How the Bros Are Undermining Bernie
Over the past 48 hours, the Bernie Sanders campaign has all but eclipsed its own message. Like the antiwar movement of the 1960s—whence I came—a small group of its activists have themselves become the story, supplanting Sanders’s powerful critique of economic elites and the sway they hold over our politics. The issues that Bernie has so forcefully highlighted have been shunted to the background; the Bros have taken center stage.
We’ve seen this all before. By the late 1960s, most Americans had turned against the Vietnam War, but the extremism of a small share of the antiwar activists, and their proclivity for violent confrontations, turned millions of Americans even more decidedly against the protestors—a backlash that gave the Nixon administration the political space to continue the war for four more years.
Now, what is arguably the most successful left campaign in the nation’s history stands in danger of being undone by an infantile fraction of its own supporters. The threats of violence, the shouting down of such lifelong liberals as Barbara Boxer, and the growing desire of some in the campaign, both on its periphery and at its core, to walk away from the real prospect of building left power by refusing to work with allies and potential allies in the Democratic Party—all these now threaten the campaign’s potential to bring lasting change to American politics.
~Harold Meyerson
Secret Third Way Oligarch
http://prospect.org/article/how-bros-are-undermining-bernie
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--imm
