The “Bernie Bro” Slur 2.0
In today's political discourse, you can say whatever you want about Bernie Sanders and his supporters without any baseline expectation of fairness. You can completely invent sensational allegations of sexist hypocrisy among Sanders supporters — and even high-profile journalists will casually repeat them, with no concern for reality.
Members of the National Nurses United look on as Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally on November 15 in Oakland, CA. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Every so often, you can see a take emerge in the takesphere that is so striking — so penetrating in its insight, so damning in its criticism — that it doesn’t really matter if it is actually true. And as far back as 2016, you could see this happening amid the “Bernie bro” complaints. In the early months of that year, Sanders supporters were parrying allegations of sexism by naming women who they preferred to Clinton — among them, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren.
At first, the response to this was to suggest that Sanders supporters were simply being opportunistic: they’re only saying nice things about Warren, we were told, because she isn’t running for president. But by the end of the year, that line had evolved into a hypothetical: what if Warren did run for president, and all of the Bernie bros who are saying nice things about her now refused to support her?
The irony was too good to not be true. And so, in the years since, a new kind of Bernie bro was born: the Sexist Warren Defector.
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