2016 is not 2020, reality is reality, and even if they were squeakers and delegate ties: Bernie Sanders has technically won two primaries. It is what it is. Even if there's a third party challenger, if he's the nominee, I'll vote for him without hesitation in the general unless he blames any group for America's problems but the rich (and I frankly can't imagine that would ever occur to him...), even if there's a third party candidate, and even if I'd vote for very nearly anybody else in the primary (and in the primary though not the general, there would even be a 50% chance I'd vote for Bloomberg against Bernie, and I fucking hate that guy). But I frankly wonder if I'm more at peace with Bernie's victory than quite a number of his supporters. What amazes me more about the Bernie crowd than anything else this year is that, like that other crowd, victory brings them no joy or peace, it only seems to make them angrier, more paranoid, more vitriolic.
Just one-and-change example: I posted something the other day lamenting that millions of Democrats may never vote for Bernie Sanders just as millions of progressives may never vote for anyone else, even when the Democratic Party might be all that stands between us and a burning planet. One vociferous Bernie-supporting acquaintance responded to a post of mine for the first time in three years, and it only took two polite responses before he got nasty, so I blocked him. Another one who posts to my stuff fairly regularly made an argument was that the entire Democratic Party should be supporting Bernie Sanders as of this moment when there are still 1975 out of 2000 delegates left to be distributed. She surely saw that I was cutting off any political discussion at midnight the night before, and then she deliberately went against my cutoff to try to get in the last word. She no doubt knew that I'd have to violate my own ban if I wanted to respond. So after writing a barn burner in response, I simply deleted both messages.
This experience tells me that the mindset of all too many on that side is that a person can only be 100% onboard this train, or one is the enemy. It is both unsurprising and astonishing to me that even when people are not crazy about Bernie Sanders and are trying to get others to come around, it's never enough. That is the mark of a cult mentality, we've seen it so often from so many different American conservative movements that we know its signs right away, and I can't imagine that these experiences are at all unique to me.
I can vote Bernie, I can even phonebank and canvas for him. But what I don't know is if, in the long term, one can trust these people to be your friends, not because I don't think I can personally, I've certainly sustained many friendships with people who have very different political views from mine, but because I'm not sure I believe that they wouldn't cut me off for similarly specious and entirely political reasons, and do so without warning, before I did the same. Ideology makes people do crazy things that they'd never think themselves capable of until it happens, or ever countenance doing if they took their ideologies less seriously, and the whole time, they'd think they were merely doing what any decent human being would.
Unfortunately, that implicates at least half the people I know in Charles Village, Remington, Ednor Gardens, Lake Montebello, Waverly and Better Waverly. So that's not a realistic option, and I have no choice but to trust in their better angels, so the only option left is to be as loud as I can to say for god's sakes, don't do this; and make them as miserable as this election is making me.
...but they seem to be doing a decent job of that themselves.
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