The first skirmish of the 2020 Democratic primary, a wave of attacks on Beto O’Rourke by supporters of Bernie Sanders, took almost everybody by surprise. On the outside, it looks like one of those inscrutable, personality-driven online spats that characterize the Twitter era. But the feud is neither petty nor personal nor irrational. It’s the first shot in a war that may well continue for the next year and a half.
I have opinions about the parties involved in this conflict that are not difficult to guess. But my aim in this article is not to persuade readers of the merits of my preferences, but instead to provide a descriptive account of an important conflict that I believe is being widely misunderstood. Indeed, I think the online warriors of the Bernie movement are getting too little credit, and their mainstream liberal antagonists would benefit from a better understanding of their motives and thinking.
The Sanders partisans who are attacking O’Rourke — like Zaid Jilani, David Sirota, Branko Marcetic, Elizabeth Bruenig — are not representative of Sanders voters as a whole. This distinction is the key to deciphering the whole episode. Sanders attracts the intense support of a small left-wing intellectual vanguard who see American politics in fundamentally different terms than most Democrats do.
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