Salon published an interesting article about the “BernieBro” myth that speculates that a large part of the reason that journalists and pundits believe there is a misogyny problem uniquely among Bernie Sanders supporters is due to assuming the behavior they are witnessing on Twitter is accurately representative of the whole country when in reality it is a distortion.
The problem is that Twitter skews much younger, more affluent, and more vitriolic (due to anonymity and lack of accountability) than America as a whole. The article even offers some interesting facts that should easily debunk the idea that Bernie’s supporters are mostly just sexist white men:
To wit: young women make up more of Sanders’ base than men. He polls especially high with Hispanic voters, far more so than with white voters; Hispanic voters also donated more money to him than any other Democratic candidate. Polls consistently show that nonwhite voters prefer him over the other candidates. Notably, the demographic group that likes Sanders the least is white men. Moreover, of all the candidates, Sanders has taken in the most money from women.
What the article doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing, though it does raise the topic, is that the Bernie Bro myth serves a useful narrative for Bernie’s opponents.
The Hillary Clinton campaign took the Bernie Bro smear and ran with it in the 2016, just the same way they did with “Obama Boys” in 2008. Clinton even used it again in a recent interview when asked if she would endorse and campaign for Bernie if he were to become the Democratic Presidential nominee (like he did for her in 2016 after she won the primary):
I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.
Hillary Clinton, 2020
As already mentioned, this has been a bread-and-butter tactic for the Clinton presidential machine in multiple elections. Focus all your attention on this false narrative of sexism, and ignore all the problematic components of Clinton’s candidacy (her ties to Wall Street, her record w/r/t minorities, crime, gay rights, war, general neoliberalism).
While right-wing Democrats continue to spout off on twitter about ‘sexist Bernie bros’ and the ‘sexist left’ it is important to remember that the same rhetoric was once used against Obama and at one point reached a level where it may have ended up putting John McCain in the White House. The same rhetoric used against progressives, the rhetoric that tries to erase non-white leftists like myself out of existence, and that dismisses anything to the left of establishment Democrats as “sexist” and “racist” is nothing more than an old line from an old playbook. Dusted off and repolished for a new generation of smears, the ‘Bernie bro’ ‘sexist left’ narrative began in 2008 with the term ‘Obama boys.’
Max Van Dyke, 2017
The Wikipedia entry for Bernie Bro provides this in its criticism section:
The Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald called the Bernie Bro narrative a “cheap campaign tactic” and a “journalistic disgrace.” He pointed to the millions of women who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton with “one has to be willing to belittle the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this ‘Bernie Bro’ smear.” He also pointed to the lack of evidence for the phenomenon outside of the typical vitriol associated with online forums. He summarized the narrative’s purpose as follows: “The goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton’s policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters.”
The article itself that Greenman writes, and from whence these quotes are pinched, is all gold. For example, it opens with:
The concoction of the “Bernie Bro” narrative by pro-Clinton journalists has been a potent political tactic — and a journalistic disgrace. It’s intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are “bros”); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior.