Crazy / Bernie Sanders People on Reddit — Touched with Fire Media

1. Crazy

About a week ago I was standing in the shower and I had a realization: I’m not feeling particularly anxious or self-loathing right now. I imagine for a lot of people this wouldn’t be any kind of revelation or exciting news, but for me it was, because it hadn’t been true for a long time. So long that I can’t even remember when the last time was that I moved through the world untroubled by those feelings, and a bunch of other, related ones that orbit around them. Years, many. It seems like maybe 7 or 8, though that feels impossible when I think about it. Had I really woken up every single morning for 7 straight years feeling what I would characterize as crazy? How was that possible?

My particular form of mental illness is insidious because of its changability. Every now and again — it seems like it happens every year or so — I fall, unpredictably and completely, into an arid, desperate place of utter despair, and stay there for a brief period. Sometimes it lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks. Though this is the disease at its most acute, it’s also strangely less terrible, because it’s descrete, identifiable, and eventually it’s over. Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible — it feels like my brain is dying while my body lives on — but because I can name it, and know it, I’m comfortable with it. Far more dangerous is the chronic state of low-grade unhappiness and anxiety, punctuated by intrusive thoughts of shame and embarrassment, only occasionally alleviated by a few hours of placidity and optimism. The reason it’s dangerous is that I often don’t notice it; it’s bad, but it seems normal, and therefore eternal. It’s paralyzing, and characterized by a constant awareness of time passing at a terrifying rate. I wasn’t even quite aware of how long this had been going on until it went away.

Now I get up in the morning and I feel basically fine. Hours and hours can go by without suddenly being brought up short by constant self-criticism or terror that pretty soon I’m gonna be old and then I’m gonna die and I will have wasted my entire life on bullshit. It’s weird, but I keep thinking, Is this what other people feel like all the time? Is this what it’s like to be normal? If it keeps up for very long, a lot of my assumptions about how the world actually works are going to have to change, I think. If you guys all walk through the day just dealing with one thing and the next and not living in a state of constant morbid fear or paralyzing anxiety, a lot of guesses I had made about human nature turn out to be completely wrong. The capacity for both sympathy and empathy is limited by lived experience.

2. Bernie Sanders People on Reddit

Are fucking crazy. They’ve reached a point where most of them have realized that the primary is going against them, but they just cannot believe that more people don’t agree with them. So many of them have retreated into a sort of fantasy land where shady forces far too powerful for mere regular people to reckon with control everything. Every time someone refers to Hillary Clinton as “a bitch” — that’s a paid Clinton shill, trying to make them look bad. Every time a poll comes out showing their candidate behind, it’s a part of a media conspiracy to keep Sanders’ ideas down. In fact, almost everything is a part of a media conspiracy. It’s a loop of illogic that you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you try. Lay out the obvious case, and you’ll have a lot of people lay into you: “The Media” is far too large and heterogenous to expect a consistent bias for or against one candidate, you can say, and they’ll just tell you that they’ve been bought off by their paymasters. “The Media” is a group of businesses that want to make money, and the best way to make money is to cover competitive races with a lot of dogfighting and clicky stories, you can say, and they will come back with some nonsense about how rich people prefer Hillary Clinton. Most members of “The Media” are underpaid, overeducated white people who are in constant fear for their jobs, making them natural Sanders supporters, you can say, and they’ll scoff. You can ask, Do you really believe in a hyper-competent, massive conspiracy to rig polling and elections in 30 states, one with an omerta so powerful that nobody has blabbed about what would be the biggest, juiciest story in political history since Watergate, and if you do, why didn’t they just rig Iowa and New Hampshire to run Sanders out of the race before he could build up any steam? And they’ll shrug.

The longer I observe politics, the more obvious it’s become that the most powerful force in collective action is allegiance to a team, and belief that the other team is both bad and not likely to win. It’s difficult to believe that any member of your team would do anything wrong, and it’s hard to believe that all the work you’ve put in for your team isn’t going to pay off. Because you’ve bought in on the team identity, its arguments have come to seem self-evident to you. When you bump up against the cold reality that other people don’t find them self-evident at all, most people’s first response will be to vilify the other. They are, after all, on the bad team. They must be cheating. Or it must be the officiating. What it cannot possibly be is that the things that seem obvious to me are just a series of subjective opinions.

The internet makes all of this worse. In real life, a lot of my friends are Sanders people — though not as many as you would expect, in a place like Portland; I think I’m attracted to a certain mindset in people that leads to a streak of independence and an unwillingness to go all-in on ideologues and purity campaigns. But it remains true that Portland is in the bag for Sanders, and I remain friendly with all the same people I’ve been friendly with, not least because talking to people face-to-face reminds you of their humanity. Talking to people on Reddit absolutely does not. It cloaks other people’s humanity in nude language, often language used badly by people who are writing in haste and / or don’t know how to communicate very well via the written word. It rewards quick put-downs, and its system of voting comments up or down gives an easy tool for dogpiling on the other. Go on the Sanders subreddit, and you’ll find some reasonable people. But mostly you’ll find dead-enders — people who still believe that somehow, through some magic, he’s gonna come back and win (a lot of these people have started to take refuge in the idea that Clinton will be indicted, which is the kind of flight of fancy that used to be the exclusive purview of the right); people who will tell you with a straight face that voters in the south don’t matter, Bernie has the momentum, Bernie is electable (perhaps the funniest of the various delusions that get handed around the various Sanders echo chambers on the left), and that superdelegates should pick him irrespective of the primary results (thereby proving once again that the USA doesn’t give a shit about black people, I guess, but most people haven’t thought about that angle); and people who believe with the iron bands of faith that this election was stolen, full stop.

I know I shouldn’t argue with those people; no one’s gonna change anybody else’s minds. But it pains me to see people with good intentions go so far astray, not least because I think that their candidate's ideas are probably the future of American liberalism (or, well, a slightly more realistic version of those ideas). I still think that in 8 or 12 years you’re going to get a true liberal Reagan — what a lot of us wishcasted for Obama, sigh — who’s going to come onto the scene with ideas very similar to Bernie’s, but with a look, sound, and campaign that more reflects America, and that person is going to shock a lot of people by winning. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, of the institutional kind, the kind that the right did for 16 years that brought the once-thought-crazy ideas of Barry Goldwater into the White House in 1980. But I think people on the left are finally waking up to that fact. Sanders showed there was a constituency for the stuff; the problem is that a lot of people (like me) who are sympathetic to his message flatly didn’t believe that he could get any of it done. Change does not happen in one big wave election. I know people hate to hear that, but it’s true. Political identities (like most other identities) tend to calcify in your early 20s, and they’re very resistant to change after that. That’s why Sanders’ overwhelming support among young people never really spilled over — older people weren’t going to just up and quit believing what they’ve always believed in order to elect some obscure guy with semi-alien ideas who wanted to change, not only the stuff they thought was broken, but all the stuff they liked.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me, riles me up — the assumption that so many Sanders people had that the reason they were going to win was that all these people who had been living under false consciousness, who had voted for Reagan and Bush and every conservative in between, were suddenly going to come awake to what they actually should believe, just because someone explained to them what that was. It’s insulting, and it belittles people who are already feeling pretty little as it is. I think you have to take what people tell you about their convictions at face value, for the most part. If you want to change those convictions, you have to chip away at them, little by litte, not all in one big flood. If you could do that, they wouldn’t be convictions at all.