Real people really disagree

I should begin by saying that I think there are good reasons for supporting Sanders, and many of his supporters make good arguments for their preferring him over other candidates. But, I also think there are good reasons for supporting other candidates, and for not supporting Sanders. Some of those good reasons involve people having different priorities from one another, different assessments of risks, or different predictions about various uncertainties about our political situation. That I feel certain I’m right is not the same as having the only legitimate political position.

I’m not saying all arguments are equally valid, or it’s all just personal preference, or there’s no difference among the candidates. I am saying that intelligence and reason are not restricted to only one candidate’s supporters. Further, I’m saying that insisting that there is only one reasonable position to have, that my political beliefs are the only rational beliefs, and that anyone who doesn’t support my candidate does so because they are corrupt, stupid, biased, or the stooge of a corrupt entity is engaging in a damaging form of demagoguery. It is damaging to democracy.

People are sharing this post as though it’s a smart argument, and it’s really objectionable berniesplaining. And, let’s start with saying that if berniesplainers explain in comments that their telling me that I have never seen berniesplaining, but I have simply misunderstood my own experience, they are berniesplaining.

Mansplaining is when a man explains something to a woman assuming she is ignorant, and she’s actually quite well-informed, perhaps an expert. It’s particularly irritating when a man explains to a woman what it’s like to be a woman, when he tells us that we don’t really understand our own experience as women, and that he knows what we should want, what policies we should support, because our own understanding of our experience is biased and irrational, but his is unbiased, rational, and objective. Whitesplaining is when a white person tells POC that they don’t really understand their experience as POC because POC are biased, irrational, and subjective, but this white person really knows how they should think, behave, vote.

Bernisplaining is when Sanders supporters explain to people who don’t support Sanders that any position other than supporting Sanders doesn’t come from a legitimate difference of opinion, or a rational assessment of the situation, but from being corrupt or a stooge of corruption. Berniesplainers explain that the people who disagree with them don’t understand our own political views, needs, or positions.

Everything that is wrong about Sanders’ rhetoric is in this post. The article says that Sanders’ showing on Super Tuesday–that a lot of people didn’t vote for him–“doesn’t mean that voters are mindless robots taking orders from above”(why would that even need to be said unless there are people in the article’s audience who would give that explanation?), but because anyone who voted against Sanders did so because they voted on the basis of a cognitive bias. ORLY?

In other words, had they not been relying on a cognitive bias, they would have voted for Sanders. So, there is no good reason for supporting anyone other than Sanders. And I am incredibly tired of bernisplainers beginning every argument from that assumption.

[Speaking of cognitive biases, that article is a great example of two cognitive biases: asymmetric insight, and in-group favoritism.]

More important, leftists are supposed to reject the notion that we are all the same, that there is some position from which unmediated perception of the truth is easy. We are supposed to be the group that says that people have genuinely different experiences, that the world is uncertain, and disagreement is okay.

Yes, not all Sanders supporters assume that they are the only people with a legitimate point of view, and attacks on Sanders can be patronizing  and just plain stupid, and, as Jamieson showed pretty clearly, much of the intra-group hostility in 2016 was ginned up by pro-Trump forces. And it’s in Trump’s best interest to have potential Dem voters hate each other more than we want to get him out of office.

But this article–one that said that people who voted for anyone other than Sanders did so because they were dupes to a cognitive bias–was not a meme created by a pro-Trump troll. And Corey Robin shared it. This is not a fringe pro-Sanders’ position. This patronizing, dismissive, and anti-democratic attitude is central, not just to Sanders, but to the left.

We should be better than this.

Not all Sanders supporters are berniesplainers. But all berniesplainers do not actually support democracy.  And that’s a problem. Democracy is premised on the notion that disagreement is productive because people really disagree, because as various people have pointed out, advocating a political policy is a leap into the unknown. Democracy presumes that we have genuinely different and legitimate values and interests.

To the extent that pro-Sanders rhetoric says that anyone who doesn’t support Sanders only does so without legitimate reasons—they do so because they’re falling prey to a cognitive bias, they’re stooges to the DNC or media—is the extent to which pro-Sanders rhetoric is patronizing, arrogant, and anti-democratic. It’s berniesplaining.

Democracy is premised on the notion that no individual or group (or faction, as the founders would have said) has God speaking in their ear. The founders did intermittently argue that some individuals reasoned from a position of universal knowledge, and leftists are supposed to reject that epistemology.

Democracy is about acknowledging that people disagree because we really disagree. There is not just one solution that is obvious to all right-thinking people. Democracy presumes that there is legitimate disagreement. People who think there is not legitimate disagreement, regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, are anti-democratic. They are not leftists. They are political and epistemological narcissists.