So Long, Bernie, and Thanks for the Memes
Meme courtesy of the author.
Senator Bernie Sanders, currently 78 years old, is objectively past his physical prime. And yet for the entirety of his two presidential runs, content about “Hot Bernie Sanders” has permeated the internet. Consider: this tweet with photos of young Bernie Sanders and the caption “not to be strange but young bernie sanders was poppin,” this TikTok of vintage Sanders photos set to smooth jazz, and “Hot Bernie Sanders” in sticker form. The joke has become so extensive that there are now tweets about the universality of the internet’s attraction to young Sanders.
By virtue of being on the internet, “Hot Bernie Sanders” is a term shared predominantly among young people. This age cohort tracks with Sanders’ established demographic support while he was running for president. During the 2016 primary election, Sanders consistently outperformed Hillary Clinton among young voters, and then in the 2020 primary, Sanders captured 60% of voters in the 18-29 age bracket on Super Tuesday.
This isn’t to say there is any kind of causal relationship between “Hot Bernie Sanders” as a meme and Sanders’ popularity among young people. Young people have rallied for Sanders because of his policy plans. Rather, the “Hot Bernie Sanders” meme speaks to the ways in which young people have decided to express their support, and how they will continue to do so even though Sanders himself has left the 2020 presidential race. While backing a candidate for his revolutionary politics, the soon-to-be largest voting bloc in the American electorate has affirmed their desire for someone who does not completely eschew personality politics. Social media has allowed Sanders supporters to construct an online presence for Sanders that embodies the many traits that he is proudly not—good-looking, trendy, effusive.
In 2020, campaign storytelling inevitably must involve the internet. Most successful politicians today can boast some level of digital fluency. President Trump has long been particularly adept at Twitter. Just as often, though, elderly politicians armed with a plethora of media-savvy staffers struggle to pull off a digital presence that feels authentic. Hillary Clinton in 2016 historically met this challenge with mixed success: from the hot sauce scandal to the #notmyabuela social media campaign to her attempt to utilize Pokémon GO as a voter outreach method. More recently, Mike Bloomberg paid Instagram influencers to post pro-Bloomberg memes that actually poked fun at his age. Young people weren’t amused.
Somehow, Sanders has never fallen into this trap. His digital success seems a bit remarkable considering he is not only 78 years old, but also the oldest candidate running for president in 2020 and would have been the oldest president had he been elected. Logically, his age difference from young people would likely cause a struggle to translate his political persona into any kind of authentic internet presence. Instead, he has long benefitted from a consistent digital meme-ability from supporters.
Consider the infamous Bernie supporter—the Bernie Bro, who is often presumed to exist primarily online as a kind of “keyboard warrior.” Whether substantial in numbers or far over-exaggerated, Bernie Bros have often elicited enough commentary and reporting to occupy a significant amount of discourse about Sanders’ campaign. The very idea that Sanders benefits from what has been alluded to as a kind of underground “army” of supporters certainly verifies his unique online following. Crucially, Sanders has consistently condemned the actions of Bernie Bros with whom he has disagreed and worked to distinguish their behavior as separate from his official campaign.
Just as Bernie Bros have helped shape Sander’s online reputation, Sanders’ supporters create his digital presence, sometimes through inspiration from actual events and sometimes organically. Several iterations of memes were popularized over the course of Sanders’ two presidential campaigns. In 2016, inspired by a spare flyer titled “Bernie or Hillary?” that compared the candidates’ platforms, the internet appropriated the template for a wide variety of inane pop culture topics intended to highlight Sanders’ nuance in comparison to Clinton’s simplistic pandering.
On Radiohead’s music, Sanders gives a pointed, educated opinion: “Ok Computer is one of the defining albums of the ‘90s and the decision to release Kid A immediately after will go down as one of the most important moments in rock history.” Clinton, instead, just points to the band’s most widely known song: “I love Creep.”
This meme formula was repeated on subjects ranging from Fight Club to Mexican food. The best evidence of the “Bernie or Hillary?” meme’s success is perhaps its reemergence during the 2020 election as “Bernie or Biden?”
In both cases, the implicit message remains the same: Sanders gets it, and the other candidate does not. To take it further, Sanders agrees with you not only politically, but also on every other niche cultural debate. Sanders actually cares about those niche cultural debates, while candidates like Biden or Clinton are manufacturing widely-held opinions simply for popularity.
It is a difficult tightrope to walk: visibly trying too hard to be cool makes candidates look like a fraud. But demonstrating genuine interest in even the small arguments that supporters care about is a level of effort we don’t expect anyone running for president to demonstrate. So when voters see it—even in faux forms—they eagerly reward it. They know Sanders doesn’t have the time to debate Radiohead, so they do it for him, and they give him the opinions they would like to believe he espouses.
We could also look to the most current Sanders meme-ology, which managed to transform a routine plea for campaign donations into a wide variety of more specific humorous phrases. “I am once again asking for your financial support,” Sanders says in an official video, which then became “I am once again asking for gum,” to jokes about unruly customers and tech-challenged grandparents. In meme form, though, the implication seems to be that we are all asking for something, really. It is hard to know whether whoever started the meme intended for it to make Sanders look good, but the rhetorical effect of it has, nonetheless, normalized the usually irritating practice of political candidates asking their supporters for money.
By the standards of a presidential candidate, though, Sanders is unusually—and perhaps proudly—out of touch. This is an important distinction to note because while his campaign messaging is robustly of-the-moment, he himself is not. How can this be? Sanders partners with Cardi B to discuss the minimum wage, organizes Iowa caucus rallies that resemble Coachella, and receives a wide variety of celebrity endorsements.
These are all moves we might expect from someone winning the youth vote. As Sanders does this, though, he makes it clear that these partnerships are based on policy agreements rather than any kind of fanship for the artists. He mostly listens to classical music, so when asked about Ariana Grande’s endorsement of him, he doesn’t say he loves “thank u, next”—instead, he praises her voter registration efforts.
Sanders positions his pop-cultural relevance not as indicative of his taste, but of his coalition-building. In this way, unlike Clinton and Bloomberg, he could never be accused of trying too hard. But as we know, he also never had to try as hard as them to begin with; his supporters have already labored to produce content that insinuates Sanders has great taste. So now he can focus on substance, which voters like to see even more than cultural pandering.
On a broader scale, though, Sanders is also on-the-record in his belief that politics ought not to be about empty manners. Sanders’ supposed charisma, or even interpersonal kindness, is not an established part of his message: staffers in interviews have admitted he is notoriously unemotional. This is not a disputed aspect of his political career. Fellow members of Congress in 1991 described him as “holier-than-thou,” and noted he “alienates” his potential allies and “screams and hollers.” Once, at a campaign event, Sanders told a crying baby to “keep it down.” Like many politicians, he has a documented history of angry outbursts and moodiness towards campaign staff. Sanders is not pretending to be a nice guy, just as he is not pretending to be a hip one—and yet, the memes his supporters create suggest they still believe he should be both of these things.
In early 2016, a lightning-in-a-bottle moment occurred when a small bird happened to land on Sanders’ podium during a huge rally. Unlike any wide variety of good-press interactions, it was hard to imagine how such a moment could have been orchestrated by staffers. The optics, then, were clear: here was a candidate who was so calm, so still, so approachable, that even a small bird felt confident invading his personal space while in a cacophonous gym. Of course, nothing about Sanders’ documented personality and presence suggest these traits. But his supporters loved it, and the proliferation of memes and illustrations cemented this version of Sanders online.
Sanders’ immense internet following has sculpted a digital persona of him that is, if not exactly nice, then certainly palatable. Through memes, Sanders becomes cultured, funny, formerly hot. He becomes somebody you would have drunk-texted in college. The inherently sly tone of social media suggests that these people are in on the joke; they know, for example, that there is something at least a little bit funny about lusting over young Sanders. But the impulse to create content about Sanders persists, even as other politicians struggle to create their own.
In fact, while still in the race, Sanders provoked an unrivaled fierceness among followers: polls show his voters consistently ranked their support as more decided than those of any other candidate. Sanders supporters were less likely to change their minds. In this way, there is a permanence to their worship, which means that even though Sanders will not be president, the qualities his supporters respect him for—real or memeified—might not be going anywhere. In a once extensive field of competitors, Sanders also was the very last Democratic candidate to clear the way for now-inevitable nominee Joe Biden. His supporters have stuck around longer than any other candidate’s base. So where will they go next?
Sanders’ political strategy existed in opposition to many central tenets of the standard American electability politics, from his well-documented crabbiness to his gruff tone of voice to his inability to ever have a properly groomed head of hair. As the digital-native generations come to power, their memes suggest young people want a very particular type of revolution; a revolution still, but a revolution with a leader they think embodies a certain personability. That personability might not be the same traits their parents looked for an era ago, but they are traits all the same, and ones we should be paying attention to.
Caitlin McCormick is a staff writer at CPR and a junior at Barnard College studying History. She cares a lot about the New York Public Library, labor policy, and the astrological charts of presidential candidates. (Bernie Sanders is a Virgo.)