970: Weekend Like Bernie
Discipline!
It’s going to be 85 degrees in Los Angeles this weekend, and things feel like they could boil over.
So who do we turn to in this moment of potential conflagration?
Bernie Sanders.
An 83 year old socialist isn’t my obvious pick in a moment of crisis, but two trustworthy sources have pointed to him in recent days. Both pointed to the same surprising word Sanders used: discipline.
He used the word “disciplined” twice in four days. That didn’t seem like his normal verbiage.
Twitter’s search function confirmed the hunch: Bernie has tweeted 22,000 times, but until last week had only used the word “Disciplined” once.1
praised Bernie for use of “Disciplined” focusing on the tangible impact of the GOP’s big bad bills.But the King tweet is just as relevant.
Stanford professor Robb Willer, Director of the Polarization and Social Change Lab had a powerful thread showing how “Bernie is well aligned with the social science literature in this take. There's good reason "non-violent discipline" is core to activist training.”
Willer cited a range of research, from Why Civil Resistance Works by Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan to research from Princeton Professor Omar Wasow (that got David Shor briefly cancelled), to research from his Stanford lab, Does Violent Protest Backfire? Testing a Theory of Public Reactions to Activist Violence which found that “highly controlled survey experiments show violent protest generally backfires in effects on public opinion”.
IYCMI,
and Willer discussed The Way Out of toxic polarization on this episode of The Depolarizers last year.The Depolarizers: The Way Out
Find this episode on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts!
We got a ton of new subscribers last week after WelcomeFest, so two reminders:
👉 Subscribe to The Depolarizers wherever you get your podcasts
👉 Groups Chat is WelcomeStack’s daily newsletter for partners building the stuff Democrats need to win. Get it daily by becoming a paid subscriber—or just reply to this email with a note.
Oh, and about the 970 in the Groups Chat subject line. It is the number of days until the first presidential primary of 2028.
The countdown reminds us to number our days, and to frame our work in the context of an event distant enough to dream of something better, but close enough to work tangibly toward it.
And if Bernie can adopt discipline in his 80s, maybe the whole party can. At least for this weekend.
970 days to go!
Bernie used “Disciplined” in the final days of the 2020 general election in a tweet that reads like it was drafted by someone else during his time as a Biden surrogate