What I Hear When They Say “Bernie would’ve won.”

This is a hard post to write—the voices of depression, self-erasure, and totalitarian-times pre-obedience all tell me to knock it off, that I’m just being annoying and trying to sabotage my remaining friendships out of grief. Outside influences including the bullying team of socialist mostly-white-dudes formed post-election call for “unity, but I’m pretty sure what they’re asking for is obedience.

There’s a little volcano in my gut made out of the b-word, and every once in a while, it explodes, and there’s yelling. I’m embarrassed by my yelling, but I take comfort in knowing that if I were Bernie, my occasional blustering incoherence would be seen as “authentic” and “revolutionary” rather than unhinged and shrill. Stupid gender.

So here’s an attempt to be coherent, to put into words what I hear when someone says “Bernie would’ve won.”

1.     Trump is your/Hillary’s/women’s fault. As a rape survivor, I’m used to carrying blame in my body that isn’t mine. Health and healing demand that I rebel against it, but trauma has placed an “If I wouldn’t have…” deep in my psyche. So when people blame Hillary supporters for the election of Trump, the nausea and pain of false blame bubbles to the surface and I hiss and flail and panic to get it off me.

Through all of human history, women have absorbed blame that isn’t ours and have been rewarded with social capital when we are willing to take the side of the oppressor. As the Rapist-in-Chief’s decisions prove to be just as hateful and apocalyptic as we thought they would be, the blame feels ever more damaging. I don’t want to hear it any more than I wanted to hear “You shouldn’t have been wearing that dress.” at 16 when I told a policemen that a guy jerked off at me in the park. The connection feels like an anxiety-leap, but that doesn’t make it not true.

2.      You/she/women should have stayed in your place. I hear, when people call for unity around Bernie, that same rock-stupid sentiment that bigots use when they blamed President Obama for racism. Instead of acknowledging the tide of misogynist mob-mentality (on both/all sides) that lifted Trump into office, (mostly, but not exclusively, straight white male) Bernie supporters try to make it the fault of those of us who saw Hillary as a way to fight oppression.

“There wouldn’t be all of this tension if people would just stay in their place” is among the most evil and ignorant American ideas, and it is one of the central themes of all hate movements, but ordinary “nice” people revert to it all the time, especially in the context of Hillary-hate.

3.     You don’t deserve representation.

4.    Your/Hillary’s/women’s/people of color’s work doesn’t count. I’ve already written extensively about how irked I am that people tend to discount Hillary’s lifetime of trying to do as much good as she can, largely on behalf of the poor. This national blindspot has given me a clear view of how often women’s work goes unseen. The women (at the headquarters I worked in, it was mostly women, mostly queer women and women of color, in fact) who donated our/their time deserve better than to be dismissed or concern-trolled by those who threw dollar bills at our first major party female candidate from president or sat on the sidelines basking in their white male entitlement, patting themselves on the back for their “progressiveness” even as they harassed and belittled women and people of color for our/their choice of candidate.

5.   . The votes of women and people of color don’t count. This claws its angry way through the system every time someone talks about how the primary was “rigged” or the DNC simply anointed Hillary. There was voting! The gaslighting insistence of their version is so strong that I sometimes have to look up the statistics just to remember it-she just won! The fact that the male candidate with a weaker social justice platform lost doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with the system. There are plenty of things wrong with the system, of course, this just isn’t one of them.

6.       White people should get to decide. But we fucking DON’T!

From the Wall Street Journal. I think that anyone who cares about social justice needs to make the opinions of people of color into account, and I hear white people dismiss these numbers all the time.

And take a look at the Trump regime if you want to see what white people’s vision of the county can be!

To me, the continued wistfulness about Bernie Sanders is a socially acceptable analog of Trump-sympathizing. In my opinion, it’s still driven by white male entitlement and white female betrayal/Stockholm syndrome, a desperate clinging to the past, tangled with the denial that race and gender bias exist at all.

It sucks, and it better be fucking taken care of by the time Kamala Harris runs for president.