The night before the caucus clusterfuck, while the Super Bowl played, Bernie Sanders acolytes threw a party at a hole-in-the-wall bar in downtown Des Moines. Bearded 20-somethings smoked actual cigarettes outside and discussed the difference in rental prices between Silver Lake and Williamsburg. Inside, the crowd of canvassers and campaign staffers bopped to “Common People,” the Britpop class-rage anthem by Pulp. Writers from New York magazine, as well as leftwing publications like Jacobin and n+1, sidled up to the bar and got down to discussing labor rights. The nearest L train stop was 1,100 miles away.
...The Sanders shindig Sunday night was conjured by the hosts of Chapo Trap House, the popular podcast of the self-proclaimed “dirtbag left” — the radicalized, often vulgar, and sometimes hilarious internet creatures all in for Bernie. The show’s hosts gathered in a tiny and graffiti-covered back room that looked like a charming imitation of a Lower East Side dive bar bathroom and discussed their candidate’s chances in the caucuses and whether one could get HBO interested in a miniseries starring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Out on the dance floor, a massive image of Jeffrey Epstein’s bungalow on Little Saint James, otherwise known as “Pedophile Island,” was being beamed onto the walls.
The difference between Sanders' working class and minority supporters and those who "express solidarity" with them.
Tickets for the Chapo event were $25, $15 for students. The
podcast now makes $160,857 a month
WEST LIBERTY — Sylvia Gutierrez and her boyfriend, Kevin Fernandez, both 22, didn’t caucus four years ago. But this year, Fernandez’s grandmother, who is not a U.S. citizen, gave them a mission: Be her voice and caucus for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“I’m here because family members wanted a vote that can’t vote,” Gutierrez said. “He (Fernandez) convinced me, and so did his grandparents. His grandmother said to come and vote for her.”
The couple were among a large contingent of supporters for the Vermont senator at West Liberty’s second precinct on Monday night during the Iowa Democratic caucuses.
Solidarity, among members of a group is not a decision;
it's a reflex. The decision would be to refuse it, to chose to be disloyal,
forms of which will make you a "rat", a "snitch", or a "scab".
solidarity | ˌsäləˈderədē |
noun
1 unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group: factory workers voiced solidarity with the striking students.
2 (Solidarity) an independent trade union movement in Poland that developed into a mass campaign for political change and inspired popular opposition to communist regimes across eastern Europe during the 1980s. [translating Polish Solidarność.]
That the dictionary editors chose the example of workers joining students is either ironic or predictable, since editors and students are members of the same group, and
loyalty wins out.
etc,
etc
What's interesting and good about Sanders is that he still has an unthinking loyalty to people he sees as like himself: workers and immigrants, people who are in the process of becoming or dream of becoming middle class, as opposed to the earnest children of success who want to help.
The Dirtbag Left is the new, new liberalism, a down and dirty Douglas Black.
Adding this, because I don't want to oversimplify.
Buppies and the immigrant bourgeois vs white bourgeois fantasists.
This is how I argued on twitter and I have an archive on google photos so I'm being lazy
