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I don't think the author made any crazy claims about Bernie. He did have a diverse coalition that was maligned as Bernie bros. He also didn't have the election

I don't think the author made any crazy claims about Bernie. He did have a diverse coalition that was maligned as Bernie bros. He also didn't have the election stolen in sc or super tuesday, he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote. RFK is an entirely different phenomenon.

dbingham 3y ago
> he simply wasn't that popular I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false. The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I was responding to: >...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring.... I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  A tangential "sigh" idea: are we ever going to see an American president younger than 70, or has the age of gerontocracy truly arrived? In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power. It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. Some of their lives could definitely have been extended, but I think people generally misunderstand human longevity. The peaks of ages have not really changed much at all, and a reasonable chunk of people who made it past childhood/birth (where there were indeed extremely high mortality rates), would make it there. For instance Hippocrates, of the Hippocratic Oath, lived to beyond 90, back in 400BC. Something else has changed.
pessimizer 3y ago
He could only get wins when all of the other candidates didn't collude with each other. Those 6 candidates were election stuffing to take focus off of Bernie, to the point that almost all of them pretended to be for single-payer health care. Pretending to support single-payer is literally the only reason that Harris made the national stage. The only reason Buttigieg entered the picture is because he was a nobody that was put up in the same way to split the liberal-left vote for DNC chair from Keith Ellison. The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden. The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  This is conspiratorial thinking. Here is an alternative: people that want to win adopt popular positions. Then when a candidate drops out their supporters go to the next most similar candidate. Not that complicated. The primaries were vicious, with people like Harris accusing Biden of being a segregationist. They were not pretending to run for president. The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries. Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    > This is conspiratorial thinking. If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.
    - zeroCalories 3y ago
avgcorrection 3y ago
> , he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote. Listen to how ridiculous this sounds. He was so “unpopular“ that the moderates needed to circle the wagons against him in order to make him lose.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  I don't see how that is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that if it was Bernie vs Biden from day 1 that Bernie would have won? Bernie never polled well enough for that, so you're suggesting a wildly different counter factual.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    If those are the numbers then I can't argue against them.

dbingham 3y ago

> he simply wasn't that popular I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false. The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.

zeroCalories 3y ago
I was responding to: >...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring.... I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.
inglor_cz 3y ago
A tangential "sigh" idea: are we ever going to see an American president younger than 70, or has the age of gerontocracy truly arrived? In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power. It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).
- somenameforme 3y ago
  John Adams lived to 90, Sam Adams to 81, Ben Franklin to 84, John Jay to 83, Thomas Jefferson to 83, James Madison to 85. Some of their lives could definitely have been extended, but I think people generally misunderstand human longevity. The peaks of ages have not really changed much at all, and a reasonable chunk of people who made it past childhood/birth (where there were indeed extremely high mortality rates), would make it there. For instance Hippocrates, of the Hippocratic Oath, lived to beyond 90, back in 400BC. Something else has changed.

pessimizer 3y ago

He could only get wins when all of the other candidates didn't collude with each other. Those 6 candidates were election stuffing to take focus off of Bernie, to the point that almost all of them pretended to be for single-payer health care. Pretending to support single-payer is literally the only reason that Harris made the national stage. The only reason Buttigieg entered the picture is because he was a nobody that was put up in the same way to split the liberal-left vote for DNC chair from Keith Ellison. The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden. The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.

zeroCalories 3y ago
This is conspiratorial thinking. Here is an alternative: people that want to win adopt popular positions. Then when a candidate drops out their supporters go to the next most similar candidate. Not that complicated. The primaries were vicious, with people like Harris accusing Biden of being a segregationist. They were not pretending to run for president. The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries. Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  > This is conspiratorial thinking. If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago

avgcorrection 3y ago

> , he simply wasn't that popular and could only get wins when 6 moderate candidates were splitting the vote. Listen to how ridiculous this sounds. He was so “unpopular“ that the moderates needed to circle the wagons against him in order to make him lose.

zeroCalories 3y ago
I don't see how that is ridiculous. Are you suggesting that if it was Bernie vs Biden from day 1 that Bernie would have won? Bernie never polled well enough for that, so you're suggesting a wildly different counter factual.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  If those are the numbers then I can't argue against them.