Who’s Horny for What in the 2020 Election?

If you think of national politics as broken beyond repair — and a lot of Americans surely see it that way these days — then it requires a pathologist’s eye to assess the corpse. It’s essential to identify the bullshit that ravaged our systems, because this bullshit is so common and casually accepted that it became invisible.

Where did we go wrong? And why, after making that mistake, did we commit to making it over and over, unto the current collapse?

Often this starts with prying into a word or phrase with contested meaning, or the ideological boilerplate surrounding a movement. Sometimes the organic jokes and memes of a moment project a deeper truth about how we’re processing a crisis of democracy.

In any case, there is hard interpretive work to be done: One has to pull a plausible narrative from the firehose spray of (dis)information while taking apart the narratives built on ambiguity.

Case in point: the Bernie Bro.

Too much has already been written of the so-called “Bernie Bros” and their noxious effect to both the Sanders campaign and the Democratic party. It’s just one facet of the media’s effort to make 2020 a sequel to 2016 — in this case, by bringing back some familiar antagonists. But we’ve yet to see a reporter account for the differences between these elections, and how Bernie’s movement has shifted and grown in that time. Instead, we see most current coverage of (and tweets about) Bernie Bros as a willful denial of that change.

Bernie, despite being counted out for months, is the frontrunner now, rather than the insurgent underdog. The establishment looks weak; its head is in the sand. If the Bernie Bros were once the strident, privileged young white men haranguing us to look at a leftist alternative to Hillary Clinton, then who are they today? Could the phrase still have any meaning apart from its signaling of a grudge? And have we always been wrong about Bernie’s supporters?

Media’s failure to grapple with the modern progressive movement is the tip of the iceberg. It’s a huge problem that 24/7 cable news demands pundits to fill airtime with gut feelings, existing preferences and both-sides bullshit with little regard for the narratives emerging right in front of them.

Thankfully, we can answer this kind of idle punditry with accounts of what’s happening in the trenches of the discourse — while always acknowledging that we, too, are limited in our ability to demystify the chaos.

Here, then, is a collection of dispatches from the latrines. These stories seek to isolate the id that drives politics in 2020. Put more bluntly, everyone’s horny for something. Maybe it’ll help us understand this hellscape a little better.

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Lots of Boomer dads seem horny for Amy Klobuchar — a hard-nosed, disciplinarian woman they want to take charge.

It’s much of the same reason people are so horny for Nancy Pelosi.

Americans are horny for the right to drink fizzy syrup until they die, which spells bad news for Small Soda Mike.

What can explain the awful attempts to “go viral” that Democratic candidates can’t seem to avoid? To answer that, we have to go back to 2008, when online content creators got legitimately horny for Obama. That’s magic you can’t replicate in a lab — but Hillary’s camp tried to, anyway, with a strange video where she and Bill maybe get whacked a la The Sopranos. This was long before her uncanny “chillin’ in Cedar Rapids” Snapchat.

Then there’s Pete Buttigieg, among the stiffest candidates in the race, a millennial so out-of-touch with his own generation he found a lane courting our sworn enemies: the ruling elite who locked so many of us in massive debt, meager housing and unstable employment.

Pete is nakedly horny for power, and the meme-fluent teens on TikTok can see right through his attempts at small-town heartland charm.

Conservatives, centrists, media pundits and many white liberals, probably scared of having their fortunes taxed, are horny for gotcha culture — anything to admit they have no problem with a billionaire with a racist past buying his way into contention for 2020.

Others are just nakedly horny for bloodshed, as easy as it may be to see its disastrous end.

Speaking of Trump’s dick, we all know what he’s horny for: big boys. (Oh, and Bloodsport.)

Over in leftist thirst, Young Bernie is the podcast dude you wish your boyfriend actually resembled.

Meanwhile, what is Bernie himself horny for? Your $2.70. And maybe a little more change.

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Cooper Fleishman

Cooper Fleishman is MEL’s director of news and audience, overseeing the Daily desk, social media, traffic growth and editorial product/engineering. He came from Mic, where he launched The Future Is Now, a channel about tech and digital culture, and Multiplayer, a gaming vertical focused on diversity and representation in geek culture. In a previous life, he was New York bureau chief at the Daily Dot, a copy editor for Us Weekly, a dog food salesman, a T-shirt silk-screener and an ’80s cover band drummer. He spent 21 years in Ohio, which explains a lot.

Miles Klee

Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’