"Bernie Bro" (sometimes spelled "Berniebro"; collective Bernie Bros) is a pejorative label applied to male supporters of 2016 U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The term was soon adopted by members of the media to critique overzealous Sanders voters as well as internet trolls alleged to support Sanders.
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Origin
Robinson Meyer, a writer for The Atlantic, coined the term "Bernie bro" in an October 17, 2015 article to describe a phenomenon in which some young, white, progressive men were "hectoring their friends" on Facebook to support Sanders at a time when few major media outlets were taking Sanders' candidacy seriously.
In the October 2015 article in which the term was coined, Meyer characterized the Bernie Bro as "[m]ale... white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, 'upper middle-class'); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands." Furthermore, according to Meyer, "[t]he Berniebro asserts that this country needs highly principled, pie-in-the-sky progressive policies, regardless of how likely they are to become legislation. The Berniebro supports free college for all and a $15 minimum wage.... The Berniebro voted for Barack Obama in 2012. And 2008, if the Berniebro was old enough to vote." Meyer's story was shared 28,000 times on Facebook, bringing the term to public attention.
Definition
USA Today describes Bernie Bros as "the unsanctioned shock troops of Bernie Sanders' vaunted online army, digital rogues who've plagued Hillary Clinton's presidential bid and embarrassed Sanders' campaign."
The Wall Street Journal described the Bros as generally "white, male" Sanders supporters who troll Clinton supporters, "leaving vitriolic comments on social media accounts and created memes showing Mrs. Clinton as trying too hard to be cool."
The Los Angeles Times calls them "online trolls... who attack journalists, politicians and fellow voters they perceive to be pro-Clinton with misogynistic, often vulgar attacks."
MTV correspondent Jamil Smith described these people as engaging in "trolling, misogyny, and 'hipster racism.'" Washington Post reporter Janell Ross described some pro-Sanders online activists as "angry people who sometimes engage in or embrace bigotry," and believed they demonstrated an attitude she called "offensively dismissive, superior, let-us-tell-you-black-voters-what-you-need-and-how-you-should-vote commentary from some subset of Sanders supporters."
Background
During Hillary Clinton's 2008 primary campaign against Barack Obama, the media coined the term "Obama boy" to describe the sexist behavior exhibited by some male Obama supporters towards women supporting Hillary Clinton. Rebecca Traister's Salon article brought the term into wider usage.
According to Wikileaks, during the Democratic primary the Hillary Clinton campaign coordinated with bloggers and columnists to use identity politics to undermine Bernie Sanders using race and gender issues.
The 2016 Democratic National Committee email leak showed that the DNC's Hispanic Media Director Pablo Manriquez used the term "Bernie Bro" to describe journalists who were critical of Hillary Clinton, in order to justify denying them interviews with DNC officials who preferred only to talk to Clinton loyalists.
During the 2016 Democratic Primary, Gloria Steinem said that female supporters of Sanders were only interested in meeting "boys." Critics of the American mainstream media argue that the Bernie Bro is a myth that exaggerates the impact of internet trolling and under-represents the political agency of young women. Sanders supporters argued that the term represents a straw man characterization used to delegitimize critics of Clinton.
Reaction
The new term, with its implicit accusation that Sanders' supporters were unusually aggressive on social media, immediately set off an online flame war between supporters of Clinton and Sanders.
Bernie Sanders response
In a February 2016 interview with CNN's State of the Union, Sanders criticized "Bernie Bros" for their sexist attacks against rival Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. "It's disgusting. [...] Anybody who is supporting me and who is doing sexist things, we don't want them. I don't want them. That is not what this campaign is about."
Clinton campaign response
In February, Brian Fallon, Clinton's press secretary, characterized the Bernie Bros as "nasty and vitriolic." Bill Clinton accused the Bernie Bros as carrying out "vicious trolling and attacks that are literally too profane ... not to mention sexist."
Online reaction
In a review for the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash, Vice's Carles Buzz called them "the voice of male Sanders supporters who use hostile or sexist terms to cut down Hillary Clinton" who are "often banned or berated in the comments." Critical of its Bernie Bro culture, New Statesman's Eleanor Margolis reviewed the online dating service Bernie Singles as "an exercise in nausea-induced celibacy."
In an interview with Yahoo! News, Limor Shifman said that the Bernie Bro phenomenon is rooted in online communities such as 4chan and Reddit. She said, "On one hand, they have this self-image of being anarchists and being antiestablishment. [...] On the other hand, they're pretty much white and male." In her endorsement for Clinton, The Nation's columnist Joan Walsh called the subculture "Berniebot keyboard warriors."
The phenomenon swiftly sparked a response among supporters of Clinton. The Bernie Bros phenomenon inspired the creation of volunteer advocacy organization Bros4Hillary, an advocacy group claiming inclusiveness and progressive ideals as their central tenets and harshly criticizing perceived misogyny and homophobia of Sanders' male supporters.
Analysis
In May 2016, historian Joshua M. Zeitz suggested that "Bernie's Bros" might follow a pattern seen in the 1968 and 1980 elections in which Eugene McCarthy and Ted Kennedy won large numbers of votes from angry Democratic voters who, when their candidate failed to win the Party's nomination, switched and voted for the Republican in November.
Criticism
In an interview with Thom Hartmann, state Senator Nina Turner (A former surrogate for Senator Bernie Sanders) affirmed that the term drives her nuts, "I just think it is really hyped by the Clinton campaign. I mean, both candidates have people who really, really support them and sometimes in ways that are not nice. But it's the same thing, if people want to research this, it's the same thing that the Clinton campaign did to President, then Senator, Obama. I think they were called 'Obama Boys.' So it's really the same stuff recycled that there are a group of men out there that are rabid and they're sexist and they're really against Secretary Clinton."
In January 2016, "The Intercept" journalist Glenn Greenwald called the Bernie Bro narrative a "cheap campaign tactic" and a "journalistic disgrace." He pointed to the millions of women who supported Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton,"One has to be willing to belittle the views and erase the existence of a huge number of American women to wield this 'Bernie Bro' smear." He also pointed to the lack of evidence for the phenomenon outside of the typical vitriol associated with online forums.
He summarized the narrative's purpose as follows: "The goal is to inherently delegitimize all critics of Hillary Clinton by accusing them of, or at least associating them with, sexism, thus distracting attention away from Clinton’s policy views, funding, and political history and directing it toward the online behavior of anonymous, random, isolated people on the internet claiming to be Sanders supporters."
Nathan Wellman wrote in U.S. Uncut that users of the term "are essentially erasing the contributions of women and people of color to the Bernie Sanders campaign to propagate their own narrative, rendering them as invisible people. This is one of the oldest forms of violence perpetuated by white people of privilege."
Questions about allegations' validity
In February 2016, political scientists attempted to assess the reality of the Bernie Bro phenomenon by analyzing Twitter data, and concluded that the existence of male Sanders supporters attacking Clinton with sexist language is real, but the numbers are small and dwarfed by the number of conservatives and Trump supporters attacking Clinton with such language.
Women supporting Sanders, including Sarah Leonard, a senior editor at The Nation, object that the term on the grounds that it "diminishes" Sanders' many female supporters, falsely tarring the entire campaign with the misogyny of a few bad apples.