Some years later, I am back on the east coast, happily working for an outfit that merges with a firm from Boston. My initial excitement at the prospect of reconnecting a bit with my roots is immediately squashed by my experience of dealing with my instant colleagues. A trip to Boston which I had eagerly anticipated in order to get acquainted with the other firm's business practices does nothing to mellow the impression I'm getting. It seems that in spite of the transaction being touted as a "merger of equals" every accommodation, every sacrifice, every ditched plan, every lost benefit, every draconian policy adoption is being made by us. "You can't think of it as us versus them! We're all us now!" Easy for them to say. Suddenly the association I have with Boston is "interloping assholes." Now the chip on its shoulder that I always thought was Boston's due is annoying the crap out of me. It is 2004, the first World Series the Red Sox have been in since 1986, what could be their first World Series win in 86 years, a rematch of 1967 with Saint Louis, and this time I'm praying for the Cardinals to kick Boston's ass again.
My prayers fell on deaf ears, and the rest, as they say, is history.
My prayers fell on deaf ears, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I've moved on to greener pastures leaving the "Bostards" as I came to call them behind me, and have even had a pleasant time or two in the city since those days, but my feelings about Boston have hardly changed. What I'm dealing with is a grudge-- a debt owed me that Boston can never repay. I don't know what to do about it. Even knowing that I come from a long line of grudge holders whose lop-sided beefs with neighbors, politicians, tv stars, car manufacturers-- food products, for the gods's sake-- sometimes looked ridiculous to me; even knowing a grudge is pointless, silly, petty, counterproductive, I can't deny that it's deeply, deeply satisfying.
I mention grudges because I believe I've tapped into it as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of a certain Vermont senator. As one of my contributions, it has been my pleasure (if you can call abject terror and trepidation "pleasure") to cold call supporters of the candidate in 2016 who have been mostly thrilled to hear from me, sometimes less than pleased, but occasionally shocking in the venom they can't contain in telling me to piss off. I'm no fan of unsolicited phone calls, so I'm surprised (and a little dismayed, truth be told) when anyone picks up at all, but I have to admit, I was really puzzled at first by the hate that filled some of these former supporters who could not tell me fast enough that they had jettisoned the revolution in the three years since the last primaries. When this happens, as the script dictates, I politely thank them for their time and wish them a great day and move on. I'm reading from a script and they are merely reacting to my self-identification as a Bernie Sanders supporter, so I don't think it's anything I've said. Bernie Sanders has not changed a bit from what I can tell. If anything his consistency -- utterly uncharacteristic for a politician in my experience-- is a great deal of his appeal. He's consistent because he's never really been on the wrong side of an issue in 40 years of public service. There's nothing for him to waffle about. What appealed to his 2016 supporters I presumed is still there today, so I was puzzled by the fury of some of the folks, until I pondered possible reasons.
What I came up with is something I can easily relate to, because I've written about it myself from time to time. It's not Bernie Sanders per se that they're reacting to, I think, but to a tiny handful of his 2016 supporters who rather than following Bernie's lead after the primaries in supporting Hillary Clinton to avoid the certain disaster of a Trump presidency, took their balls and went if not into the Trump camp then to frivolous support of a third party or merely home after the primaries, often extremely loudly, making clear that they would have no part in supporting Hillary, even at the risk of Trump winning. Given the hostility toward Bernie by the mainstream media and establishment Dems, some of these "Bernie Bros'" anger was understandable, but some of it was abjectly absurd, petulant, arrogant, some of it bordering on ugly misogyny, and as anyone with consciousness knows reckless as hell.
People do forget (or simply do not know) that the contingent of "Bernie Bros" was smaller and on the whole less objectionable than the Party-Unity-My-Ass former Hillary supporters, the PUMA's who flocked to support John McCain after Barack Obama defeated Hillary for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and especially after McCain cynically inflicted the clueless Sarah Palin on the culture by selecting her as his running mate, a move precisely calculated to attract disgruntled Hillary supporters. Nevertheless the contingent of Bernie Bros in 2016, although not as decisive as Hillary Clinton's poor campaigning in losing the election, were a convenient place to hang blame for Trump's victory. Not content to harangue Clinton supporters for their "support of the Neo-liberal status quo" before the election, if you lived somewhat online as you tried to work through your grief over the election results you could not avoid many of them gloating at you afterward.
It's difficult today to recall Trump's obscenely racist performance following the Nazi march on Charlottesville, to see the plight of immigrants as we speak on the southern border, to contemplate the portent for reproductive, worker's and voting rights of the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, to behold the tattered state of the Iranian Nuclear deal, to come to grips with the trillions of dollars starved from the public treasury in order to enrich the billionaire class even more, or to consider any number of other Trumpian outrages and not see the arrogant rebellion of Bernie Bros in 2016 as an extremely myopic and privileged response to Bernie's defeat in the primaries. But Bernie was not himself a Bernie Bro! He did not fade away or even shirk after Hillary's nomination, but rather held 39 rallies for her in 13 states (including the ones she badly needed to win but did not herself visit) by election day.
It's not the nature of a grudge to be fully transparent and revelatory about the perceived crimes against the grudge holder that instigate it. Once formed, grudges admit no new knowledge. Nothing feeds them, and yet they grow. So I think I understand how the grudge of a Bernie Bro against Hillary Clinton and her supporters in 2016 might find itself engendering a reactionary if completely misdirected grudge against Bernie Sanders in the heart of even someone who like a grownup transferred support from Bernie to Hillary in 2016 when it was clear that she was the last, best hope against the election of Donald Trump. Grudge holder that I am, I somehow avoided the trap, first by voting for Hillary in 2016, and then simply picking back up my support for Bernie in 2019. But if I'm right that this explains the hostility to him felt by some former supporters even though if anything we need the revolution now more than ever, I recognize the pull of it. And my quandary is familiar: I just don't know what to do about it.
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