The key takeaway from Elizabeth Warren’s stunning interview with Rachel Maddow
Last night Elizabeth Warren sat down with Rachel Maddow to discuss the end of her 2020 presidential campaign. This was the biggest stage that Warren was going to get for awhile, and made a point of using it to call out the often deranged behavior of Bernie Sanders fans. We were fairly certain Warren wouldn’t endorse Sanders when she dropped out, but even we didn’t see this coming. So now what?
The key takeaway from Elizabeth Warren’s interview with Maddow is we’ve got to figure out how to separate rank and file Bernie fans from the toxic leaders of their cult. We have to teach these folks how politics and elections actually work, and get them out of the cult mindset. Lots of Bernie fans are new to politics. All they know is this Lord of the Flies routine the cult leaders have taught them. They think foot stomping is activism. They think ignorance of the political process is a virtue. They think every normal thing that happens is a conspiracy.
They’re under the impression that the guy with the laughably simplistic false promises is their ally. They’ve been taught to believe that competent politicians, with a proven track record of moving the country to the left, can’t be trusted. We have to help them unlearn all of it.
Plenty of political newbies took Bernie’s magic carpet ride in 2016, then they realized it was a toxic fantasy, spent the past few years learning how politics and progress actually work, and are supporting a legitimate candidate in 2020. That’s proof we can rescue more of them.
When the Bernie cult formed in 2016, none of us had ever seen an anti-intellectual movement on the left in our lifetime. We had no idea how to fight it, or how to bring its victims around in time for the general election. But 2020 is different. We have a years-long roadmap.
More importantly, we’re not afraid this time. The Bernie cult was so scary in 2016 that the majority of democratic voters felt they had to hide from it, keep quiet, find refuge in secret Facebook groups, for fear of getting blown up by Bernie’s online mob. This time we weren’t afraid of Bernie’s mob. We openly fought for our candidates from the start, which forced the media to grudgingly acknowledge that the majority of democratic voters wanted someone other than Bernie.
The 2020 process didn’t go like it should have. The Bernie cult’s lie machine took down Kamala Harris early. Then it went after Warren. Then Pete. Whoever was surging at the time. We landed on Biden. At least we landed on someone. If Bernie had taken it, he’d have lost to Trump. Now that it’s Biden – someone who is broadly popular enough to beat Trump – we have to spend the rest of this primary process trying to unplug as many of Bernie’s rank and file supporters from the matrix as we can. Shifting poll numbers say it’s already underway. Keep at it.
We should go after Bernie’s cult leaders as hard as we can, within the bounds of decency. Expose the toxicity of his advisers and surrogates for all to see. But Bernie’s naive rank and file fans, the ones we want to win over, let’s treat them as victims we’re trying to rescue.
