Yes, the world breathed a sigh of relief when Alabama actually failed to elect a serial pedophile to the United States Senate. But the world was right to be concerned that Alabama might do exactly that. They had every reason to believe he’d prevail, after all. And the numbers bore out their fears.
In Alabama, the white vote usually determines the outcome. And in the case of this election, white voters just loved the serial pedophile. 74% of white men voted for Roy Moore, and nearly 2 in 3 white women did the same thing.
The very people Bernie Sanders has assured us that we need to be reaching out to, in other words. Bernie’s people were Roy Moore’s electorate. The only thing that stopped Moore from prowling the malls of the DC area for teen girls are Black men and women, who voted better than 90% for Doug Jones. Bernie has called those people “low information” voters.
I call them voters who caught onto his game early.
Bernie is wrong. Whether he knows this and is lying, or he’s just too disconnected from the world to realize it, is for others to sort out. The mythological “white working class” of Bernie Sanders did not, and does not, vote out of “economic anxiety.” They vote bigotry. They vote hate. They’ll cut their own throats if they think there’s a chance to nick the throat of whatever minority of woman they blame for the predicament they find themselves in. The GOP has known this for a long time, and carefully played on it. And now, with a well-oiled, Russian-influenced propaganda apparatus masquerading as “news”, they can keep them bamboozled from now until the end of time. They voted for a pedophile, and they’d do it again. They’d vote for anyone who says things like Roy Moore said. Moore, after all, said that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He also said that the greatest era of the United States was the era of legal slavery. He’s intimated that women shouldn’t be allowed to run for office. All of this is music to the ears of Bernie’s “white working class”, as they’ve been conditioned via FOX “News” and online propaganda to believe that all of these things are true. They have chosen to embrace it. We will not change the way they think, or the way they vote.
Am I suggesting we abandon them? No, of course not. But we can’t embrace them either, because it won’t work. We must reach out to men and women of color to finally put the nightmare of the present day firmly behind us. Many of those men and women are facing difficulty in voting due to suppression measures. We must help them fight this. Many others are not participating. We must use Alabama as an example to show them what the possibilities are. We can form a broad coalition of people of conscience, and push aside the Nazi-flavored tyranny of the present day. This is the one thing that will help the nihilist “white working class” more than anything any politician to date has promised them.
We must write them off politically to help them economically. Sanders would have to know this, as I am quite sure he has people around him who are well aware of the facts regarding what really drives them. Since I am certain he knows the truth, I am just as certain he’s pandering to them for his own reasons, and not because he actually wants to see things get better. Is he another old white bigot, just like Trump? No. His life history says that he’s been at various times a sincere fighter for the rights of those who are being suppressed. But his present political tack has erased a lot of his history. It could be that the old gentleman is too full of himself now to be a force for good.
If this is the case (and it looks to me like it is), it’s time to stop giving him oxygen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Ted Lieu, Jackie Speier… they are the future. Bernie is an impediment. It’s time to acknowledge that he was once a good man and a force for good, but that day has passed. Let Bernie and Trump continue to pander to the shrinking numbers of the scared and ignorant racists. The rest of us need to marginalize both of them. We have a lot of work to do.