Who were Bernie Bros? What did they reveal about American society, and what difference did they make?
Ijeoma Oluo explores the phenomenon of white men hijacking social causes in her analysis of the 2016 US Presidential election. She focuses on a group of Bernie Sanders supporters dubbed “Bernie Bros,” examining their motivations and impact on progressive politics.
Keep reading to discover how Bernie Bros shed light on broader issues of race, gender, and class in social movements.
Ijeoma Oluo Analyzes Bernie Bros
One way Oluo says white men react to social progress is by co-opting movements that seek equity for marginalized groups. She argues that white men are so used to being the center of attention that they balk at not being that center, which leads them to hijack social movements in order to reassert their significance. Oluo says that this hijacking typically occurs when white men join a social cause as allies only to push their own interests, exploit the people they purport to help, and eventually turn against the cause.
Oluo says that this pattern of join-undermine-abandon recently re-emerged during the 2016 US Presidential election in the form of “Bernie Bros,” a certain type of white male supporters of Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders.
(Shortform note: Co-opting social movements for personal benefit isn’t a new phenomenon; companies learned long ago that tying their brands to social justice issues can be an effective way to turn a profit. For instance, Nike’s ad campaigns promote issues like gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights. However, critics argue there’s a disconnect between the company’s messaging and its actual practices, such as the lack of paid maternity leave for the female athletes Nike sponsors. This suggests that, for companies like Nike, the real concern is always for their bottom line and not for the people they claim to support—and they won’t hesitate to withdraw that support once it stops being profitable, such as cutting off sponsorships to women on maternity leave.)
Oluo argues that Bernie Bros were white men who felt threatened by the growing prominence of people of color (such as outgoing President Barack Obama) and women (such as Sanders’s main Democratic rival Hillary Clinton). In Sanders, she says, these men saw someone who advanced progressive values while deliberately sidelining feminist, Black, and other minority viewpoints by insisting that the “real” problems facing the country had to do with class inequality.
Oluo argues that Bernie Bros’ dogmatic focus on class inequality—along with a pattern of bullying and aggressive behavior—constituted a hijacking of the progressive political movement in an attempt to re-center white male issues. She points out that most women and people of color were quite aware of socioeconomic inequality and didn’t need white men to point it out to them. Moreover, she argues that focusing exclusively on socioeconomic class dismissed problems facing women and people of color, such as reproductive rights and police violence.
(Shortform note: Although “Bernie Bros” gave progressive movements a reputation for racism and sexism, in the years following Sanders’s candidacy, it’s become clear that class-based politics are not the exclusive domain of young white men. Since then, diverse Democratic candidates running on policies similar to Sanders’s—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other members of the “Squad,” for example—have gotten the same kind of vehement support from a broad spectrum of genders and races. It’s also worth noting that white men who supported Barack Obama during his 2008 run against Hillary Clinton faced accusations that were nearly identical to what Oluo says about Bernie Bros here.)
