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So when I wrote that "Bernie Sanders Is Currently Winning the Democratic Primary Race, and I'll Prove It to You," I was offering a "minority report" of the Real: suggesting that something may actually have shifted in the Democratic race around March 15th. Illinois voted on that day, but so did North Carolina, a state thought to be unfriendly to Sanders which he somehow lost in only the mid-single digits in live voting, even as he was playing Clinton to essentially a tie in Missouri. Clinton's early voting lead of well over thirty points in Ohio disintegrated in live voting, where Clinton appears to have won in the high single-digits or very low double-digits.
The mainstream media said only, of the March 15th primaries, "Clinton goes five-for-five." I saw in the same data another possibility entirely. Another metanarrative. And as an experimental writer I wanted to write of, from, and for that metanarrative rather than any other then available for public use.
After I wrote my article, Sanders began winning the overwhelming majority of states. Clinton's unfavorables rose. Sanders continued getting massive crowds even though it'd become obvious that at least the pledged delegate math was absolutely dire. His general-election poll numbers against Donald Trump both nationally and state-by-state started to exceed those of Clinton with such a startling consistency that it's amazing the Clinton camp's all-too-simple "spring polling is meaningless" spin placated the corporate media into silence. The polls didn't fit their metanarrative, and as they had some -- albeit spotty and contradictory -- evidence suggesting spring polling isn't probative, they went with that explanation. And then they dropped that pretense the moment it seemed Clinton was the likely nominee and spring polling made for a good (and, more importantly, consistent-with-metanarrative) news story. And yet what they failed to realize was that Clinton and the DNC's (e.g. Howard Dean) view of super-delegates -- that it was all right for Clinton to accrue hundreds of them in 2015 because super-delegates don't cast their ballots based on the popular vote or the delegate count -- could in time be seen to undercut Clinton's narrative that, having failed to secure the 59 percent of pledged delegates needed to avoid recourse to the super-delegates, she should be given the nomination on July 25th anyway. And thus was the most surprising metanarrative of all born.
The master narrative employed by the mainstream media since early 2015 has been that Clinton is destined to finally get what she deserves: a general-election shot at the White House. The media is so steeped in this version of the Real that the fact that something entirely different from this is happening this election cycle has escaped them entirely. The minority report for this election, which I began writing on the day Donald Trump announced his candidacy, and I wrote for The Huffington Post an article entitled "Trump Is Serious: Why the Donald's Presidential Campaign Is More Than Just Entertainment", says the following: this is the first metamodern political campaign, and not only have all the old rules of politics gone out the window, so too have all the old modes of thinking about the Real.
The minority report for the 2016 presidential election says that we are in the midst of the end-times for the major political parties -- yes, both of them -- and that Sanders and Trump are the Angel and Devil (as it were) of the metamodern Garden of Eden whose lush overgrowth we now find ourselves surrounded by. I spent the fall writing about the Devil for The Huffington Post and Metamoderna -- Trump as a post-policy, post-truth, post-personality entity whose "angry optimism" so dynamically synchronizes with the mood of the nation that voting for it means voting for one's own self-contradictory macro-feelings more so than a candidate, making Trump in a certain sense unbeatable -- and I've now spent three months writing about the better angels of our newly metamodern nature. I'm thrilled to say that the latter writings, the ones about Bernie Sanders, have been infinitely more popular than the former.
The old journalism is dead because the Real as it constructs it no longer coincides with the Real as Millennials either experience it or (far more importantly) can imagine it. It speaks only to and into the past; the language it speaks in is deconstructive, but on a landscape so already deconstructed that every word it pumps into the ether is another kick to a dead horse; it speaks from a form of power -- temporal, monetary, geopolitical -- that won't have currency in the decades to come. The chief currency today is of course virtual, and it's attention. Not the cynical breed of attention we associate with the vocal ministrations of a carnival barker -- though this is the future Trump would sell us if he could -- but the attention to multi-dimensional narrative that actually creates possibility from impossibility. And that's the only means of production Sanders is hoping his movement will come to control. Sandersism isn't dying out, and won't die out, because it is born not of so-last-century hash-taggable philosophies like #FeeltheMath or even the impotent rage of, say, #NeverHillary, but a commitment to turning the feeling that there are other realities out there than the ones we're being exposed to into a way of life and not just a slogan.
So #FeeltheBern has nothing, finally, to do with Bernie Sanders.
What it means for the only generation that will matter in just a few short decades -- Generation Y, (though of course even the term itself is a monstrosity born of the now-fully-past) -- is that a journalism that simply instantiates the metanarrative of least resistance, and looks for whatever sequencing of phenomena would suggest the most synchronicity with the past (and present), is no longer palatable to the overwhelming majority of young people in this country. My present metanarrative for the 2016 presidential election is no more true or false, in the long-term, than the other ones now available, but it constructs something new rather than rehashing something old -- and therefore has a special power that will continue to cause consternation to major media institutions and social media trolls the nation over. I'm told the Clinton folks don't like it much, either.
Why? Because Bernie Sanders has won this election, and Hillary Clinton is only a ghost silently mouthing out the final lines of a play we've all seen before and an ever-increasing number of us no longer feel much need to return to. What Sanders offers, instead, is not the empty and passing affections produced by insubstantial rhetoric, but a robust and abiding love of possibility that loves the possible enough to go searching hopefully and without expectation in the only place that will finally matter to our grandkids -- the wide-open, still-unwritten spaces that lie beyond it.
Seth Abramson is an Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire and the Series Editor for Best American Experimental Writing (Wesleyan University Press). He has been writing about metamodernism for a variety of publications, including Indiewire and Metamoderna, since 2014, and has been writing and publishing metamodern poetry since the summer of 2013. His most recent books of metamodern literary art are Metamericana and DATA, published by BlazeVOX.
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