When Bernie Sanders was taken to task for the bullying behavior of some of his zealous supporters during Wednesday’s presidential debate, the senator replied, “If there are a few people who make ugly remarks … I disown those people; they are not part of our movement.”
What else could he have possibly said?
The Vermont senator is not only the front-runner for his party’s presidential nomination but the leader of the most populist and anti-establishment campaign among Democrats. There are undoubtedly some ugly elements in his base. But when a candidate genuinely inspires voters to the degree that he has, particularly young people, expect some of them to be inspired too much. Some of those individuals’ intemperate passion, or mental instability, can lead to poor behavior spanning from incivility, to cyberbullying, or even attempted murder.
All of this is inexcusable. Those who participate in it should be shamed or prosecuted. Sanders should continue to condemn it.
But it is also almost impossible to completely contain bursts of deviancy great and small when it comes to bona fide populist movements, particularly in the age of social media. (Can you imagine if the anti-Lyndon B. Johnson hippies who fueled Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 anti-war presidential campaign had Twitter?)
Just as many Democrats would love you to believe that most of President Trump’s 63 million voters are actually jackbooted Nazis, political establishments have always been eager to portray insurgent candidacies by their worst and usually most minuscule elements.
This is not new. Take it from a “Paulbot.”
Other than where liberals and libertarians overlap on issues such as foreign policy, civil liberties, and the drug war, Ron Paul and Sanders couldn’t be further apart politically. However, much of that distance is often on solutions rather than their diagnoses. “I feel a kinship with Bernie Sanders,” Paul told Larry King in 2016. “We’re both against corporatism. We’re both against special benefits to big business.”
“His answer to that wouldn’t always be the same,” Paul said. “Mine would always drift to the free markets. His would drift to, ‘Well, we need more government to redistribute wealth,’ but we could both attack subsidies to business or the military-industrial complex.”
Paul is a former Republican congressman who really did represent the genuine small-government constitutionalism many in his party had exhibited only in rhetoric, and Sanders is the kind of true socialist many progressives have longed for and also the kind most Democrats have spent years assuring moderates and independents they are not.
One might say Paul and Sanders are the true north of each man’s respective party. How annoying. No one in either party’s establishment wants that!
I was the official campaign blogger for Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign. As Paul placed first or second in polling for the early Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the GOP establishment pushed back just as hard, where clashes between our tribe and theirs became common enough.
Sanders having to answer for his unruly supporters in the most recent debate reminded me of something I wrote for Paul’s campaign website in June 2012. “Establishment Republicans sometimes claim that Ron Paul supporters occasionally get out-of-hand,” I wrote nearly eight years ago. “This has been true, and to the extent that some Paul supporters have exhibited poor behavior [it] not only reflects badly on the individuals involved, but Dr. Paul.”
What else could I say? Paul certainly never encouraged this behavior, and neither did our campaign. Our people also didn’t always start this friction, especially at the 2012 Republican National Convention. I’m sure some Sanders people are amassing their own frustrating stories.
To the Republican establishment and their media apparatchiks, “Paulbots” were not valuable actors in the democratic process, but unserious people they wish would just go away. Paul’s insurgent 2008 campaign was treated similarly. Paul received 1 million primary votes that year. In 2012, he got 2 million votes, and Paul and his supporters also got a lot more grief from the powers that be.
Paul’s growing success correlated with the rising ire of the establishment. Sound familiar?
Right now, Bernie and his “bros” have enough votes to lead the Democratic field, so the establishment is turning up the heat on all of them. In 2016, “Bernie Bros” was closer to a term of endearment. Now, in the midst of constant attacks, it’s becoming more of a slander. The establishment media and political machine attack all of their characters by focusing on the few.
I do not want Sanders to become president (to put it lightly). I fear he would wreck the economy and fundamentally transform the country for the worse, surrendering American freedom for a false government security.
But even so, I can recognize the authenticity that inspires his faithful, as yet again, one of the oldest candidates running for president continues to draw the largest and youngest crowds.
I get it. Bernie Bros should expect to keep getting it too, good and hard, the closer their hero gets to achieving what was once considered unimaginable.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
