Warren – Sanders: the non-handshake that shook progressives

Fundamentally, Bernie Sanders is another clueless male

When there was so much dust being kicked up around the contretemps between Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, at first I thought – meh, she’ll get over it, or he’ll find a way to resolve it  that will bring her around; the dust will settle and things will go on as before . . . .  Such was his expectation after Warren charged him with calling her a liar on national television . . . then, when Warren refused his handshake and waited, looking him in the eye with clasped hands, as if beseeching him to admit a wrong, he said they should talk about it later and turned aside.

It doesn’t matter if “things will go on as before” on the surface, because at a deep level the damage has been done, and given what we saw, it will continue to get done.

Reflecting on my own version of male cluelessness, I have a good guess as to what must have happened to (1) elicit Elizabeth Warren’s fury over Sanders telling her a woman couldn’t get to be president, then denying it; and (2) explain his denial.

I think it comes down to Sanders just not getting it. Whatever his exact words, she took it as an aspersion back then, and in the heat of the Iowa race felt driven to spit it out. And Sanders, instead of taking her to heart, instead of conceding he may have made a mistake, flatly denied saying it.

On either side of the gender divide, most of us have experienced how this goes—something like the following:

Woman:  you did say it, you know. You said I was wasting my time with Joan. 

Man:   I didn’t say it!  I didn’t say you’re wasting your time with Joan!

Woman: You just don’t remember.

Man: I remember. I did not say, “you’re wasting your time with Joan.”

Woman:  it’s not whatever your exact words were, it’s what you meant.  We both know what you meant!

Man:  I didn’t mean anything of the kind!

Woman: [pregnant pause] You’re just defending. You know what you meant, and if you can’t acknowledge it, I don’t know what to say. 

Man: fine.  We can discuss it another time when you’re more reasonable.

Afterwords:

Man [inner monologue]: where does she get this from?  Her mother? Using her intuition? Tricking me? I know what I said. I know perfectly well what I said. Joan’s a loser, but I would never say that.

Woman [inner monologue]: I just don’t know how to get through to him. He knows . . . something in him must know. But he’s got this wall. . . .  

Warren doesn’t get him. He doesn’t get her. Where do we go from here?

Lurking somewhere in Bernie Sanders’s brain is the idea that if he had won the nomination, he would have won the general election. That if Hillary had been more forceful, had taken her fight to the enemy like a man, she would have beaten Trump in an electoral landslide, with far greater margin than three million Coastal votes that didn’t count where it mattered. She was too soft. Too conciliatory to the (non-Trump) Right.

Somehow, whatever Bernie’s exact words, Elizabeth Warren picked up on it.  Inside, he’s 80% convinced that a woman can’t win the presidency, and it leaked out in something he said to her.  He’s sexist—not intentionally, but unconsciously, because he’s been living in a white man’s skin for 70-some years with all the advantages conferred as a birthright in America. He can’t help himself! He’s not a bad man!  He’s just not in touch with parts of himself that he wishes weren’t there, and convinces himself they are not. He’s convinced himself that he never told Warren a woman could not win a presidential election.  He’s got this wall . . . .

I’ve been listening to Bernie Sanders run for president for four years, and no matter the content of what he says, his tone, affect, and body language are frequently that of some Old Testament prophet designing to free The Chosen People from their oppressors.  The loud declaiming.  The pointing, outreached, thrusting hand.  The repetition of the same phrases in the same tone over, and over, and over again. The invocation of a monolithic enemy, the filthy rich for whom there is no redemption. The insistence that without a revolution, all is lost.  (Maybe he’s correct, but the hard sell will not work with most voters to his right, which is most voters, period.)

Some people like that. I like it up to a point, but when it veers toward megalomania, it turns me off.  His True Believers  really like it, and remind me  of Donald Trump True Believers, cheering at every significant pause, laughing on cue, hanging on the Glorious Leader’s every word.

Why Bernie won’t win.

Bernie Sanders is not a true megalomaniac—it’s just a shade. He would probably make a good president, once he started to make the inevitable compromises that would disappoint his most zealous fans.  He’s honest, honorable, speaks the truth, and has good ideas. He knows Washington. Despite the lapses into Old-Testament-patriarch style, he has a sense of humor about himself. A lot of positives.

BUT if the Virginia elections of 2017 and 2019 and the U.S. congressional elections of 2018 tell us anything about how to win elections in the age of #MeToo and #NeverAgain, it’s that the decisive swing voters are working-class white women and white suburban women—women who have been inexplicably voting Republican for decades . . .  and are moving left to join the resistance to the patriarchy.

It’s my sense that many of them may find Bernie Sanders off-putting if he continues to evince the same arrogance with which he treated Elizabeth Warren last Tuesday night. They’d cross back over the fence to the Right.  It’s not so much about that particular episode, since he will probably get around to apologizing  as a political necessity within the next few days.  Rather, it’s what that episode revealed about who he is, and those colors will show again.

If Sanders gets nominated, that flaw will cost him the election, because there’s less daylight between him and Trump on gender relations than he would like to admit. He’s not openly misogynistic as is Trump. But he carries around in him the assumption of male superiority—the unconscious assumption most white men of my generation carry around in us no matter how we consciously fight it. It showed last Tuesday night, and it’s not going away.