I support Bernie Sanders for President. I knew of him when he was a politician in Vermont (and met him in middle school), and when he decided to run for president, I decided to quit my tenure track job teaching political science at a liberal arts school in upstate New York to volunteer for his campaign, because the movement to start a political revolution that will elect Bernie president, and bring sweeping change (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives) in Congress and Washington in general is the kind of thing I can believe in a way that I could not believe in the mission of the the increasingly corporatized institution of higher learning where I'd been teaching for the previous half-decade.
I now have no regular income, having insurance through Obamacare, and am moving with my wife to Virginia, an early primary state, to volunteer for Bernie and write books. I did this because I believe we can win.
Following the campaign with a magnifying glass (one of my main occupations until I move in a couple of weeks), Bernie's rise has been striking, and though I never bore Hillary Clinton ill-will (I just think Bernie's better, and will really stand up for what I believe in), I've become increasingly aware that one major impediment to more people switching from her to Bernie is the central motivation of fear.
Reading this post from Vox, where several Iowa voters said they liked Bernie, but were afraid he wouldn't be able to win the general election, reminds me of two conversations recently. One was last spring, after I told colleagues I was quitting my teaching post. One of them, in the philosophy department, ribbed me a little, saying that although he was impressed by bold move, he questioned what the point was, given the small chance that Bernie could beat Hillary or become president. At the time, I reacted with pique: I asked him if he was a political scientist, or if he specialized in elections and political parties in his research (my specialty), angrily implying that he didn't know what he was talking about, and I did. He backed down.
Whether my friend and former colleague has a more accurate vision of our country's political future than me with all my academic training, though, is not as important as what I've begun to realize is where he--and many other of my friends who do not want to see Donald Trump or any other Republican in the White House--are coming from. They are not inspired by Hillary Clinton, and they don't really believe she'll improve our country very much. But a Hillary presidency would stave off the major and disastrous changes that a president from the party that keeps trying to shut down the government would likely usher in. While David Axelrod's observation that "Hillary: Live with it!" is not a very energizing rallying cry for a campaign, that is, in fact, exactly what many of my Bernie-skeptical friends kind of want--they feel comfortable with Hillary, and they could live with her as president, while they couldn't with any of the top Republican contenders (nor could the US economy, society, or middle class, probably, given how the Tea Party would be in the driver's seat even if a reasonable moderate like John Kasich were elected).
But why are they so afraid of Bernie Sanders? As came up again recentcly when probing some of my liberal friends in DC, they just don't believe Bernie can win a general election. But how can some voters in Iowa, professors at a liberal arts school in upstate New York (not political scientists--or very avid followers of politics), and DC insiders be guided in the primary by such sure perceptions of a general election 14 months away?
In some ways, this is a logical inversion of the ostensible point of primaries. Like first-round elections of run-off systems, primaries allow you to "vote your heart" without "wasting your vote," since you can always vote for the merely "lesser evil" candidate in the general election (or run-off, in countries like France, Brazil, or Poland). In other ways, voting in the primary on the basis of "electability" (which is just another word for "fear that my values and choices are too alien to the rest of the country, which wouldn't support the candidate of my heart in a general election") is also a bit of mathematical tomfoolery: if you think others see primaries as a chance to vote with their hearts (the reason primaries exist), but that you that you can foil them by casting your one vote more "wisely," then you haven't thought about the weight of your one vote in the entire primary electorate (one voice can be slightly more influential in caucus states like Iowa, but only marginally); and by contrast if you think others see primaries as chances to pick the most "electable" candidate from the party, then it doesn't really matter how you vote (unless it's really unclear which candidate is most electable) anyways.
But recalling these discussions, and reading alternate coverage of Hillary and Bernie in, for example, the Washington Post, I realized that there's something deeper going on in my friends who think like this: Most of them are comfortable with their lives and the way the world is, and in this they are like most journalists and political pundits whose stories about Hillary's woes almost always comprise or at least conclude with attempts to reassure readers that she's still the favorite. These observes fear to discover that the state of the world is not what they have been telling themselves: it has seemed to them that things in this country are going "ok," that a status quo candidate like Hillary could beat any of the [adjective] comers on the Republican side, and that there's no way this country has problems deep enough cause a mass hysteria enough to put Donald Trump in the White House, or deep enough to need a political revolution to solve them, like the one that could (will!) put Bernie Sanders in the White House.
They're not only afraid of Bernie losing, it may also be that they're afraid of discovering that they're in a cable-news, hybrid-suburbia, full 401k & good health benefits, comfortable bubble that actually includes precious few (and fewer) Americans with each passing year. Afraid to find out they're in the Truman Show along with only a few million other citizens of this country, while the vast majority have to scrape & hope & pray for their economic futures and those of their families. In a country where over 30% of Hispanic children and nearly 40% of African American children grow up in poverty, there are still bubbles where affluent white people can be comfortable living with Hillary and the stalemated status quot. They look at Bernie, and they are afraid to lose the illusions of comfortable America with good chances for all that Clinton allows them cling to. Instead, they should awake to fact that we can build that country again, but only if all people of good heart and good conscience--people like me and you--approach this coming electoral struggle, the struggle to build a movement much larger than Bernie Sanders, and the struggle to rebuild America as a place with good chances for all, with the attitude of "We can win," not "we're afraid to lose." The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.
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