So, in a debate last night someone basically accused me of being a "way of the bern" type, and while I have had past association with those guys and their brand of politics, I've long since moved on, as has been documented on this blog. You can probably trace my political journey with these guys going back to 2016, I'm pretty open about how I feel about things, but I did want to summarize it for anyone who was wondering.
2016-2018: The honeymoon period
Way of the Bern was a subreddit that formed in 2016 when the Bernie or Bust movement was in full swing. Apparently it came from other subreddits like Kossacks For Sanders, etc., but the common thread for these kinds of subs is that they were basically pissed off Bernie or Busters who wanted a safe space to vent.
Reddit was in a weird state. Most mainstream political subreddits had massive changes in culture overnight, with moderators often banning Bernie or busters from their subs, or people would get mass downvoted, or get overwhelmed by a deluge of negative comments from Hillary supporters.
To this day, I feel like in 2016, Reddit was astroturfed by the democratic party and organizations like Correct the Record to promote democratic party talking points, and to demonize anyone who didn't fall in line.
But for those of us who were strong willed, we basically ended up migrating to subs like Way of the Bern in order to get away from more mainstream reddit that was full on "YOU BETTER VOTE FOR HILLARY OR ELSE!"
In 2016, I also came across political commentator Jimmy Dore, who I liked at the time. He seemed like a voice of reason, a very angry voice of reason, who castigated the democrats for their failures to address the problems of the day, and while I didn't agree on everything (I've never been big on this weird "end the wars" left), I largely found the content to be up my alley given my disaffection with the democratic party at the time.
Now, some people will claim these guys were "Putin puppets" or "in line with Bannon", and while I would probably agree with such statements these days, at the time, not so much. As I see it, the democratic party's job is to bully people into voting for it, in lieu of an actual policy, and demonizing alternatives and pulling this "with us or against us" game goes with the territory. And Clinton and the 2016 democratic party loved to do that, claiming anyone who aligned with them was either a Putin puppet or helping the alt right.
In all fairness, Russia did leak a lot of the wikileaks stuff, the guccifer stuff, all of which I posted about at the time. And..I didn't know that stuff was Russian. Sure, some people said it was, even at the time, but why should I believe them, given the democrats clearly were trying to deflect from their own failures? A lot of the info wasn't even wrong, the dems clearly did have biases against Bernie. Any idiot knew that, and honestly, all that stuff did was confirm it to us. We didn't NEED russian interference to know that the dems were biased, they just confirmed our preconceptions as far as I'm concerned.
Anyway, yeah, it was Russian, and yes, they did push that stuff to undermine Clinton. Still, given the amount of propaganda the democrats and Clinton was throwing out there, it kind of seemed dishonest for them to just be like "that's russian propaganda, you should only listen to ours."
Uh...I make up my own mind. I'm independent minded, and don't you forget it. My views are based on evidence, and I'm nuanced as fudge.
Anyway, obviously, WOTB, Jimmy Dore, etc., also kinda ignored the fact that this stuff was from Russian sources, if anything, they went further and seemed to deny the whole thing. The fact is, the democratic party lost their trust. They tried so hard to bully people into voting for them and to push the whole "if you arent with me you're with trump/the russians" line that a lot of those people just tuned out.
WOTB always had a bit of a conspiracyish vibe to them. They would take "rigged primary" claims further than I would. While I largely focused on the idea that the democrats didnt explicitly rig anything, and it was all using their powers as a party, as well as their connections with the media to manipulate the voters to the outcome they wanted, a lot of them did seem to think the democrats did more.
They would also spout things about how the DNC killed a staffer named Seth Rich for leaking emails and stuff to wikileaks. This has never been verified and just comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory.
This kind of mindset would later become quite problematic for WOTB, and even at the time I tried to avoid accepting the more crazy elements of their conspiratorial thinking. I mean, you need evidence, ya know? I don't trust the DNC either but yeah, they did go too far.
Anyway, through 2016, and the years after, I largely remained aligned with these guys. And outside of a few quirks, I largely found ranting on their subs and listening to Jimmy Dore to be a relative safe space. The democrats were too busy playing partisan games about how the russians helped trump and blah blah blah, and I kinda just...tuned out. People in the more mainstream DNC environment seemed deranged. They literally had trump derangement syndrome. I mean, trump sucked, but when your entire party is just bashing trump and trying to bully people who dont agree with you into supporting them in order to fight trump, that did nothing for me. I have my ideals, I have my priorities, and I was focused on not giving into their propaganda and remaining as laser focused on UBI, universal healthcare, and free college as possible. And in 2020, I planned to vote on policy. But, as we got closer to 2020, I started having a falling out with these guys.
2019: Rifts start forming
So, don't get me wrong, I went into Sanders initially intended to support Bernie completely. But then I ended up finding out about Andrew Yang. I had kinda been curious about him. I heard he was running for president as early as 2017, but I looked at his platform and it kinda looked shoddy. I mean, when me, some random redditor, has a better platform than him, you know this guy ain't that good. But still, he had that Andrew yang interview and I decided to give him a chance.
And...holy crap. Is this guy me? He sounds exactly like me policy/politics wise. He discussed all of the issues that he talked about in his "the war on normal people" book, and I was easily won over. This is what I had been saying for years!
Don't get me wrong, I still liked Bernie. And Bernie had a lot of aspects of his platform I liked better than Yang's. A stronger, more consistent stance on medicare for all. Free college. a $15 minimum wage, etc.
Yang was a bit more moderate, and that kind of spelled bad news.
There was a lot of paranoia within the bernie or bust about "fake progressives", ya know, the candidates who would fake left come election time, but in office would end up being moderate and not doing anything they promised? Case in point, Kamala Harris. Harris was the kind of candidate who knew how to look progressive, without being progressive. it's like the democrats were trying to siphon off Bernie's votes through imitator candidates who kinda sorta sounded like Bernie, but who were more controlled by the DNC and were more moderate on policy.
And this led to A LOT of insane purity testing within the 2020 democratic primary. Sometimes TOO much. Like, take Elizabeth Warren. She was a lot like Bernie, but her policies were often slightly more moderate. Warren wanted to forgive $50k in student loan debt, Bernie wanted all of it. Warren also had positions on medicare for all and the green new deal that were actually quite similar to bernie's in practice. I've looked at them on this blog.
But a lot of people HATED Warren. To be fair, she deserved a lot of it come 2020 when she basically turned all Hillary Clinton and tried to lean into cynical identity politics to demonize bernie as sexist for saying a woman candidate couldn't win. That was kind of shameless and she did kinda split the vote between Bernie and herself without offering anything of value different. She put her own ambitions over the policies, and I honestly think she should've dropped out and backed Bernie, given she was the weaker candidate, but I digress.
It seemed like the WOTB guys hated ALL bernie competitors, outside of maybe Tulsi because of her weirdo "end da warz" stance (again, more of this...).
And honestly? Something that alienated me was how they treated Yang. Because I went all in on Yang in 2019. I mean, I kinda liked Bernie too, but I was leaning Yang. And I kinda still saw common ground with Bernie people. I mean, we did want the same things, right? But, they would do the ideological gatekeeping nonsense that's kind of endemic of the modern left.
And even worse, they'd attack UBI, attack it as a neoliberal or techno libertarian program to destroy welfare, and go on about how Yang was a right winger and bashing him because "he's a capitalist", while hyping Bernie up because he was "socialist". They started calling for "decommodifying" basic needs instead and basically calling for...more welfare, or alternatively something resembling soviet communism.
And HOLY CRAP NO. As I wrote the other day, I came to supporting Bernie from a liberal standpoint, not a socialist one. I considered actual socialists to kinda be crazy and insane,and while yes, around this time I came to a point where I was leaning a bit into market socialism (since it seemed like a inoffensive form of socialism that fit well within my capitalist beliefs, the ideological gatekeeping was insane.
And the amount of hostility I got from the WOTB guys was....a bit much. I largely considered them allies up to this point, but after going through much of the 2020 cycle like this, I just ended up drifting away from them.
And eventually my politics shifted away from them as well.
2020-2021: The breaking point
So...eventually I did inevitably support Bernie in 2020. I made this decision either at the end of 2019 or beginning of 2020 in that December/January time frame. The fact was, I looked at Yang's platform, and Bernie's platform, and Bernie just had a stronger platform. yes, Yang had UBI, but Yang was inconsistent as fudge on healthcare, he didn't support free college/student debt forgiveness, and I kind of accepted the green new deal at the time as a more acceptable platform.
Yang had...just UBI in comparison. Do I support my #1 priority over all of my other ones? Even UBI isnt that valuable. And I also decided it wasn't time for UBI yet. If we have 10 years to solve climate change, we better get cracking, and given Bernie supported all my other priorities, I figured it would be better to vote for him, get all that out of the way, and THEN come back to UBI in the future. UBI is something I view as a long term necessity, but I figured at the time, it could wait.
So eventually the Bernie crowd won me back over and I supported him in early 2020, and then went Bernie or bust again when Biden got the nominee, disagreeing with the DNC's shady primary practices and not really feeling Biden at all.
And I largely stuck with WOTB and Jimmy Dore, but honestly, as COVID hit, I kind of saw them going in the weird denialism direction the right went in, and I couldnt agree with that.
And after Biden won in 2020, I sat back and I was just thinking, gee, do I even really align with bernie's movement anymore? I voted for it, but after being attacked so many times for liking Yang/UBI, it kinda left a sour taste in my mouth. And it seemed like that group started getting more unhinged.
Going into 2021, Jimmy Dore's show was all anti vax nonsense, and yeah, he was spouting the same talking points as the right.
And the WOTB/Jimmy Dore types were doing crazy things like attacking Warnock for getting us $1400 checks instead of $2000 (the "$2000 came from the fact that originally the government offered $600 checks but they wanted to up it to $2000, $1400 being the difference, and the Bernie Bro types wanting literally $2000 on top of the $600). And then there was force the vote that Jimmy Dore was pushing, and I was just like, ya know what? This is insane. Screw these guys.
Also...did I mention these guys REALLY have a hate boner for Yang? Which I kinda take personally for sharing a lot of politics with Yang? Attacking him over his stances on crime. Attacking him for offering $1000 checks to New Yorkers. Attacking him for not being as pro union as the progressive they liked. Attacked him for supporting Israel...you can see where I'm going. All of this is documented, go back to 2021 on this blog and read my stuff.
Also, I started myself moderating slightly. I kinda realized Yang and Bernie did offer different political philosophies and worldviews and I ended up doing a lot of work in trying to prioritize issues and trying to make the numbers work on my ideas. Like, i realized that maybe funding UBI and Medicare for all at the same time won't work, so I figured if I I HAD to sacrifice one, I'd do M4A, in order to preserve a UBI, in a stunning reversal of my 2020 electoral decision. And I ended up supporting...a public option instead. Like Yang and every other candidate seemed to want. And eventually I looked at climate plans, and same thing. I would rather have a build back better or Yang 2020 climate plan over an overpriced green new deal.
And gee, did I just turn into what Andrew yang was for all along? It caused me to distance myself from the Bernie movement and shift toward Yang. And when Yang announced his original forward party, I was totally on board with that, given I was disaffected toward both the democratic party and the Bernie movement.
Meanwhile what's WOTB and Jimmy Dore up to? Screaming at AOC for not "forcing the vote". Basically they advocated she did something like Matt Gaetz did to McCarthy against Nancy Pelosi, forcing her to hold a vote for medicare for all, which wouldnt pass. it was a complete publicity stunt, and one that would've led to AOC committing political suicide, since the response pelosi would have would be to isolate her, make her unable to do anything, and then run her out of office. Unlike the GOP the democrats tend to have more discipline within their party, and know how to deal with people who dont play ball. Huge reason I dont wanna be a politician myself, btw. Better off as a commentator.
But yeah. It just seemed like again and again, these guys would keep pushing insane crap. And after going on WOTB and seeing the whole page full of anti vax nonsense, and going on Jimmy Dore's show, and have it being full of anti vax nonsense, I really had to wonder, wtf, am I doing here?
I mean, yeah, I Bernie or Busted in 2016 and 2020. I dont regret it. It was the right decision given my value system for those election cycles. BUT....post 2020, I just had a huge falling out with WOTB, Jimmy Dore, etc. They just got too nuts for me, and they don't represent my value system any more. In part because they kept getting more insane, and in part because due to my politics mirroring Yang more than Bernie, I ended up going in a bit of a more moderate direction instead.
Bernie and WOTB kinda pulled me further left than I would be otherwise. And given my coalitional theory of politics, I was willing to tolerate and overlook some stuff I didn't agree with in order to get my goals achieved. When you're dealing with the far left, weird crap like "end da warz" rhetoric, socialist apologia, and wokeism are common things you encounter. And idk, I just figured hey, if I can achieve medicare for all, free college, etc., that way, then eh...Im willing to overlook that stuff.
But, as they started purity testing candidates I actually agreed more with to death, holding elected representatives to unreasonably high standards, and engaging in more and more batcrap insane theories and misinformation, I just ended up noping out.
2022-2023: The post WOTB/Jimmy Dore Era
Honestly? I havent watched Jimmy Dore in years now. I unsubbed in 2021 when it was just nonstop anti vax nonsense. I kept looking at his videos, being like if I can even find one decent video I like, I'll keep subbing, but after it just ended up being full of anti vax nonsense, I won't even watch him.
I'd say in the post 2020 era Kyle Kulinski has been my favorite youtube commentator now. He's kind of a more sane alternative Jimmy Dore, still appealing to that Bernie or Bust vibe (although not as much recently), but not being crazy about it. And he was just more sane on it.
On force the vote and the weird spat dore had with TYT, he kinda remained neutral, and I kind of found his takes the most reasonable. And outside of foreign policy, I normally find kyle to be the most reasonable commentator on youtube, which is why I write articles about his videos from time to time.
And yeah. I just ended up shifting away from subreddits like WOTB toward ones that valued my nuanced perspective, and away from Jimmy Dore toward commentators I liked more.
The thing is, we were all in it together in 2016 and the subsequent years, but we parted and went our own ways after that. The rift started when I liked Andrew yang, and it continued through 2020-2021 as they kept getting more crazy, and I ended up shifting in a different direction entirely.
The fact was, I only latched onto the bernie movement because he was an honest dude who wanted to make america better, and he had a lot of policies i agreed with. However, I never agreed 100% with him. When looking at my 2016 voting requirements, my view on Bernie was "2/3 ain't bad". Hillary was 0.5/3 and trump was 0/3. But notice how that one policy that Bernie lacked ended up being a much more important policy to me as time went on. I always believed in it, by the way, I just downplayed it since before yang it wasn't present in American politics at all, even if I was an early adopter for it. But after Bernie faced competitors who had such policies, I started shifting away from him toward them.
Meanwhile, the WOTB types just ended up getting more and more purity testy to insane degrees, and eventually I look at them, notice how a lot of them are these crazy communists, who somehow keep shifting toward MAGA at the same time, and I'm just like, holy crap, does the nazbol vortex exist after all?
Speaking of which, in party realignment terms, something I wanna explain. My goals in voting for third parties and going bernie or bust...was to pressure the democrats into adopting policies I wanted. The purpose was to split the dem politician to force one of the parties to adopt my policy preferences.
What WOTB is doing is shifting toward the MAGA coalition. They've gotten so batcrap insane with the anti democratic party rhetoric, that they're actually shifting toward republicans. I remember some of them were talking about voting trump in 2020. A lot of them just like mindless populism whomever it comes from. A lot of them are conspiratorial, much like the QAnon nuts. A lot of them are anti vax, like a lot of republicans. The fact is, this group became so anti democratic party they now have this weird perspective of being so far left...they wrap back around and support the right. And there does seem to be a WOTB-alt right pipeline. And I want NOTHING to do with that.
Meanwhile, if anything, I'm getting sucked back into the Biden coalition. The fact is, Biden has attempted to achieve some progressive priorities. he has failed on a lot of fronts, but those failures extend beyond his office and are thus, not his fault in my eyes. And I'm starting to kind of like Biden. I'm not crazy about the guy, but the fact that he is attempting to make some progress I find amenable helps.
What also helps is my shift toward the Yang gang. I mean, if I'm more moderate and flexible on priorities other than UBI like climate change, and Biden has plans similar to what I want, why not just support Biden? The fact is, while Biden is a failure on my top couple of priorities (UBI and healthcare), he's pretty decent on everything else. He's tried to forgive student loans, push for some free college, fix climate change, pass a $15 minimum wage, etc. Why should I look a gift horse in the mouth here? Ya know?
This is also why im not really fighting biden much despite there being candidates closer to my politics like west or williamson? Admittedly, im only on board with either of those for the economic platforms. You add in the social and foreign policy, and once again, I actually kinda like Biden, and find williamson and west cringey, especially on foreign policy ("end da warz" looks stupider than ever as issues like ukraine and israel become the big foreign policy conflicts of the day, replacing the afghanistan war which biden DID end).
And yeah, you understand how I can kinda sorta like Biden here? Then I watch the WOTB/Jimmy Dore left NEVER given biden credit and seem to call for literal communism while falling for alt right populist grifts and yeah no, I'm off that train.
Again, WOTB made sense in 2016 and the subsequent years during the trump administration, but in the age of biden it's aging like milk. The world is moving on, we ARE making progress, even if it's not at the rate I want, and I'm satisfied enough with Biden's job as president that honestly? The democratic party is looking a lot better than the alternative.
Also, Trump. I was willing to overlook the guy in his first term, but after January 6th, yeah no, F that guy. The GOP is like stage 4 cancer on this country at this point and needs to be stopped, period. I'm willing to play chicken with the dems when they're doing alarmist rhetoric to try to bully me but when trump shows himself to be a literal threat to democracy and a criminal and all that, no, he must go. Period.
So yeah. The fact is, a lot has changed in the past few years, and I've just fallen in more with the democratic party. As I said, I dont regret my past actions as a bernie or buster. If anything, I feel like my pressure worked. I dont think Biden would be governing as far left as he is if it werent for the political pressure the bernie coalition put on him. And yeah.
That's how I go from supporting WOTB and Jimmy Dore to being more of a Biden supporter.
Now, again, in terms of the 2024 primary, I'm NOT a Biden supporter. Officially I'm supporting williamson. Because i wanna keep that pressure up, and I do think that despite not being as warm on the bernie approach to politics these days, that I wanna keep the economic pressure on Biden. I do wanna see things like UBI, medicare for all or a public option, free college/student debt forgiveness, a housing program, a climate change bill, a $15 minimum wage, etc. I havent really changed on that much outside of shifting to be a bit more moderate on some priorities to accommodate UBI. And I do think we need to keep pressuring Biden to do good things.
But when the time comes, you also gotta reward him for doing good things. The carrot and stick approach with voting won't work if you only use sticks and never give him a carrot for doing a good job.
The fact is, I plan on supporting Biden this time around, and then litigating these issues more in 2028. When the seat is open, I'm going to push the party as hard as I can in my direction. And if it doesnt move, yeah, I MIGHT consider alternatives. But if they do, I'm going to vote for them.
WOTB or whatever, they're just gonna keep screaming the democrats are bad, unwittingly supporting republicans out of spite, and doing...whatever it is they think they're doing.
I'm off that crazy train. Don't @ me about them.
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