The Night I Punched A Hippie
It Was Not My Finest Moment, But Gives A Look At Where Leftists Went Wrong
You’ve probably heard the phrase “hippie punching.”
It’s the idea that for Democrats to appeal to moderate voters, they must come down harshly – though not necessarily violently – against the far left. The term dates back to the Vietnam War Era, when “hippies,” as the left-wingers of the time were called, were often targets of ridicule and violence by blue-collar labor-minded workers who were also part of the Democratic coalition. Hippies were often literally punched, and the country, made uncomfortable by hippie political culture, cheered it on.
Today, for the most part, no one advocates for punching anyone, but “hippie punching” has entered the political lexicon as slang, meaning Democrats should disown or try to clamp down on far-left reactionary rhetoric and actions because they can be anything from annoying to dangerous and drive voters to Republicans.
I perhaps took the term too literally on one winter day five years ago. I punched a “hippie.” I don’t condone it, and I’m not going to argue everyone should do it, although not apologizing for it got me banned from Twitter for a year. I’m telling this story now because I think the circumstances that led to me snapping that frigid evening in Brooklyn five years ago this week is a pretty good cautionary tale about how the political momentum progressive appeared to have in the late 2010s unraveled quickly around the same time I threw a fist.
I also encountered Bernie supporters in 2016. One person, a friend of an elementary school classmate I had recently reconnected with, followed me from bar to bar in Astoria right before the New York Democratic Primary that April and insisted I let him persuade me to vote for Bernie. When that didn’t work, he found me on Facebook and commented on all my posts until I blocked him. While this behavior was creepy and annoying, I at least admired his persistence, and it never got personal.
Four years later, I experienced the same type of creepy persistence, except this time, it turned ugly.
Our story begins at a coffee shop in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Thursday, January 23, 2020, a clear, crisp winter day. Although it was a Thursday, I did what I usually did on Wednesdays before the pandemic: work and dinner with my partner. My routine shifted to Thursday because I had seen Jeff Daniels in To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway the previous day with my aunt.
After my last showing, I went to Swallow Cafe and waited for my partner, who worked in Midtown, to meet me there to go to dinner and perhaps do some shopping before heading home to his apartment in the South Bronx. I was familiar with Swallow Cafe because I regularly attended writers’ meetups there, so I opted to sit at the long farmhouse table that runs up the center of the cafe. I went to the counter to get a tea, sat down, opened my laptop, and began writing.
I could feel eyes on me.
At the other end of the table, I noticed a young man, tall, with dark hair, wearing a brown jacket and an off-white shirt, with a serious look on his face glancing at me. After about 10 or 15 minutes, he slid down the table to sit across from me. I had thought he was looking to hit on me or something.
I supported Elizabeth Warren for president then and had a Warren sticker on my laptop. He commented on my sticker, and I affirmed that I was a Warren supporter. What he said next actually shocked me.
“I think that would be a big mistake to vote for her,” he said.
I sighed. I did not want to have this conversation. The guy slid a Bernie Sanders palm card across the table and told me to choose “the real progressive in the race.”
I confessed that what I had liked about Warren was her style, not necessarily her politics, because nothing either she or Bernie wanted to do – Medicare For All, free college – would ever happen since, at that point, Republicans were heavy favorites to retain the Senate in 2020, and even in the unlikely event Democrats won it (which they did), it would be by a bare majority relying on conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He got increasingly irritated and said I was “being naive” about the type of change Bernie would bring to the country, suggesting that a Bernie Sanders nomination would lead to a “nationwide movement” that would win Senate seats in places like Texas and Indiana – the latter of which wasn’t even having a Senate contest that year. Again, I thanked him but said that I wouldn’t be voting for Bernie and texted one of my friends to tell him “it was happening again,” referring to my 2016 experience with a Bernie supporter.
Unlike in 2016, however, this guy’s pleas grew increasingly desperate.
“Bernie is the only one who could beat Trump.”
“Bernie can win Trump supporters.”
“You can’t nominate anyone else; they don’t have the energy to match Trump’s.”
And my personal favorite, which got me angry.
“Can you image how great it will be when Bernie supporters take the energy they have fighting the establishment and turn it on Trump?”
My response to him was, “Why aren’t you doing that already?”
Realizing I couldn’t relax, I finished my tea, closed my laptop, and left the coffee house, walking a block to my car on Grattan Street and Morgan Avenue. It was about 7 p.m. and dark, and the streets were pretty deserted except for some people walking from the L train a block away. I got only about 500 feet down Grattan Street before I heard his voice behind me again.
“I don’t think you understand how important it is that Bernie win this primary,” he said.
I turned around, outraged that he was following me, and told him how creepy it was and asked him to leave me alone.
“If you’re trying to get someone to vote for Bernie, this is absolutely not the way to do it,” I said, explaining that I was heading to meet my partner.
That must’ve triggered him into one last argument.
“Partner? You have a boyfriend?” he asked. “Well, if you care about him, you have no choice except to vote for Bernie.”
I gave him a chance to explain this bizarre argument. I wish I hadn’t.
He explained that if Bernie doesn’t win the primary, he and other Bernie supporters will sit out the election, and Trump would win reelection, and that would mean people like me would be responsible for his reelection and the horrors he would deploy on the LGBTQ community.
With a smug look, he said I should consider “the price to pay” if I didn’t pick Bernie in the primary and whether I could live with myself.
“I HIGHLY SUGGEST YOU GET OVER WHATEVER PROBLEMS YOU HAVE WITH BERNIE AND VOTE FOR HIM. YOUR PARTNER’S LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT.”
Those words have been burned into my brain for five years.
I’ve never had a short temper, but I’m like a bomb that is hard to detonate but can do catastrophic damage when I do. This was one of those times when I was pushed to the brink. Being told by someone with progressive flair on his satchel and a self-professed dedication to progressive causes supporting a campaign running on the motto “fight for someone you don’t know” that I should do what he wanted or I’d be responsible for my partner’s oppression or death was about all I could stand from this kid.
The next thing I knew, I saw his face slam into a beige brick wall outside a loading dock. At first, I didn’t realize I had hit him. I don’t think I’ve punched anyone since junior high school. But when I saw him get up, cupping his face and looking at me with shocked eyes, I knew I had to leave. I told him, “fuck off,” and sternly walked down Grattan Street toward my car. He said something, but I can’t remember what.
My partner was not too thrilled when I told him later what had happened, and I was sleepless for several days, worrying that I might be arrested or prosecuted for assault, but that never did happen, and I never saw the kid again. As the COVID-19 Pandemic started only a few weeks later, I didn’t return to Swallow Cafe again until 2022.
I often wonder, especially since November, where that kid is now and the likelihood that his level of bitterness over being unable to persuade me, and probably others, into voting for Bernie made him more sympathetic to Trump.
For years, the incident has occupied a space in my mind. I often wonder, especially since November, where that kid is now and the likelihood that his level of bitterness over being unable to persuade me, and probably others, into voting for Bernie made him more sympathetic to Trump. How had it come to that? How did we get to the point where a Bernie supporter felt he had to make threats to win votes?
Years before Bernie Sanders first announced a run for President of the United States in 2015, I believed a subset of people on the political left were waiting for their “messiah,” someone who would ride a white horse to the White House and unite all the long-time working-class factions who had been at odds with each other. This was the concept of the 99% dynamic during Occupy Wall Street – the working class represents most of America. Someone will come with a progressive agenda and unite the 99% against the 1% – the oligarchy. It was also delusional because it does not consider social and cultural divides within that 99% that can never be bridged outside of some massive economic or social shock akin to the Great Depression1.
Bernie Sanders was supposed to be the guy who led the working-class renaissance and buried both conservatism and neoliberalism in America. His supporters believed it throughout his campaigns, and their worldview and sanity relied on it being the truth. They could not face a world where he wasn’t. Even at the early signs that his campaign wasn’t catching fire, supporters would dismiss it, saying, “People will like him once they get to know him,” but while his favorability ratings have typically been high, he was never able to convince people to elect him president.
That is why his supporters became tethered to the idea that the Democratic National Committee sabotaged his 2016 campaign. 2020 would be their year. It was a much easier-to-stomach explanation than “We are wrong; working-class people just don’t want his vision or ours.” It didn’t manifest in 2020 either. Bernie ran on a campaign of “Fight for someone you don’t know,” and America…didn’t. This was not the America they thought they knew.
This realization explains the behavior of the guy who taunted me five years ago. Desperate, angry, and confused, Bernie supporters could no longer accept “no” for an answer. If he didn’t win this time, he’d never win. It was their last chance.
It explains the Bernie to MAGA pipeline we have seen – people like this guy who harassed me growing increasingly angry and unhinged that the movement they expected to form wasn’t forming, blaming marginalized groups, especially black voters who opposed Bernie in large numbers, for its failure.
If it were up to the heterosexual cisgender white men in the Democratic coalition, Bernie would’ve won, but it wasn’t. It’s no surprise that many of Bernie’s supporters grew so angry they started making veiled threats at members of marginalized groups and ultimately grew attracted to the “anti-woke manosphere” that is now the base of Trump’s coalition.
This is amazing. And while I never got to fisticuffs, I did get into loud arguments with many of the Bernie coalition (and the self professed Bernie Bros were the worst).
And indeed, we are seeing large swaths of that cohort make the relatively short hop to supporting MAGA and Trump. c.f. Ana Kasperian and Cenk at TYT among many others.
It all seem to be that they need to feel heard, and the MAGA influencers, are ready to stroke their fragile egos.
Great read but now there’s no need to punch anyone.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.