About Those Bernouts

DISSENTING JUSTICE: The Voices: Why Do White Male Progressives Hear Things That No One Else Can?:

...Opinion polls of the 2016 primaries show a similar pattern and provide greater support for my analysis of black votes. Progressives (at this point, it should be clear that progressives means white progressives) have anointed Bernie Sanders as the leftist; Clinton is still a conservative. Although white progressives appear solidly behind Sanders, opinion polls show that Clinton has overwhelming support among Blacks and Latinos. Although white progressives tout Sanders as the best candidate for economic issues, the voting blocs that have the most at stake with respect to economic issues—people of color, the elderly, women, and poor people—support Clinton more than Sanders. By contrast, Sanders polls well with white college students, white college-graduates and graduate-degree holders, white professionals, and white men. In other words, Sanders supporters tend to have more social and economic privilege than Clinton supporters, despite white progressive depiction of Clinton as a conservative. Sanders’s revolutionaries, on average, are not socially subordinate.

Despite pegging Obama as a leftist, white progressives’ admiration for him plunged after he became president. This trend was especially true among young persons. Young white voters cast more votes for Romney in 2012 than they did for Obama, a dramatic turnaround from the 2008 election. For years, they had accused him of betraying his campaign promises. Few progressives, however, were willing to admit publicly that they heard something in Obama that never existed: a narrative of leftist heroism. Obama campaigned as a moderate, and people who actually analyzed the substance of his proposals—such as Paul Krugman—wrote about this frequently. Progressives, however, argued that Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize winning Princeton economist who writes a column for the New York Times, was a corrupt corporate media spokesperson. These same patterns have taken hold in the 2016 primaries. Persons who find little differences between Clinton and Sanders—or who find that Clinton has better policies—receive blistering criticism from white progressives, even though their misjudgment of Obama is very recent history...