What is the meaning, the mittenology of it all?
As with so much else related to this new administration, it’s too soon to tell. What follows are five possibilities.
1. The Mittens as Reserved Judgment
Much of the media focus has been on the mittens themselves: their 1970s cross-country ski anti-style. Their handmade-ness in a world of mass manufacturing. Their haphazardness and the fact that Bernie clearly didn’t spare a single brain cell deciding to wear them beyond “It’s cold. These are warm.”
Just as important, however, is the posture of the mitten-wearer: the slouch, the crossed arms, the physical isolation from the crowd. The effect is not of a person left out at a party but rather, let’s be honest, of a person who has no interest in joining.
At an event that was, above all, a show of cross-partisan unity, Bernie’s mittens stood in for everyone who has never been included in that elite-manufactured consensus.
It wasn’t a boycott of the occasion itself; nobody wanted Trump out more than Bernie. But it expressed an unequivocal reservation of judgment about what was coming. Those crossed arms were the mittens saying, “Let’s see what you actually do and then we can talk about unity.”
2. The Mittens as Warning
But it was more than that. There was also, if you look closely, a woolen warning. The world went nuts for Bernie’s sullen inauguration posture because he was keeping alive the hope that there is still moral opposition to concentrated power and money in the United States — at a time when we need it more than ever.
In that moment, Bernie’s crossed arms and sartorial dissonance seemed to be saying, “Do not cross us.” If, after all the hoopla, the Biden-Harris administration doesn’t deliver transformational action for a nation and a planet in agony, there will be consequences. And unlike during the Obama years, those consequences won’t take years — because the revolutionary spirit is already on the inside, and it’s wearing mittens.
3. The Mittens as the Conscience of Liberals
Bernie’s mittens have not only been an obsession among the senator’s base, those of us who had dearly hoped to see that slab of scratchy wool placed over a Bible earlier this week. They have also been a surprising hit among liberals — many of the same liberals who spent the primaries publicly gagging over the prospect of a President Sanders (so shouty, so pointy, so angry). And yet here they are forwarding mitten memes and sharing delightful stories about how the gloves were handmade by a teacher (crafty!) or that time Bernie lent them to a chilly health care worker (a “hand-warming” tale!).
What’s up with that? Why is Bernie the dangerous socialist suddenly everyone’s lovable grandpa? On one level, it’s simple enough: Even as chair of the Senate Budget Committee, Sanders is far less of a threat to them than he was as a presidential candidate running on a promise to redistribute wealth and take the profit motive out of health care. Put another way, for the elite of the Democratic Party, it’s easy to love Bernie when he’s redistributing handmade mittens — so long as he keeps his mitts off their donors’ billions.
In some ways, it’s even useful to tolerate a scruffy wing of the party precisely because the leadership is so cut off from its working class base. In that context, publicly embracing Bernie at this late date plays a role similar to the various pseudo-populist primary season stunts, like very publicly eating fried foods you hate or wearing regular people clothing.
by Naomi Klein, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Caroline Brehman/Pool/AP
