Longtime reader and correspondent Joel writes in,

“Hey Freddie, I’ve seen that you’ve written a little bit about the ‘Berniebro’ phenomenon on Twitter and on your blog, but I feel like you haven’t really made your definitive case, and I really need it. It’s one of those times where I am just pulling my hair out in frustration; this primary is so important and this election is so important and I just get Berniebros on my Facebook feed over and over again. Please talk me down from this ledge.”

The “bro” thing in general, not just BernieBros but the rapid ascent to dominance of “bro” as a catch all insult, is really about the triumph of the politics of association.

Politics has a lot of functions, obviously, and there are a lot of ways to engage politically, equally obviously. A traditional definition of politics might be that you have a (at least minimally) coherent political philosophy through which you understand the world, and then “issues” pop up, and you interpret those issues through the lens of your philosophy, and make informed decisions about what you support and why. And then you develop a strategy, taking into consideration the issue and your political philosophy and your assessment of the available means of persuasion. Then you go about and work politics, whether up from below or from establishment institutions on top or however you think you can get the job done.

Almost nobody believes that this idealized form is how politics actually works, of course, and for good reason. Politics has other functions to fulfill and they’re not all invalid. One of those is the establishment of a certain group identity. Although that version of politics comes in for a lot of abuse around here, it has its uses. While people can have thriving personal relationships across political differences, it’s understandable that people would want to define themselves, through politics, in a way that excludes those they find truly incompatible with their own beliefs. And taking pride in political identity can be useful for maintaining passion in a dispiriting system.

The problem, from my perspective, is that the politics of association — the ways in which politics becomes about establishing a given in-group identity, and more importantly, an out-group identity, threaten to become the only kind of politics, in general and especially among progressives. I’ve written a lot about this and I don’t want to belabor the point. Suffice is to say that the tactic involves spreading a particular political belief through associating it with a social or cultural group people want to be a part of, and that this tactic has become inescapable in the past decade or so. It’s no coincidence that this has occurred along with the rise of social media, as the lines between the social space and the political space have blurred considerably in those forums. Again, I should point out that this isn’t an entirely bad thing. These tactics have proven to be remarkably effective at, for example, spreading a particular vocabulary. Look at the rise of the language of academic feminism. I don’t think people realize how quickly that language has taken over progressive politics and media circles. Go back in time even ten years ago and a lot of the language would be just unrecognizable to the people then. And that’s in a world where the humanities are often treated as a joke. But there are deep problems with this situation, too.

What does this have to do with “bro”? I think “bro” is the purest distillation of this associative function of politics, and that the only meaningful definition of “bro” in this sense is “person from the outgroup,” “person who I can treat as ridiculous or irrelevant without argument.”

Many people have talked recently about the slippery definition of the term “bro.” Robinson Meyer, the coiner of the BernieBro term, has argued repeatedly that women can be bros, and so can people of color, and so on, even while the archetypal bro is a white dude. (In a backwards cap.) Or, as someone on Twitter put it recently, “a white dude isn’t necessarily, you know, a WHITE DUDE.” In many ways, bro is similar to the term “hipster,” which can mean, depending on your immediate need, both the ultra put-together dandy in a three piece suit and boutineer and, somehow, the dirty bearded lumberjack. In both the bro and the hipster, what matters is not any particular denotative quality but the capacity for immediate and existential rejection from the in-group. Indeed, the boundaries of these terms have to be so vague, because they exist only to perform this particular social function. Meyer has protested, fairly I suppose, that his term has undergone semantic drift, but then of course it did; people were only ever interested in it for its capacity to exclude, ridicule, and dismiss.

For good or for bad (and you can guess how I’d adjudicate that), progressive politics have adopted cruelty as a core function. Those who are deemed politically unclean — often, I will fully admit, for very good reason, as the world is full of people with shitty opinions that are naturally offensive — are widely believed to be worthy targets of mass character assassination, subject to petty personal insults and existential moral denunciations. I find that so banal a statement of reality I’m not sure anyone could deny that it happens with a straight face. Whether it’s good or bad for us, in any sense, I set aside for now. But one way or the other, bro is just one facet of the presumption that achieving social justice involves nominating some people for the most powerful social shunnings the online world is capable of. The bro is the one who comes pre-shunned; his ridiculousness is understood as part of the shared social fabric of the in-group.

It’s remarkable, on social media, how many of the insults and attacks boil down to more-or-less naked statements of, “I am a member in good standing of this group, and you aren’t, and my group has agreed on your irrelevance and your lack of value.”

What’s the problem, then, if we’re not interested in adjudicating whether this behavior is fair or unfair in a moral sense? The problem with associative politics writ large is that they work only on those who are already predisposed to care about the approval of the given in-group. I am far from the first person to note that the really brutal political fights waged online are internecine, between people who largely share political beliefs and backgrounds. That’s hardly only an online phenomenon, of course, but on Twitter it’s incredibly stark, with people who share 95% of the same beliefs endless lobbing accusations of racism at each other while people with Confederate flags for their user icons go unmolested. That’s not hard to understand once you recognize that the basic tactic of in-group expulsion simply has no force with those who don’t want to be in that in-group. Politics has traditionally been about getting unalike people to come together for a common political purpose. That’s not just idealism, but also brute pragmatism: to win in democracy, political coalitions need to be big and inclusive. But if your only tactic is to entice people to your group by letting them know they’ll be included, you’re restricting yourself to those who could see intrinsic value in that inclusion. Which makes your analysis of your political power subject to the narcissism of your group identity.

These conditions, taken to a certain extreme, mean that eventually you simply lose the ability to communicate with other human beings from outside of your in-group. After all, for a large majority of the people who use the term, bro is a cherished term of endearment. This is part of the point of using the term performatively: when you use bro in a way that indicates that you see bros as inherently ridiculous, you are necessarily distinguishing yourself from most people who use it affectionately. You assert your in-group identity and deny it to others. The problem is that there’s a whole lot more of them than you. The in-group appeal is inherently limiting. I’ve been as frustrated as you have been with this month-long avalanche of BernieBro pieces, but I’m also unsure why Clinton supporters are so sure this is a winner for them. People like bros. Bros are relatable, they’re laid back, they’re funny, in the eyes of many. Sorry, Twitter, but that’s the case.

Indeed: by so tying arguments about sexism and privilege to a term that is innocuous to the (much larger) out group, bro-obsessed progressive types risk trivializing those complaints, playing directly into the hands of many people who see feminism in distorted, caricatured terms. What better fits the model of feminism’s critics, after all, than to see feminism as a discourse of offense-seeking and hectoring, attacking regular dudes who just want to have a good time? This is the fear that Amber Frost first articulated in her brilliant essay “Bro Bash,” which as time has gone on I’ve come to see as one of the most essential and prescient pieces of the last several years. Frost understood, before any of this primary season had played out, that what you seek to trivialize might end up trivializing you.

I’m not sure where the next step of this sad saga takes us. Many have tied this issue to the incipient war between identitarian neoliberalism and the socialist left, with the HRC campaign an innovative adopter of the tactic of playing elite diversity politics against ground-up economic justice. Perhaps that’s so. Now, the debate has inevitably spilled out into the actual world, with the media’s obsessive focus on trivial aspects of elite post-collegiate social practice having made a non-story into a story. Whether this actually hurts the Sanders campaign in its contest with the establishment candidate remains to be seen, but I do think that this whole story helps crystallize this slow sad drift, the elite media’s increasing inability to understand the world as it appears to most Americans, to see the out-group from a perspective other than that of the in-group. I say this, more or less, as a member of the in-group.

And I will say, for the thousandth time, that anyone truly committed to the causes of justice and equality must work to rescue those causes from the oroubourous of associative politics, to return to the solid foundation of class solidarity between people who share only the recognition of their mutual economic interest. To get there, you have to make your case, to assume that your values can’t be spread simply through reference to your identity but by marshaling evidence and engaging on the plane of ideas.