The White Entitlement of Bernie Bros

Over at The Daily Beast, we see once again that for blacks everything boils down to race, even within the progressive movement itself:

“Killary Clinton is stealing the nomination and the system is rigged against Bernie Sanders,” said the two young white guys standing behind me in line. They rambled incessantly about how she was cheating and could not be trusted. Superdelegates were their greatest frustration. Unelected delegates who could “decide” the nomination proved that the process was a sham that was intentionally set up to prevent Sanders from winning. …

Essentially, we disagreed on what America supposedly promised or owed us. They felt success was promised to them. The entitlement to believe that you should always win allowed them to overlook how the system in many ways has always been unjustly rigged in their favor because they’re white. I brought up race during our conversation and how I’m very aware of how a system can be rigged against you. These guys acknowledged my point, but it was obvious that this reality did not factor much into their thinking. They felt aggrieved and cheated, and that was all that mattered.

They could not understand the perspectives of blacks, Latinos and other minorities in America who are regularly treated as threats to society before their voices can be heard. We are often silenced before we even have the chance to win. And as a result, we know that losing is a reality we will confront and that success can be a difficult and long process that may only show its face in the lives of our children or grandchildren who have more opportunities because we’ve spent a lifetime fighting for positive change. …

Sanders’s message has resonated mostly with a younger, predominantly white electorate like those two guys. Their message and frustrations have been heard loud and clear, but their electoral defeats have resulted in an intensified pack or tribalist mentality that unfortunately has similarities to the white tribalism that has guided Trump’s campaign. Sanders and Trump are mining similar disaffections amongst the white electorate.
On Face the Nation, Sanders recently attempted to pour cold water on some of the rage and rhetoric of his supporters, “I wouldn’t use the word rigged…I think it’s just a dumb process which has certainly disadvantaged our campaign.”

The black writer for The Daily Beast sees everything through the prism of race and automatically assumes that the two disgruntled Sanders supporters are suffering from “White entitlement” because of their racial background. Tellingly, he doesn’t see two individuals standing in line in front of him.

As for the superdelegate system on the Democratic side, it was created in the 1980s to strengthen the Democratic establishment by giving them the power to block insurgent candidates like George McGovern from ever winning the Democratic nomination. At the time, the Democratic elite felt that “the pendulum had swung too far in the direction of primary elections over insider decision-making.” The superdelegate system has nothing to do with race. Its purpose is to protect the party establishment from voters.

“The commenter is a Midwestern, working-class white male in his late 30s who intends to vote for Trump if Sanders does not win the nomination because “if it is all going to be tribal politics, then well, I guess you have to go with your own tribe—if not for your sake, then for the sake of your kids.”

Sanders has broadened the Democratic electorate to include voters who may not normally participate in the primaries and caucuses, but now they need to combat the tribalism that could negatively impact Clinton and other Democrats in the general election. Sanders, unfortunately, has said that he has no obligation to convince his supporters to throw in with Clinton.

A beguiling component of Sanders’s campaign is how the unintentional white tribalism that has been forged on shared economic hardships has boosted his campaign, while at the same time rendering him unappealing to the minorities he needed to win the nomination.”

The Midwestern commenter learned something from the Democratic primary.

In state after state, blacks overwhelmingly voted along tribal lines for Clinton. By doing so, Hillary won nearly the entire South – Oklahoma and West Virginia were too White – which gave her an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates. She carried less racially diverse states like Nevada, Missouri, and Kentucky solely because the black block vote tipped the election away from Sanders. The only real surprise in the Democratic race was Michigan which went for Sanders because Hillary only carried 2/3rds of the black vote there.

The black population chose the Democratic nominee by voting as a block along tribal lines. Now that Hillary is on the cusp of winning the nomination, the problem is the White tribalism and White entitlement of Bernie Sanders supporters. The moral of the story here is that Whites are expected to vote as guilt-ridden, deracinated individualists. Blacks, however, reserve the right to proudly vote along tribal lines for their perceived racial interests and to browbeat Whites as entitled racists for even grumbling about their defeat.