Evan Vucci/AP Photo
Bernie Sanders with Vampire Weekend lead singer Ezra Koenig during a campaign rally at the University of Iowa, January 2016
Remember the PUMAs? Short for “Party Unity My Ass,” it was a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters who made a great deal of noise for a brief time in 2008 about how they weren’t going to support Barack Obama in the general election, so hot did their anger burn at seeing their favored candidate lose the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.
But in the end it didn’t matter—their numbers were relatively small, their anger dissipated, and Clinton herself proved to be a good soldier as she campaigned for Obama in the general.
And of course, Obama won 2008 easily. Things were different in 2016, when it was supporters of Bernie Sanders angrily declaring they wouldn’t support Clinton. And though there isn’t clear evidence that those voters swung the election to Donald Trump with their own votes, they certainly helped him by reinforcing his message that Clinton was a corrupt sellout who couldn’t be trusted.
And now with voting in the 2020 primaries just days away, the particular fervency of Sanders supporters is again a topic of intense discussion within the Democratic Party. In a recent interview, Clinton called out the “online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women,” and she’s hardly the only one questioning their eagerness to attack Sanders’s rivals and their potential effect on the general election should Sanders not win the nomination. Or even if he does.
Before we go on, we should make clear that there is a distinction between the population of people who will vote for Sanders in the primaries, a group that numbers in the millions, and the much smaller population of Bernie Sanders superfans, that activist core that joined him in 2016 and never lost their faith. It’s the latter that constitutes an interesting phenomenon and one that is distinct from the supporters of other candidates. But there are questions about how deep their perspective goes; a recent Emerson College poll found only 53 percent of Sanders supporters saying they’d definitely vote for the Democratic nominee, whoever it is; the figures for Biden and Warren supporters were 87 percent and 90 percent, respectively.
Sanders fans stand out in the Democratic field not because the other candidates don’t have fervent fans; they do. There are Democrats who are passionately devoted to Elizabeth Warren or to Pete Buttigieg, and perhaps even a few who get weak in the knees at the sight of Joe Biden. What distinguishes the Bernie stans is the way they think about the other Democrats.
Coming from the most fervent supporters of a candidate who calls himself a democratic socialist, it isn’t a surprise. There’s a long history in left politics of obsession with the perfidy of other leftists, even to the point of ignoring the forces they’re supposed to be fighting against; as the revolutionary People’s Front of Judea says in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front!” But one often finds an even greater contempt for run-of-the-mill liberals, who can be considered by some an even more profound danger than conservatives and the plutocrats ruling society.
And it’s the intersection of a set of impulses old and new that gives the Sanders base its particular character that separates it from the rest of the Democratic Party, one in which animosities and emotional responses that other Democrats aim at the right are aimed instead at Democrats who oppose Sanders.
First, we live in an era of intense negative partisanship, in which dislike of the other party has become a stronger motivator than affection for one’s own party. This has become true of both Republicans and Democrats, who will tolerate or rationalize weaknesses in their own candidates because they despise the other party with such a burning passion.
Yet some Sanders supporters don’t seem to feel the same urgency about defeating Donald Trump at all costs that many other Democrats do. Even if they’re happy to tell you why Sanders is the most electable candidate, it isn’t that they began from a worry about electabilty and arrived at Sanders as the solution to the problem; they began with their commitment to him and added the electability conclusion after.
The reason why Sanders supporters feel this way is that many of them—like Bernie Sanders himself—are not actually Democrats. They’ve long viewed the Democratic Party not as their team but as a bunch of neoliberal sellouts who can be relied on to regularly betray the principles the party claims to hold. Just as he was four years ago, Sanders is still talking about “taking on the Democratic establishment” as one of his key tasks, something other Democrats don’t say.
The second relevant feature of our era is that this is an age of encompassing identity politics, in which every political choice is a statement not about what you believe but about who you are. Politics is colonizing one area of our lives after another: where we live, where we get our news, what music we listen to, what TV shows we watch, which sports we pay attention to, which products we buy. All of them are increasingly freighted with political meaning.
If you’re a committed Sanders supporter, that identity may be defined as much by not being the mainstream Democratic establishment as by not being Republican. If you think of yourself as an outsider who doesn’t accept the rules made by the existing structures of power, then it may not seem crazy to see, say, a candidate who accepts a public option instead of immediate implementation of Medicare for All not as a reasonable pragmatist with whom you share most of the same goals, but instead as a contemptible corporate tool who literally wants people to die.
Bernie Sanders’s hard core of support is different than that of other candidates precisely because many of them are not Democrats, not just in a formal sense but in their outlook and motivations. So what will they do after a nominee is chosen?
If that nominee isn’t Sanders, we can expect pretty much what we saw four years ago: While Sanders himself will urge support for the nominee, many of his supporters will vote for a third party (though, alas, Jill Stein is not running) or simply not bother to vote.
And what if he is the nominee? That will be uncharted territory for many of these activists. They may well continue to target Democrats who don’t display the proper support for Sanders, policing the party for signs of insufficient enthusiasm. Or they may send out Twitter storms against Republicans, when the GOP inevitably comes after Sanders with a fury he has yet to experience.
It’s hard to know, just as it’s hard to know what kind of impact it will have on the ultimate outcome, if it has any impact at all. And at this point, even the most fervent Sanders fans may not know themselves.
