalexander
and all the people liking this not know that Mueller laid out in the
indictments of a number of Russians and in his report their help on social
media to Sanders and Trump. Help Sanders has acknowledged
https://twitter.com/_nalexander/status/1202470778014486528 …
Nicole Alexander Fisher 🌺
@_nalexander
Are we just going to ignore that Hillary Clinton, today, just implied that
Bernie Sanders is also a Russian asset?
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Bernie Sanders has faced similar smear efforts by the establishment, including
by the DNC’s last failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton – in his case,
painting him as a “Russian asset”. (“Asset” is a way to suggest collusion with
the Kremlin based on even more flimsy evidence than is needed to accuse someone
of being an agent.) In fact, in a world where identity politics wasn’t simply a
tool to be weaponised by the establishment, there would be real trepidation
about engaging in this kind of invective against a Jewish socialist.
One of the far-right’s favourite antisemitic tropes – promoted ever since the
publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion more than 100 years ago – is
that Jewish “Bolsheviks” are involved in an international conspiracy to subvert
the countries they live in. We have reached the point now that the corporate
media are happy to recycle evidence-free claims, cited by the Washington Post,
from anonymous “US officials” and US intelligence agencies reinventing a US
version of the Protocols against Sanders. And these smears have elicited not a
word of criticism from the Democratic leadership nor from the usual
antisemitism watchdogs that are so ready to let rip over the slightest signs of
what they claim to be antisemitism on the left.
But the urgency of dealing with Sanders may be the reason normal conventions
are being discarded. Sanders isn’t a loud-mouth egotist like Trump. A vote for
Trump is a vote for the establishment, if for one of its number who pretends to
be against the establishment. Trump has been largely tamed in time for a second
term. By contrast, Sanders, like Corbyn in the UK, is more dangerous because he
may resist the efforts to domesticate him, and because if he is allowed any
significant measure of political success – such as becoming a candidate for
president – it may inspire others to follow in his footsteps. The system might
start to throw up more anomalies, more AOCs and more Ilhan Omars.
So Sanders is now being cast, like Trump, as a puppet of the Kremlin, not a
true American. And because he made the serious mistake of indulging the
“Russiagate” smears when they were used against Trump, Sanders now has little
defence against their redeployment against him. And given that, by the
impoverished standards of US political culture, he is considered an extreme
leftist, it has been easy to conflate his democratic socialism with Communism,
and then conflate his supposed Communism with acting on behalf of the Kremlin
(which, of course, ignores the fact that Russia long ago abandoned Communism).
The Hill
✔
@thehill
Sen. Bernie Sanders: "Let me tell this to Putin -- the American people, whether
Republicans, Democrats, independents are sick and tired of seeing Russia and
other countries interfering in our elections."
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Antisemitism smear at the ready
There is a final use of weaponised identity politics that the Democratic
establishment would dearly love to use against Sanders, if they need to and can
get away with it. It is the most toxic brand – and therefore the most effective
– of the identity-based smears, and it has been extensively field-tested in the
UK against Jeremy Corbyn to great success. The DNC would like to denounce
Sanders as an antisemite.
In fact, only one thing has held them back till now: the fact that Sanders is
Jewish. That may not prove an insuperable obstacle, but it does make it much
harder to make the accusation look credible. The other identity-based smears
have been a second-best, a make-do until a way can be found to unleash the
antisemitism smear.
The establishment has been testing the waters with implied accusations of
antisemitism against Sanders for a while, but their chances were given a fillip
recently when Sanders refused to participate in the annual jamboree of AIPAC,
the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent lobby group whose
primary mission is to ringfence Israel from criticism in the US. Both the
Republican and Democratic establishments turn out in force to the AIPAC
conference, and in the past the event has attracted keynote speeches from
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But Sanders has refused to attend for decades and maintained that stance this
month, even though he is a candidate for the Democratic nomination. In the last
primaries debate, Sanders justified his decision by rightly calling Israel’s
prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu a “racist” and by describing AIPAC as
providing a platform “for leaders who express bigotry and oppose basic
Palestinian rights”.
Trump’s Vice-President, Mike Pence, responded that Sanders supported “Israel’s
enemies” and, if elected, would be the “most anti-Israel president in the
history of this nation” – all coded suggestions that Sanders is antisemitic.
But that’s Mike Pence. More useful criticism came from billionaire Mike
Bloomberg, who is himself Jewish and was until last week posing as a Democrat
to try to win the party’s nomination. Bloomberg accused Sanders of using
dehumanising language against a bunch of inclusive identities that, he
improbably suggested, AIPAC represents. He claimed:
This is a gathering of 20,000 Israel supporters of every religious
denomination, ethnicity, faith, color, sexual identity and political party.
Calling it a racist platform is an attempt to discredit those voices,
intimidate people from coming here, and weaken the US-Israel relationship.
Where might this head? At the AIPAC conference last week we were given a
foretaste. Ephraim Mirvis, the chief rabbi of the UK and a friend to
Conservative government leader Boris Johnson, was warmly greeted by delegates,
including leading members of the Democratic establishment. He boasted that he
and other Jewish leaders in the UK had managed to damage Jeremy Corbyn’s
electoral chances by suggesting that he was an antisemite over his support,
like Sanders, for Palestinian rights.
His own treatment of Corbyn, he argued, offered a model for US Jewish
organisations to replicate against any leadership contender who might pose
similar trouble for Israel, leaving it for his audience to pick up the
not-so-subtle hint about who needed to be subjected to character-assassination.
Chief Rabbi Mirvis
✔
@chiefrabbi
WATCH: “Today I issue a call to the Jews of America, please take a leaf out of
our book and please speak with one voice.”
The Chief Rabbi speaking to the 18,000 delegates gathered at the @AIPAC General
Session at their Policy Conference in Washington DC
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Establishment playbook
For anyone who isn’t wilfully blind, the last few months have exposed the
establishment playbook: it will use identity politics to divide those who might
otherwise find a united voice and a common cause.
There is nothing wrong with celebrating one’s identity, especially if it is
under threat, maligned or marginalised. But having an attachment to an identity
is no excuse for allowing it to be coopted by billionaires, by the powerful, by
nuclear-armed states oppressing other people, by political parties or by the
corporate media, so that they can weaponise it to prevent the weak, the poor,
the marginalised from being represented.
It is time for us to wake up to the tricks, the deceptions, the manipulations
of the strong that exploit our weaknesses – and make us yet weaker still. It’s
time to stop being a patsy for the establishment.
