A recent article in The New York Post advertises a new book by NBC News correspondent Ali Vitaly titled Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House … Yet.1 Written by Emily Crane, the article mentions that Hillary Clinton “rips” Bernie Sanders as a chauvinist, stating: “I know the kind of things that he says about women and to women.” The book also delves into the tug of war between Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for the 2020 Democratic Party nomination, a melodrama that earned Warren the epithet of “snake” among Sanders supporters. When Sanders visited Warren ahead of the 2020 presidential nomination campaign, Warren took offense to the insinuation that she should be his running mate. The point of the meeting was to find agreement on how to strategize against the more centrist and right-wing candidates, but Warren chose to play all sides, a decision that cost both of them a chance to improve social conditions. When Democratic Party heavyweights like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter called on Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar to drop out of the race so that Joe Biden had a chance at the nomination, Warren stayed in the race, denying Sanders an almost certain path to victory. Regarding Warren’s “backstage” attack against Sanders at the 2020 Iowa debate, which, like Kamala Harris’ attack against Biden as a school bus segregationist racist – which Harris later conveniently forgot – Clinton argues, MeToo style, that we should believe Warren, not Sanders: “I believed her [Warren], because I know Sanders, and I know the kind of things that he says about women and to women. So, I thought that she was telling an accurate version of the conversation they’d had.”
With regard to that conversation, which Warren noted down for the sake of later use, all that we know for certain is that Sanders told Warren that he didn’t think a woman could beat Trump in the next election, that is, after Trump had beat Clinton, who in 2016 was one of the most disliked candidates in American political history.2 With regard to Clinton, we know her record as a politician and we know the way that the Democratic National Committee lied, cheated and stole for her, with Clinton doing nothing to help candidates in down-ballot races. That in January 2020 Clinton later bloviated about Sanders (one of the most like and trusted politicians in the U.S.) that “nobody likes” him says much of what you need to know about the neoliberal war hawk from Chicago.3 That Clinton wishes there had been more and not less of an altercation between Warren and Sanders also tells you about the kind of person who is groomed by New Democrats to lead the country. While it’s true that Sanders was and remains far too conciliatory towards party centrists, he at least is not given to spectacle and focuses on the policy issues that are most needed and popular with the American public. Agree with him or not, Sanders is more about substance than he is given to bread and circuses while the billionaire class fleeces the taxpayer.
But there is more to this story. In his 2018 book, How Bernie Won, Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver has an instructive chapter titled “Of Berniebros, Hillbots, the Russians, Alt-Right Racists, and A Whole Lot of Really Great People.”4 While the book discusses Clinton’s transgression of party rules and overall lack of social solidarity, it also mentions how the Clinton campaign used social media to propagate the “Bernie Bro” meme, a term coined by a party strategist in 2015. The meme suggests that Sanders supporters are mostly rude, racist, misogynistic young males. Inquiries by the Sanders campaign into Clinton’s leaked DNC emails led to further attacks. While Sanders denounced any offensive and hateful messages made by his supporters, Clinton campaigners and online trolls, known as Hillbots, smeared Sanders with the very same social media tactics they denounced. While in 2008, Clinton attacked Barack Obama supporters as “Obama boys,” identity politics played a much more prominent role in the “great awokening” era of 2016 to 2020. Part of the problem is that the Bernie Bro meme is simply factually wrong. In 2016, Sanders led Clinton 51 to 48 among African Americans and 66 to 34 among Latinos. In 2020, Sanders also had a considerable amount of support among women under 45. The use of race and gender shaming is a tactic of so-called “progressive neoliberals” in the mostly college-educated activist and professional-managerial class. On the whole, these accusations do not resonate among working people. However, the corporate media are not concerned with social conditions among the majority of working poor and outside the U.S.
The New York Post fails to mention that Clinton was found out to have had the support of a super PAC called Correct the Record, which was headed by David Brock. The Brocktopus, as he is known, revealed that the PAC had spent more than $1 million (considerably more than the few thousand dollars some people ‘from Russia’ spent on Facebook ads) on paid trolls to attack Sanders online. The PAC used a campaign finance loophole, Weaver says, to coordinate with the Clinton campaign. Brock is known as a professional right-wing defamer and for his defaming of Anita Hill in the Clarence Thomas confirmation. In other words, Clinton’s inside man on the Bernie Bro smear campaign is the same person who has played an indirect role in the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. This is the kind of company that Hillary Clinton keeps. Correct the Record provided media, like the New York Post, with smear material that it would dutifully print but keep confidential as far as sources are concerned. Like the Post, which refers to Sanders as a “socialist” rather than a social democrat, CTR worked to associate Sanders with Hugo Chávez and Jeremy Corbyn. After Brock attacked Sanders’ age and health, the Clinton campaign asked him to ease off, worried that he might be working for the Republicans. One thinks of the character ‘Singali’ in the recent film version of Balzac’s Lost Illusions – a mercenary opportunist who takes bribe money from rival groups, ultimately favouring the highest bidder. Weaver mentions that alt-right racists and Trump trolls also smeared Sanders online.
While it may not be surprising that the far right attacked Sanders in 2016 and 2020, the point is that the Clinton campaign, and Clinton herself, are no better than these miscreants and enemies of the public interest. That Clinton continues to issue woke invective from the sidelines keeps a stale debate alive in the zombie media. Female, black, Latino, Indigenous or queer politicians will not save us from lousy policy if those politicians are neoliberals, war hawks and corporate stooges. In fact, their woke cred may make matters worse if bad policies are covered over by the mere facts of identity, as was the case with Obama. The real issue is not the use of woke messaging and shaming to keep the political debate locked between the neoliberal and the fascist right, but the extent to which the genuine left has understood the failures of postmodern anti-universalism as a widespread problem within its ranks, in academia, among activists and in the media.
Notes
1. Emily Crane, “Hillary Clinton calls Bernie Sanders sexist in new book: ‘I know the kind of things that he says about women’,” The New York Post (August 12, 2022), https://nypost.com/2022/08/12/hillary-clinton-calls-bernie-sanders-sexist-in-new-book/. See also Secular Talk, “Hillary Returns To Call Bernie Sexist,” YouTube (August 15, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJt5el51mE, and Status Coup News, “Hillary Clinton Dusts Off Bernie Derangement, Believes Elizabeth Warren’s Bernie is Sexist Smear,” YouTube (August 16, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeTlhxUMjzw.
2. Matthew Yglesias, “Hillary Clinton will be the most disliked nominee ever – except for Donald Trump,” Vox (May 2, 2016), https://www.vox.com/2016/5/2/11565194/clinton-trump-unfavorable.
3. Kenya Evelyn, “Hillary Clinton says ‘nobody likes’ Bernie Sanders and criticizes ‘culture around’ him,” The Guardian (January 21, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/21/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-nobody-likes-him-hulu-documentary. See also John Haltiwanger, “Bernie Sanders Is the Most Popular U.S. Politician, Even as Some Blame Him for Clinton’s Loss,” Newsweek (August 25 2017), https://www.newsweek.com/bernie-sanders-most-popular-politician-655315.
4. See Jeff Weaver, How Bernie Won: Inside the Revolution That’s Taking Back Our Country – And Where We Go From Here (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018). See also Marc James Léger, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2022).