Feeling the Bern With the Youth Vote By Nathan Heller NEW YORKER MAGAZINE
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/feeling-the-bern-with-the-youth-vote?mbid=nl_082515_Daily&CNDID=26139401&spMailingID=8014206&spUserID=MzkxMjA1MjAwODQS1&spJobID=743022122&spReportId=NzQzMDIyMTIyS0
The oddest thing about the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator seeking Democratic nomination for President, is not his distaste for fund-raising, his insistence that he is a “democratic Socialist,” or even his unofficial slogan, “Feel the Bern,” a phrase that vividly recalls Jane Fonda at the moment of her disentanglement from the New Left. It is his popularity with kids. Since tossing his worn cap into the ring, in April, Sanders has racked up a disproportionate share of the youth vote: thirty-seven per cent of voters twenty-nine or younger, compared with Hillary Clinton’s forty per cent, in one poll. Why? Outwardly, he does not seem like a particularly hip or youthful guy. Sanders is nearly seventy-four, dresses like Willy Loman, and can name, from direct memory, the Dodgers’ lineup in the year 1951. When he shows up at events, his fleecy hair, or what remains of it, looks ravaged, as if he had puttered all the way there in a drop-top Model T. He wears a watch; it’s not by Apple. And yet, today,
Sanders boasts a larger Facebook following than Clinton and Jeb Bush combined.
It’s on Facebook that Sanders fandom, and a language associated with it, has flourished. Followers post about the way he “slayed” in this or that speech, how he seems “so logical” compared with other politicians, how he motivated them to vote, for the first time, in their late twenties. As Sanders, an independent, throttled into a strong second place for the Democratic nomination, Bern-ers on Twitter praised him as “clever” and “trustworthy.” In the magazine last week, Daniel Wenger reported on an eighteen-year-old kid’s attempt to organize a Sanders YouTube viewing party in his parents’ living room. On Friday, in a greater coup, Sanders received the endorsement of the fifteen-year-old prank candidate Deez Nuts, who made a splash in some Midwestern polls earlier this month, and who cited his frank and accessible style. Queried about Sanders’s leading opponent in the race, Hillary Clinton, Mr. Nuts simply asked, “Why can’t you be more open and friendly like Bernie?”
“Open” is a reasonable description of Sanders’s campaign, which has worked to underscore the candidate’s ideological consistency over the decades. When Sanders started out, in the sixties, he was a civil-rights activist and a sit-in coördinator. After settling in Vermont, he worked in carpentry, wrote weird satirical erotica, and set about the business of losing elections. The goals of the young Sanders were a lot like the goals of Sanders now. From 1981, in his first elected post, as the mayor of Burlington, he fought for corporate regulation and against big-money fund-raising. He sought to lift the minimum wage. Recently, his supporters have produced old footage from his early years, as if to show that, in a field of opportunists, Sanders has held firm to his beliefs. The anachronism of his world view proves both his authenticity and his lack of hidden baggage as a candidate. For young voters, who approach the booth with shallow political memories, this “open” attitude toward Sanders’s past can come as reassurance: they don’t have to worry about being pinioned by a history that they don’t know, because history, for Sanders, is a backward projection of the behavior that they saw last week. The approach is striking in an era when even personal life is preconceived, polished, performed. Sanders is exceptional because he seems, demonstrably, the same guy who he was before the iPhone cameras first appeared.
The nature of that lineage may play a role in Sanders’s youthful popularity, too. He speaks often of “revolution,” as in: “Today, we begin a political revolution to transform our country economically, politically, socially, and environmentally.” Revolution is a term that’s rarely heard now, but it recalls the period when Sanders landed on his political cause. Radicalism nostalgia—the Boomer-propagated idea that the sixties were a halcyon age in American culture—survives today even among people born decades later. For the uninitiated, Sanders is a link back to that heady time. “Neil Young playing at the end of #BernieSanders SC speech is making me hippie fangirl out,” someone far below the hippie age cutoff tweeted this past weekend. Now that American youth culture is increasingly business-oriented—there are shopping recommendations based on your exact location, parties with playlists picked by subscription algorithm, and privatized mobile transportation apps to ferry you between—Sanders’s tinge of hippiedom, his seeming lack of calculation, lets members of the smartphone generation embrace the political sixties trip they never had....
SNEERING CONDESCENSION...PRAISING WITH FAINT DAMNS
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