General Bern it all down 2020 edition
- Thread starter mysticmac
- Start date
Crazy Bernie "Cuck" Sanders is 300 years old and looks like an old diabetic with aids so he don't want da smoke...
This kind of take isn't helpful to any campaign, is padded with racist assumptions and frankly is antithetical to what Bernie's politics stand for. I could see the Intercept running something like this, but not a supporter.
Am I missing something here?
Not if Bernie gets it first at 2-1!
Bernie should probably check the stats before he goes on about "private prisons"
But they wrote in on twitter. Does that mean nothing?
You see it as the argument that you've been having with me where Bernie's campaign (politics?) failed to excite black america in the primaries for 2016....That he is now doing better on that front, has changed course or got his message across better, etc. Just another stat of Bernies momentum.
@Kneeblock , if I can be so brazen to presume, is pointing out that such comparisons set black woman Kamala Harris as some black standard and thus suggests beating a black woman to the black vote must be something special. Sanders the white man getting black votes as the away team! It sets black america as being less critical of black candidates and they are the vote by default.It's be a strange headline to see, "Kamala Harris beating Sanders 2-1 for the Jewish vote". (although that probably wouldn't be too embarrassing for some of our media to make such assumptions https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-jews-to-vote-for-him/?utm_term=.784f89222122 )
But as I was pointing out earlier, Kamala Harris specifically has a problem personally and professionally in left wing politics as a "top cop" where police action has yet to be reconciled with left wing national policy. She has also yet to convince black america that she understands a number of cultural issues. Some of its unfair painting of her for the same reasons some news outlets questioned Obama's 'blackness' in his primary against Hillary -- immigrant family, overseas upbringing, etc. Some more of it is that Harris just hasn't done a very good job of reconciling her prosecutor job with unanswered policy questions about community policing or just her campaign at large on issues that matter to many black americans. But those personal/professional overlaps build up this image that you get this...
Kamala Harris takes on questions about her 'blackness' - CNNPolitics
And then it has become its own reverse meme where she can't do anything without it being seen as pandering -- some sort of double reverse not black enough.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...g-chicken-and-waffles/?utm_term=.b2f44250a0d6
So the Sanders headline comparison jumps right into that ongoing identity question that is somewhat fair about her policy but somewhat a catch 22 about being black enough without being black 'on purpose'.
she has a history of top-copping the poor while being part of political machine is Sacramento.
this is a prime example of how identify politics fails. So what if she's an African-American woman? She led the charge to lock up minorities while trading backroom favors to get her position.
this is a prime example of how identify politics fails. So what if she's an African-American woman? She led the charge to lock up minorities while trading backroom favors to get her position.
Kamala Harris is an early leading candidate it's fair to contrast her support amongst black voters to Bernie when people such as yourself claim he has a problem amongst black voters. She has a problem herself amongst black(all) voters, but nowhere does it say that she is some standard or claim that black people will only vote for other black people, or something else that you've read into a fairly innocuous headline. I think maybe you've both been influenced by other questions around her as a candidate and read more into a headline than there really is.You see it as the argument that you've been having with me where Bernie's campaign (politics?) failed to excite black america in the primaries for 2016....That he is now doing better on that front, has changed course or got his message across better, etc. Just another stat of Bernies momentum.
It's be a strange headline to see, "Kamala Harris beating Sanders 2-1 for the Jewish vote". (although that probably wouldn't be too embarrassing for some of our media to make such assumptions https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-jews-to-vote-for-him/?utm_term=.784f89222122 )
But as I was pointing out earlier, Kamala Harris specifically has a problem personally and professionally in left wing politics as a "top cop" where police action has yet to be reconciled with left wing national policy. She has also yet to convince black america that she understands a number of cultural issues. Some of its unfair painting of her for the same reasons some news outlets questioned Obama's 'blackness' in his primary against Hillary -- immigrant family, overseas upbringing, etc. Some more of it is that Harris just hasn't done a very good job of reconciling her prosecutor job with unanswered policy questions about community policing or just her campaign at large on issues that matter to many black americans. But those personal/professional overlaps build up this image that you get this...
Kamala Harris takes on questions about her 'blackness' - CNNPolitics
And then it has become its own reverse meme where she can't do anything without it being seen as pandering -- some sort of double reverse not black enough.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...g-chicken-and-waffles/?utm_term=.b2f44250a0d6
So the Sanders headline comparison jumps right into that ongoing identity question that is somewhat fair about her policy but somewhat a catch 22 about being black enough without being black 'on purpose'.
I don't think the reversed headline would be weird if that was an actual thing that was happening. It would be an interesting question as to why it was happening, what are the motivating factors that would lead to a single racial group supporting one candidate so strongly over another. Especially, if opponents of the individual in question have made the opposite, a lack of support, as a central criticism of their campaign.
@Splinty got it partly right.Cursory research usually tells you Black people vote as a group, making the "Black vote" an all important thing to lock down for horse race purposes. But when you dive a little deeper past the seeming group behavior you see that Black voters have quite a bit of variability, especially in primaries where candidates have to make the case state by state. Low income urban populations tend to vote similarly (though not uniformly), and Black people are overrepresented in this demographic. Middle class Black people are more diffuse geographically and typically vote similarly to their middle class white Democratic counterparts. Black Republican voting is usually more of an outlier, but is often geographically determined or occasionally class bound (which usually means the same thing).
So "black voters" are an imaginary construct that gets reified every election cycle, especially during Obama's 8 years because identity seemed to be a more salient motivator among Black voters from traditionally low participation groups, eg Black young adults and low income populations.
The idea of clustering Black people politically isn't new. We all I'm sure remember when media appointed Al Sharpton as Black spokesperson. Prior to him it was Jesse Jackson. Before him MLK. Before that DuBois and before him Booker T Washington and prior to him Frederick Douglass. All of these (uncoincidentally) men were part of much larger assemblages of Black political debate on how to engage around issues of race, but also politics unrelated to race, specifically concerning issues of political economy and foreign affairs. Media seldom has had room for showing a diversity of ideology among Black people which is why the internet has been such an interesting place for making visible Black involvement among socialists, liberals, moderate conservatives, and libertarians. Involvement that was always there, but was easy to write off or overlook.
Simplification of "Black voters" to a voting Bloc feeds into politics based on identarianism or worse suggests that there's something intrinsic about Black people that could explain why they vote. This analogizes to prior racist associations between thinking or decision making and race plus a whole host of other discredited racial social theories.
Bernie's campaign has been about eschewing identarianism for the more universal terrain of class struggle. He routinely disavows identity politics but does make a point to acknowledge over-persecution or marginalization of groups on the basis of identity. This has been his consistent stance for decades.
The idea that Harris deserves any vote, whether Indian, Jamaican, Californian, etc. will have more to do with how her narrative maps onto different communities within states. Same for Bernie. She doesn't have to outpace Bernie among Black people, she just has to do so among her constituency which skews toward a multiracial coalition of mostly moderates. There are plenty of law and order Black as well as Indian or white or Latino people who won't see her having been a prosecutor as any sort of disadvantage. But there are flanks of the Black left (and the left generally) for whom that's a nonstarter.
So insofar as Bernie is leading Harris 2-1 among African Americans he's also leading her 2-1 nationally among likely Democratic voters according to the latest polls, suggesting the so called Black vote is roughly the same as the rest of the electorate. The take that Kamala is somehow underperforming with Black voters implies that the symbol of her skin means she should engender loyalty (which you'll note Sharpton, Cain, Carson, and Keyes didn't reliably get during their Presidential runs). But again there is no similar analysis of Indian voters, which is a smaller less cosmetically politically similar group, though arguably more relevant to Harris' identity.
Bottom line: Bernie's politics aren't about contesting identity so much as political economy. Celebrating his popularity along identarian lines is problematic on face and undermines the purpose of his campaign. Also it ignores the absolutely hilarious #BernieSoBlack hashtag that was trending on Twitter just last week.
Agreed.
Cursory research usually tells you Black people vote as a group, making the "Black vote" an all important thing to lock down for horse race purposes. But when you dive a little deeper past the seeming group behavior you see that Black voters have quite a bit of variability, especially in primaries where candidates have to make the case state by state. Low income urban populations tend to vote similarly (though not uniformly), and Black people are overrepresented in this demographic. Middle class Black people are more diffuse geographically and typically vote similarly to their middle class white Democratic counterparts. Black Republican voting is usually more of an outlier, but is often geographically determined or occasionally class bound (which usually means the same thing).
Bernie's supposed lack of support amongst black voters was used as a cudgel to beat him within the media sphere during the 2016 primary and despite it being a false framing of the question it is important to combat it. If opponents have made this a central criticism to a campaign you need to address it, even if it is to point out the flaws in the criticism. By showing that race isn't a factor in how black voters are choosing to vote, as evidenced by their support of Bernie over Kamala, then it implicitly asks the questions of what they are then basing their support on. To which I would point to Bernies policy differences to Kamala.
While there isn't one unique experience of blackness, or any other skin colour, creed, or other criteria, there are similiarities to how people are treated within society due to their identity. This does create certain solidarities within these groups that form into identity politics, and although they are uniform across everyone to deny their existence at all is equally a lie.
While I would agree that Bernie isn't trying to contest on identity rather than the traditional class struggle to suggest identity doesn't play a part in politics is to deny the reality we live in. Bernie has consistently engaged with identity politics such as his support of BLM, civil rights movement, support for gay issues, etc.
This is something you've personally read into an ito a fairly innocous headline, perhaps due to how black voting has traditionally been framed within the U.S. media sphere. I didn't see any suggestion that Harris deserves any vote in the headline, but perhaps that is my niavity in my immersion to the U.S. media sphere.
I don't know anything about the #BernieSoBlack hashtag.
Black America has only the bonds of policies that are based on their skin color as a commonality. I referenced community policing because of the fact that socioeconomically different black americans seem to become victims of the same community policing system irrespective of their actual identity or class. And in some larger contexts that
@Kneeblock has done an interesting and effective job explaining before (public entity vs private entity trust in policy implementation, tone deaf law and ordering) you won't find many black americans jumping to the GOP anytime soon. That's about the limit of shoehorning black americans into the same identity.Black american experiences and opinions are as multi faceted as white america. Do well to do New York whites think of their bond and voting bloc with Florida poor whites? Do they vote the same way? Do the headlines ever reference it? There's no reductive thinking there. We get college educated whites vs non educated whites. There's more talk about socioeconomic class differences in white america. The black monolith is a known trope in paternalistic type support and cross aisle pity of black america. It's manufactured.
I personally believe that those media headlines, constant banging the drum, and creating said faux identity is what continues to inflame racial tensions in the USA. We are incapable of having a race conversation that would heal, without these manufactured identities creating preconceived notions against each other and then catching people in the catch 22 I referenced for Harris earlier. I think its highly reductive, destructive, harmful, and insulting. And if you don't like Trump, I'd argue that without such identity politics, he wouldn't have been elected... or at least the floor of support that won't leave him ever would be lower. Identity politics become a divide and conquer in this political domain. Then you must work on intersectionalist thinking attempting to then bind that back together for a common struggle...or campaign tent. Somewhere in there, you will leave some out and you still keep an us and them going based on stereotypes, group data applied to individuals, reductive identities, etc.
A non-reductive headline would talk about Bernies cross population popularity without needing a comparison to Kamala Harris.
If you want Bernie to beat Trump, you have to keep it on that. If Bernie is reduced to identity politics you would lose a ton of support and mobilize people that do not feel that strongly right now.
The reason I've personally read that into the use of this stat is because I'm an African American. As such, I'm used to shared identity being used as a prop for white people to win woke offs and also to delegitimize other black people. The narratives are already out there about Harris and Booker and Bernie should be contrasted to them on the basis of policy, not some imaginary quid pro quo basis with a voting Bloc that's not as uniform as it's often presented to be.
The Black Bloc is an imaginary. Historically it's only been useful as a predictor when positions on rights related issues were more variable among Democrats. In a campaign season when people are tripping over themselves to be first to co-sign reparations, that's decidedly not the case. Your identification of BLM as an identity politic issue speaks directly to this as the point of that movement from the beginning has been about unrestrained state power over life and death and the disproportionate effect of it on black people. Bernie's support of that movement and the Civil Rights Movement are not identity based, but rights based. They have to do with unequal protection under law rather than identity assertion or cultural equanimity, which is what we commonly call identity politics. The stat in that intercept article is an attempt to invoke that kind of identity politic against Harris as a form of litmus testing some amorphous blackness vs. a Bernie who gets the advantage of only having to contest on grounds of policy. It does thinly veiled rhetorical work which goes with Greenwald and the Intercept's general house style. What I am saying to you as an African American Bernie supporter is headlines like that are exactly what would make me have second thoughts.
Bernie with strong troll game, honeydicking state run tv...
Fox News attacks Bernie Sanders day after he embarrasses network with Medicare for All support
Fox News attacks Bernie Sanders day after he embarrasses network with Medicare for All support
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The Big Guy
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I don't know why you tagged me. Anyone here can tell you Bernie has the attention span of a fly. There are camps for that.