"The White Entitlement of Some Sanders Supporters" - Daily Beast

[rjsquirrel]

25. Especially the younger ones

I've been a college professor for 30 years almost. When I started a B was a good grade and students never argued about their grades. Now if I give a damn A minus, I'll get a pleading request to raise it to a straight up A; FSM forbid I give a B or a C. I admire the idealism of the students I teach these days, but they seem remarkably entitled and sure of themselves (as I am sure my generation did to our elders, but all is relative).

They literally seem incapable of accepting failure, which is admirable except when you objectively fail at something. Like a presidential primary campaign. Or a (lol) "revolution" fought on the terrain of a major party's presidential primary process.

If you want a revolution, start your own radical party and take to the streets. No one is stopping you. But if you want the apparatus of the existing social institutions like political parties and congress and the supreme court and mainstream media to bend to your will, you have to win an election first. Why Sanders and his supporters seem to think that the rest of the democratic party -- establishment AND base voters -- have to roll over for the white guy because (oligarchy, corruption, millennial superiority, or whatever) is unfathomable.

It has something to do with white privilege for sure, although it goes beyond that to a generational culture of instant gratification and a valorization of feelings over reason and facts.

When you base a campaign on outrage, it also behooves you to be sure that your outrage is as widely shared as your fellow travelers and you think it is when you sit around a seminar table or hang out with mostly like-minded folks (encouraged by both campus culture and the internet -- DU is a good example, even the Clinton supporters here represent the far liberal end of the Democratic party base and you'd think no Americans were actually conservative or republican or not particularly obsessed with income inequality or ending fracking or whatever you think is so important that we need a "revolution" to fix it).

It's this sense of white privilege and entitlement (minus the generational differences) that makes Sanders and Trump supporters similar -- a mightily outraged response to the discovery that the rest of the world doesn't necessarily see things the same way as they do or see their problems as the most important ones.

There's also a huge element of nostalgia that unites both Trump and Sanders campaigns --- a weirdly ahistorical view that there is some "golden age" we can return to with a wave of the hands by changing policies, whether that is the white suburban patriarchal fantasy of the Trump voters or the naive and simplistic invocation of "New Deal" or 1960s radical politics by Sanders supporters.