Asymmetric warfare

Andrea_Vaccaro_-_David_with_the_Head_of_Goliath

Hillary is an OK Goliath, but Sanders a very improbable David. Still, there’s a reason why these old stories come repeatedly to mind.

As one who has remained pretty much on the sidelines during this dogfight — though I admit to a sneaking hope that Sanders will put a serious monkeywrench into the gears of Hillary’s triumphal Juggernaut — one has the luxury of examining the rhetoric on both sides dispassionately. A thing which has struck me very forcefully: Clinton backers are extraordinarily abusive and insulting toward Sanders’ folks, as persons, in a personal way. But the converse is not the case.

Locutions like “Bernie bros” and “Bern victims” and “Bernbots” drop thick and fast from the lips of Hillary’s remaining admirers, along with the usual baloney about ‘purism’ versus ‘realism’.

As far as I can tell, Bernie fans don’t operate this way. They don’t abuse Hillary’s backers. Naturally, they do abuse Hillary. But that’s fair. Slinging brickbats at the other candidate is quite in order. Pissing on his or her supporters is another matter.

Of course this is a larger pattern, and one of long standing. I think it may be a specifically liberal vice. Anyone to the left of a given liberal is by definition a wild-eyed loon, probably mentally defective, certainly a menace to the Republic. This tendency, as we all know, took very concrete form in the US during the postwar witch hunts, when liberals busied themselves putting their former Popular Front comrades in jail.

The stakes aren’t so high now, of course — sadly, it’s more a matter of the narcissism of minor differences. So it seems unlikely that Hillary, once she scrapes into the White House, widely loathed and nowhere really liked, will start rounding up Bernie Bros on terrorism charges. Although, frankly, I wouldn’t put anything past a Clinton.

Do right-wingers do this? One really knows very little about that weird world and its inner life. Do ‘moderate’ Republicans raise their tails and spray the same kind of skunk-oil at Teabaggers that Hillarites do at Bernites? (Or Gorites did — and still do! — at Naderites, or pick your own example.)

13 thoughts on “Asymmetric warfare

  1. Do right-wingers do this?

    During an election? Sure.
    Still kicking the same old pooch a decade later ala Nader? No, never seen them do anything like that.

  2. in a little group of urban professional “liberal” episcopalians that i know, being a bernbot is grounds for being cast into outer darkness, precisely b/c bern=nader, trump=w. and the shit they say about obama…”no president has ever had a more difficult time in office.” sorry abe & fdr and all you guys who took a bullet for Team America in office. and only a klan member won’t acknowledge the world historical significance of making a black guy the PR rep for the national walmart.

    • ‘”no president has ever had a more difficult time in office.” sorry abe & fdr and all you guys who took a bullet for Team America in office.’

      Hahaha!

  3. The Right does it, but it’s so Goddamn disjointed so it can’t be used as a hammer in the way the Dems can. There’s nothing like the Left, which falls instinctively in line with the Dems at the slightest provocation. A great example is when Perot ran. He basically gifted the election to Clinton, stealing a huge percentage of Republican voters. Dude got nearly 20% of the vote! And how did Republicans respond? They never even mention the dude! Compare that with the continued obsession with Nader. I mean can you imagine someone like Trump being able to pull that off with the Democratic Party? I can’t, you have to run that Machine gauntlet.

  4. “A thing which has struck me very forcefully: Clinton backers are extraordinarily abusive and insulting toward Sanders’ folks, as persons, in a personal way. But the converse is not the case… Locutions like “Bernie bros” and “Bern victims” and “Bernbots” drop thick and fast from the lips of Hillary’s remaining admirers, along with the usual baloney about ‘purism’ versus ‘realism’. :

    I’ve noticed the same, and yet I seem to live in an alternate universe in which no one, except maybe my “Bernie Bro” wife, seems to recognize this. Or THEY live in an alternate universe, but their universe is bigger and smothering of ours…. Whatever the case, the sense of aggrieved entitlement — the How-Dare-He? — is thick and oppressive. “It’s Her Turn!!!” To do what, my dears? To do what?

    Oh, and all this has produced an unbearably cloying hashtag: #imwithher. In fact, I just was haunted by a thought the other day that I cannot shake: When the Queen inevitably ascends to her throne and proceeds to do nothing about the banks of the “billionaihs,” while assenting to whatever Bibi et al want, will all of our howls of protest me met with hisses of “DOUBLE STANDARD!” “MEN HAVE DONE WORSE FOR MILLENNIA” “#IMWITHHER.”

    But then I take heart in the fact that the young #arentremotelywithher. They cannot stand her. I had a great chat with a young activist over the weekend, and he affirmed what I hoped to be true: The young’uns find her so callow and dishonest that they’ll invest no hope or expectations in her, and they’ll be ready to mobilize at a moment’s notice when the bombs start raining down on Iran, after she has torn up the accord as her first act in office, or wherever else. They’ll greet her as activists in 1968 greeted Nixon. Fitting, to be sure….

  5. The conservatives have come up with the wonderful “cuckservative” meme, which in truth applies to most of our politicians. I can’t think of a political insult that so aptly describes the debased and humiliating servility of our political class. The obsequious enthusiasm with which they grovel to Israel and its fifth column in the US borders on sexual pathology.

    The “liberal” media wasted no time denouncing the term as (what else) “racist,” perhaps out of fear some cunning linguist would create a liberals-only version of this devastating put-down. We can only hope.

    SyrianGirl gives her opinion of the term:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNtd-f01eNg

  6. These days my social medias are more infested with Safe Space Truthers and Brendan O’Neill worshippers than Hillary supporters, oddly (I know my fair share in the “real world”). Somewhere along the way I accepted a friend request from Tom Hayden–watching him circle the drain has been mildly amusing.

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