The White Entitlement of Some Sanders Supporters

[BobbyDrake]

As read on The Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/06/05/the-white-entitlement-of-some-sanders-supporters.html

“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.

snip

The more I reflected on them, the more I realized the key point: They felt entitled to win, and a defeat meant that someone must have cheated or that their opinions did not matter, which of course couldn’t be true. They preferred to suspend reality and fabricate injustices rather than concede that Sanders has lost fair and square.

snip

These guys could not understand this struggle. They wanted immediate success and gratification, and they were not used to things not going their way. The issues and the lives of others had become irrelevant. All they wanted was for me to agree that they had been unjustly cheated, and that “Killary” and the DNC had rigged everything against them. I could not agree, so I had to walk away.

snip

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.

My brother and I are 3 years apart in age, roughly. I'm a Clinton supporter, along with the rest of most of my family. The difference between us? I'm a middle child, and he is "the baby." As in, "got everything he ever wanted," and "was never responsible for chores the way the rest of us were," and "basically lived an unrealistic lifestyle before having to make his way in the world." My parents bought my brother a new Honda Accord after he went to a trade school on scholarship, because that was the money they'd saved for him for college, but when he got a job with a union shop where "foreign" cars weren't allowed in the parking lot, he sold a well-built, fuel-efficient vehicle for pennies, all so he could buy a gas-guzzling American truck. Just to fit in among a mindless union shop. And that's the kind of thinking that brought him to Bernie Sanders, I guess. (This isn't a dig against unions, just against the brainless groupthink that can govern them most of the time.)

Sanders and Trump truly are two sides of the same coin, and that coin IS white entitlement, no doubt about it.