As Jonathan Chait observed, if America was going to get its first socialist president, the Bernie bros were going to have to crush Beto.
The aspirational socialists and the intersectional liberals suddenly found themselves in league against a common enemy: a white male capitalist who once took a road-trip with a . . . Republican. So when Beto formally announced his campaign last week, what he may not have realized is that he was firing the first presidential shot in the left’s internecine Woke Wars. And in this battle he is on the wrong side of some of the very people who were his base in 2018: center-left journalists and power twitter users.
Not only have these social media influencers cooled to Betomania 2.0, but many turned out to be actively hostile, treating him more along the line of how they handle conservatives…
The same members of the media and the liberal twitter elite who did not find Beto’s privilege to be particularly problematic when he was trying to defeat a Hispanic Republican have suddenly discovered it now that he is challenging their ideological or identitarian preferences. And it’s hard to see a way out.
