“I just don’t really think he can win a national election.”
I was standing at a party, the kind you go to in college. We were in a French language house, because that’s the kind of lefty, liberal-arts school this was, clutching red solo cups. I was talking to a guy I barely knew. I think I shared a history class with him? Maybe I’d just seen him around. We were standing in that position well known to anyone who hopes to make out with a stranger – my back was to the wall and I had one leg hitched up. He was leaning over me, one arm against the wall above my shoulder. Its pretty likely I was playing with my hair.
We were talking politics, this guy-from-maybe-my-history-class and I: a little loudly, maybe a little drunkenly, but generally benignly. We were in Vermont, on an idyllic campus spread out over rolling green hills. We were talking about the progressive Vermonter who was poised to kill in the Iowa caucuses the next week.
“What?” he said, shouting over thumping European techno music.
“I said I don’t think he can win a national election.”
Suddenly everything changed. He took his arm from above my shoulder and barred it across my chest, just below my neck, pushing me back hard towards the wall. He leaned in close and I could smell the beer on his breath as he growled, “say that again.”
I squirmed out and left the party. It was January 2004, and a week later Howard Dean swept the Iowa Caucuses.
******
This morning, while I procrastinated from working, Facebook reminded me that on year ago today, I posted this:
“If you are
1. In C'ville and
2. Want to see a real, live, actual liberal voice in the primaries
Come by next Friday for a backyard bash/fundraiser for Bernie - we'll provide the beer and snacks, you provide the progressive spirit.”
I’ve raised money for Bernie and given money to Bernie. I’ve talked to people in diners about him and yelled at my father about him. But yesterday I finally unsubscribed from his campaign emails and told a phone banker that yes, sure, yes, fine, I’d give $10 to Hillary’s campaign.
How on earth did I get here?
******
That same winter the-guy-from-maybe-history shoved me against a wall for voicing my concerns about Dean’s candidacy I, for reasons unknown, ran Campus for Clark.  I grew up around Democratic politics, so running something made sense; I just don’t remember why Clark in particular. But I do know why, when he dropped out, I moved next not to Edwards or Dean but to Kerry: this guy I had a crush on asked me to. I want to clarify, lest this sound like a less-than-solid reason for picking a candidate, that it was a really big crush.
The beginnings may have been dubious, but I worked hard that spring and summer for Kerry. I took day trips to leaflet in neighboring states. I door knocked. I wore my team’s t-shirts and hats and sweatshirts. I handed out stickers. I was in Boston for his nomination and sat phone banking for hours over the late summer. In the fall I took 3 days to go get out the vote in New Hampshire with one of my best friends. She tried turkey bacon for the first time and I had dogs set on me by disgruntled residents. It was a formative experience for both of us. The night Kerry lost we held each other and sobbed. We’d lost, but we’d lost together. Â
It was the second time in less than a month that many students from my college had sat in one room weeping. Just three weeks earlier the Red Sox beat the Yankees in game seven of the American League Championship Series, and we had all lost our collective minds. I moved a lot growing up, and other than my father spending Sunday afternoons eating grilled peanut butter, jelly, and cheese sandwiches while he watched the Broncos, sports hadn’t been a big part of my life.
But I saw the appeal of the team spirit of sports. I loved the Olympics for the moments when, at 2 on a Tuesday afternoon, I’d get to tear up with patriotism because someone who I’d never heard of thirty minutes earlier medaled in a sport I didn’t know existed. I still love these things. I’ll stand on tables screaming for the World Cup. When I appeared at a college whose greatest strength was hockey, I learned how the game worked, memorized the chants, and showed up, full-hearted, at games.
So when I found myself living in New England the year the curse of the Babe died, I joined in the yelling, the cheering and the crying. We all wore Red Sox hats. Somewhere on campus someone lit a bonfire. Everyone liked everyone that night.
The next morning we heard that down in Boston, outside Fenway Park, an Emerson College student died in the riots.
I thought back to the guy-from-maybe-history-class leaning over me, arm poised to choke me, shoving me hard against the wall, daring me to question his tribe.
******
In the years since John Kerry lost to Bush, I’ve joined a lot of campaigns. I’ve run through streets high-fiving and hugging strangers. I’ve stayed up for 48 straight hours and wept when I saw a candidate I adored and truly believed in take the stage. I’ve registered voters, knocked on doors, sat through tedious phone banks and gotten into party-ruining pedantic policy debates.
All of these campaigns, all these late nights, were driven by real ideals. I do believe in better healthcare and education and the functioning welfare state. I sincerely think that policy upholds racism and policy can help tear it down. But I would be lying through my teeth if I said that ideals and policy were all that fueled slogging through the rain knocking on doors. Because a huge part of it, perhaps a bigger part of it, was fueled by what I’ve never got from sports: I got to be part of a team.
I’ve felt the quasi-religious fervor of feeling sure that your man would win, that your tribe would come together. In 2009, on a freezing January day, I found myself hugging a friend and weeping again. We felt righteous and joyful and filled with hope. It was one of the best days of my life.
So when another Vermont politician I admired joined the fray last year, I raced to join his tribe. And I loved it there. My heart swells every time I see his ads. When I read articles about one in every four dollars donated to his campaign are coming from the unemployed I have to blink back tears. When he shook Hillary’s hand in that first debate, insisting they talk policy, not scandal, I sent a tweet about how good it was to watch a debate that felt like sitting at the grown up’s table.
He was running against a politician I have long admired, a hero of my girlhood, the woman who launched a thousand college admission “who’s your hero and why?” essays. But so was Obama, and that didn’t stop me from falling headfirst into a fevered year of work for him. I wanted Bernie to keep talking. I wanted to stand at his rallies with a big sign and hug a stranger.
But when the Massachusetts primary rolled around, I voted for Hillary Clinton.
The morning of the primary I sat down with 30 pages of reading. I read about voter turnout compared to Obama’s primaries, I read four sides of the great Bernie Math debate, I read about six Robert Reich posts, looking for inspiration and assurance. I cried out of frustration. Finally, I wrote to my father, who had long been selling me on Hillary, in defeat. “I certainly hate being a "realist" when I think that often mean being an unreasonable curmudgeon," I wrote, "but the armies of supporters don’t seem to be showing up.”
I felt defeated as I left the polls, another foot soldier who failed to turn up to fight. Driving home with my boyfriend that night, I told him I envied his ideological purity. I envied him still being part of the tribe.
But I don’t anymore.
In the months since then, the tone has changed. The other day I posted on Facebook asking that people recognize when they call supporters of the other candidate idiots or hypocrites or evil, that they are probably talking about friends of theirs. A Bernie supporter, a smart man whom I like, posted on it, calling me ignorant of the facts, and referring to the choice between Hillary and Trump as being between “nightshade and cyanide.”
My tribe has gone rogue.
******
It was somewhat inevitable that this primary would disintegrate into tribalism. Jill Lepore recently argued in the New Yorker that as the party system was created by old media, so it would, of course, be pulled apart by new media. Each major change in parties has correlated to a change in the way Americans consume media. And in today’s media landscape, it’s almost impossible to find facts that will speak to one another.
This has been true as long as I can remember – which, I’ll grant you, is only back a few decades – of divides between the parties. Whether it was birthers who refused to trust Obama’s birth certificate or members of my own tribe who would argue to you that the Koch brothers own the entire right, an informed populace has long since ceased being a check on factionalism. It never really was.
But this year, the cracks that stop left and right from being able to meaningfully speak to one another have spread, and the parties themselves have splintered. The friend who wrote on my wall told me that, “Fact and figures don’t make you an idiot,” they simply served to discredit Hillary. The problem, of course, is that facts are never just facts. Only if he and I agreed on what Hillary’s Wall Street speech fees mean could we then agree that Hillary is a stooge. It’s not a matter of ignorance: we both know the same facts. We just don’t agree that they mean the same thing.
I suspect I am not alone in finding it dizzyingly hard to sort through the facts this election. My Facebook wall is an array of different interpretations and half stories; tiny clumps of data are taken out of context and said to stand in for everything. There is more information than any of us can process. When it came time to vote, I did what I could: I read some sources I trusted, I talked to some smart people, I debated a few points and I made a decision call. I left my tribe behind.
One year ago, I went public to ask friends to give to a warm, friendly, enthusiastic campaign: a group that wanted to make America better; a group that seemed open and honest and truly loving. They were the kind of people I could see myself among.
But in reading the skirmishes breaking out Facebook, hearing the offhand comments about “Killary,” and realizing I was too anxious to post a Hillary profile for fear of the backlash, I remembered something else. I remembered an arm pressed up against me, the smell of hot beer in my face, and that threat: say that again.
The more of our identity we weave into our political affiliations, the more an attack on them feels like an attack on us. I cannot deny that being a woman is part of what makes me proud of Hillary. The downside of that is that I feel irrationally angry, personally affronted, whenever I think an attack on her seems particularly gendered. It doesn’t make for civil discourse. But if the facts are nearly impossible to agree on, it’s little wonder that we fall back on deciding politics based on where we feel safe. And in the last few months, the supporters of the man I once fundraised for have grown increasingly sour - increasingly mean. It feels like those of us on the left have tipped over from high-fiving strangers to rioting outside Fenway.Â
We join tribes for a thousand reasons, from the flightiest crushes to the most serious activism. I have no doubt that the vast majority of Bernie supporters are there for the right reasons. He is a good man, with good intents and some excellent ideas. And probably the last thing anyone in that tribe cares about is why a foot soldier who lost courage on Election Day no longer feels guilty about that.
But twelve years ago I simply wriggled away, too intimidated to deal with it. Today, I’m a little less forgiving and a little less fragile, so let me say this as clearly as I can: Hillary has won the popular vote, the caucuses, and the primaries. She has problems, no doubt. She holds positions on foreign policy I can’t bring myself to endorse, and has a grasping greed for wealth that, while not illegal, is hardly endearing.
Yet when I hear her talk thoughtfully about race on Another Round, when I read ludicrously detailed policy papers, when I see her really lay into Trump, and, yes, when I remember that little girl who looked up to her, I can see a tribe that isn’t ugly and isn’t nasty; one that’s focused on policy, on gun control, and on the slow, often boring, work of governing. I can see a tribe I want to join.
So I’m with her.
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