Democrats Lost Men When They Knifed The Bernie Bros

I could've called this: 'How Joe Rogan became a Republican.'

Maybe the most surprised I’ve ever been in my years following politics was watching the immediate aftermath of Elizabeth Warren’s ouster from the 2020 Democratic primary. As a progressive, well to the left of the party on most economic issues, it had been feeling like a good year.

We had two, viable progressives in the race for the Dem nomination: Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (Kamala Harris had been a *maybe* but she’d flamed out early.) Bernie had proved his chops against The Notorious HRC in 2016, looking for a minute, like he’d overtake her. And Warren, we assumed, had only stayed out of the 2016 race to give Hillary an open field.*

*As an aside here, I thought that was a huge mistake on Warren’s part; hanging back in 2016. Hillary’s candidacy was built on her purported inevitability. It wasn’t ever clear that voting Democrats - how shall I say this? - liked her. She was just The One. Until Bernie started to give her a run for her money. The problem for Bernie was that until that very moment, he’d been regarded as mostly a joke - as the grumpy old man yelling at everyone to get off his lawn. Elizabeth Warren could have perfectly bridged that gap between progressive policy preferences (for which there was obviously a bigger appetite than anyone thought) and the excitement afforded by having a woman on the ticket. I think if Elizabeth Warren had jumped in, she might’ve blown both Bernie and Hillary straight out of the water. But we’ll never know, of course.

Fast forward four years and I was on the fence between Warren and Bernie. I ended up going for Bernie at the last minute for two reasons. The first was that by then, I doubted Warren’s chops as a politician, and questioned her ability to beat Trump. The “Pocahontas,” DNA test debacle had been an own-goal of epic proportions, and I wasn’t sure that non-wonks would ever warm to her. The other reason was that I’d seen Barack Obama blow through every ounce of his political capital to pass a Frankenstein health care bill that nobody understood and nobody liked. Not because it was an inherently terrible bill, but because Congress had been allowed to toxify it. Warren seemed more likely to be willing to work with Congress, and to compromise, and I didn’t think those were valuable traits at the time. I thought it would be better to offer the bully pulpit to an uncompromising curmudgeon who could spend four years warming the country on progressive policy ideas, even if he didn’t get anything done.

I might have been wrong about that second thing, but I was spot on in my concerns over Warren’s political skills. She seriously sucked (and still sucks) at getting people to like her. Anyway, I didn’t think it would matter a whole lot. There was very little daylight between Bernie and Warren in terms of their respective agendas, and whichever of them emerged as the last progressive standing, I was going to be fine with. I assumed other progressive Democrats would feel the same way, and that we’d all do whatever we could to support the victor, and keep trying to wrest control of the party away from the moderates.**

**Another aside here: “moderate” meant a very different thing in 2020 to what it means now. We hadn’t hit “peak woke” yet. Covid was barely a thing, George Floyd was still alive, and the Democratic Party, not to mention the left as a whole, still nominally cared about things other than identity. Progressive vs. moderate was mostly a function of whether you thought the party should do more to enshrine universal health care or whether you thought the ACA was all we needed. Bottom line, “progressives” in early 2020 were still liberal. They hadn’t yet fully remade themselves into the online NKVD. Joe Rogan was one of them.

This isn’t really a story about Rogan, but his gradual lean from Bernie to Trump was highly consequential, and should be highly instructive for Democrats. The people who hate Rogan, and have always hated Rogan, will naturally point to his rightward drift as evidence that they were right about him all along. They were not. Rogan, along with much of his audience, was run out of town by the organized left. To understand how cosmically stupid this was, consider that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by only 2.3 million popular votes. Rogan’s average audience is around 11-15 million, and mostly comprised of political free agents. So when *CERTAIN PEOPLE* said that Harris should grow a pair and go on his show, there was a reason…

Anyway, back in 2020, Elizabeth Warren ended up getting trounced on Super Tuesday, and Joe Biden, who’d been mostly a non-entity in the race up to that point, emerged as the “moderate” that people trusted slightly more than the others. He’d edged ahead of the newcomers and unknowns like Amy Klobuchar, Beto O’Rourke, Pete Buttigieg, and Michael Bloomberg.

So okay, then. With Warren prepared to exit stage left, it was time for progressives to assemble, right? Elizabeth Warren would endorse Bernie Sanders, get to work coaxing her voters into his camp, and together, we’d transform the party into a steel-toed boot to aim straight at the testicles of the establishment.

Except no. We would not do that. We would not do any of that. Elizabeth Warren would not endorse Bernie Sanders. Her supporters would not move into his camp.

Why? Because a great evil had arisen: the “Bernie Bros.”

Bernie Bros were mostly young, mostly male, mostly white fans of Bernie Sanders, who were attracted, above all, to his anti-establishment cred. They weren’t traditional voters. They felt no real loyalty to the Democratic Party because they weren’t in the Democratic Party. “Independent” is usually shorthand for “white, male Republican who doesn’t like being called a Republican,” but in this case, the moniker was apt. The Bernie Bros were politically homeless skeptics of *the system* who were unlikely to vote for any Democrat other than Bernie (we knew this because they said it frequently, to anyone who’d listen).

By Super Tuesday, the Bernie Bros had gotten kind of a bad name in pro-Warren circles. Remember, they weren’t Democrats, which rankled many of the party rank-and-file. Fair enough there. Also, a few of them had podcasts, and on a few of those podcasts, a few of them had said mean, arguably sexist, things about Elizabeth Warren. Bernie had condemned those things, several times. But by failing to literally self-immolate after doing so, his condemnations had rung hollow. Some Bernie Bros were even using snake emojis (🐍) when referring to Warren, and that was, I guess, a bridge too far. It was intolerable.

So when Warren dropped out, she notably did so without issuing an endorsement of any other candidate. And when Bernie supporters (like this one) looked to Warren supporters and tried to wave them over into the progressive aisle, we were met with a giant, collective middle finger. It got pretty ugly. Warren voters were not about to fucking cuddle up under the same fucking tent as the fucking Bernie Bros. Fuck that.

Fuck that, all the way to progressive extinction.

Bernie Sanders, it was widely assumed, would have instantly endorsed Warren had the tables been turned, and had she come out on top of the Super Tuesday contests. And most of his supporters would have been fine with that. The “Bernie Bros” were more a meme than an actual political force.

True, there were some very vocal ones who were Bernie-or-bust. But remember, Bernie had been caucusing with the Democrats for decades. Four years earlier, he’d gone toe-to-toe with the Clinton behemoth, and the party puppet masters were so worried he’d win, they had to intentionally screw with his campaign to keep him in second place.

Now, you might tip the scales of a close race with outsider, “spoiler” votes. But you do not win the Michigan Democratic Primary with just a handful of edgelording podcast dudes. You do not beat Hillary Rodham Clinton in the industrial heartland without persuading a huge chunk of the Democratic party faithful, including the non-white Democratic party faithful, that you’re for real. So the notion that Bernie’s 2020 campaign was only afloat with support from a bunch of sexist, Dem-hating frat boys was a Warren talking point that escaped the lab.

The trouble was, Warren herself appeared to believe it. And she was pissed.

Instead of lining up behind the only progressive still in the race, Warren chose to lead her legion of liberal white ladies through a week of bitter mourning. While they were sitting shiva, the moderates were picking themselves up, coalescing behind Joe Biden (who again, nobody had really wanted initially) and that was the last time a serious progressive stood a serious chance at winning the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.

The Warrenites had gotten their revenge on the Bernie Bros. They’d stuck it right to those jerks, with their dirty-mouthed podcasts, and their mean snake emojis.

Poor people could simply go fuck themselves if helping them out meant making those other assholes happy. Whatever, nobody needs to see a dentist.

I learned a lot about the Democratic Party that week. And I learned, for the first time, what people were really talking about when they derisively used the term “White Feminist.”

It turned out that a lot of Warren voters didn’t like Warren for the reasons I liked Warren. I liked Warren because I liked the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and I cautiously liked what she’d done as TARP watchdog. I liked Warren for her politics, and I’m not saying her supporters didn’t also. But for vastly more of them than I’d ever imagined, that wasn’t her real x-factor.

A great many liberal white ladies were in the Warren camp because they liked Warren’s style. They liked what she represented more than they liked what they thought she might do.

For me, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ticked all of the same, major boxes. They were mostly interchangeable, as far as I was concerned. I assumed everyone else felt that way also. But Warren’s supporters did not feel that way. They didn’t just want Elizabeth Warren’s politics, they wanted Elizabeth Warren. Not just because she was a woman (Amy Klobuchar was, and is, also a woman), but because she was a high-profile, whip smart, truth-to-power, get-shit-done woman, who didn’t have Klobuchar’s baggage***.

***Klobuchar had come under fire for reportedly mistreating her Capitol Hill staffers. For what it’s worth, I 100% believe these claims, and believe that she is legitimately a piece of shit. Two reasons why: one is that most members of Congress, whether Democrat or Republican, do not have these rumors swirling around them. They’re politicians. Their jobs depend on their being personable. The other is that when I was a Senate aide, every single person I knew who worked on the Hill said the same thing: Klobuchar was a notorious nightmare who couldn’t hold onto staff. And this was borne out by her office turnover rates. There’s just no realistic reason for so many people to have been saying these things if they were not true. Capitol Hill is a gossip mill, but not in that way.

I’m not letting Warren supporters off the hook, by the way. I think what they did was unconscionably selfish. I will never stop being angry about it, and I will never forgive them for fragging the progressive movement over *vibes*, just as we were finally about to crest the hill. God, it makes my fucking blood boil to this day. But the mistake was ultimately mine. I had fundamentally misunderstood the party, and I have nobody to blame for that but myself.

By the time Warren supporters emerged from their cave of sadness, it was too late. Biden had locked up the moderates, and without the Warren progressives, Bernie had no hope of beating him. It was over. Warren went on to meekly endorse Biden, Biden went on to beat Trump, and to lead us through four years of milquetoast, anti-populist neoliberalism. Trump came back, and now, for some reason, the CEO of SpaceX has fired a bunch of river biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Strange times…

The moral of the story here is that, in knifing the Bernie Bros, then lining up behind Nobody’s First Choice Biden to spite them, the party sent a very powerful message. One that still resonates today, and that explains why a guy who makes electric vehicles is helping decide who works at the FBI.

Let’s accept Team Warren’s premise for a moment. Let’s assume that Bernie Sanders was drawing most of his support from disgruntled young men who were primarily attracted to him because they thought he’d put the system to the torch. Then let’s remember that Bernie wasn’t shunned because of anything Bernie did. He was given the cold shoulder cum middle finger, not because the party didn’t like him, but because the party didn’t like the people who liked him. The party did not wish to associate with those people.

Well, those people just handed the presidency back to Donald Trump, a guy who *checks notes* promised to put the system to the torch. And is now keeping that promise.

The Democrats are tanking with men. Not just white ones either. Young, black, white, Hispanic, working class, gay, all of those groups have members switching sides. The kinds of people who supported Elizabeth Warren? They’re the only people the Democrats can rely on anymore. They are the Democrats. And you have to wonder if some of them might be rethinking the wisdom of kicking so many of their would-be brothers in the balls four years ago.

Except really, you don’t have to wonder long. Because they plainly don’t regret it. Just listen to how they still talk about these guys. They kicked them in the balls for the same reason anyone ever kicks anyone in the balls: they hated them. And they still do. The Democratic Party became the party of White Feminism. Style over substance, identity over accomplishment, vibes over votes, purity over pragmatism, and most importantly, it became a party of elites trying desperately to keep the riff raff on the other side of the moat.

These trends only accelerated after the 2020 primaries. They would come to a head four years later, of course, when the party opted to not even have a primary, choosing instead to lie about Joe Biden’s health until they couldn’t keep up the charade, then just prodding the cattle into the Kamala Corral and hoping for the best. They really, honestly thought it would work too. Why would they not? They were in a fully cordoned-off conversation with only each other. Finding out why people like Joe Rogan were threatening to turn Trump would’ve required (barf!) talking and listening to people like Joe Rogan.

Not if they’d been openly trying could Democrats have found more ways to tell disaffected, politically unhoused men to go fuck themselves, and to take shelter anywhere but here.

Elon’s little code cronies? The dudes slashing up the executive branch? Those guys could’ve played for our team. Elon was on our team! They could be doing The Lord’s Work right now. All it would’ve taken was just…not being total dicks to them.

Nope. Impossible. Too icky.

I don’t have a lot of hope that any of this will change soon. If anything, Democratic thought leaders seem only to be jamming their fingers even deeper in their ears, and walling themselves off with yet higher walls. Bluesky, as I understand it, exists for solely this reason.

I guess if the next 12 or 16 years of president Donald Trump don’t wake them up, nothing will.