Life in Bernietopia

It was about a year ago, not long after Bernie Sanders announced he was running for president, that I saw the first Bernie bumper stickers in cars parked in driveways of the residential neighborhoods near where I live, here in East Portland.

"That didn't take long," I remember thinking at the time. It was obvious to me that although Bernie was probably still unknown to most people around here, that those stickers would be the first of many that would pop up over the coming months.

Things have played out pretty much as I figured since then. The light poles along East Burnside by the Laurelhurst theater, which I pass nearly every day, are still covered with four-color posters for nightclub shows, but in between them are the ones for various Sanders-related events. The posters are not a shrill cry for attention. They do not exhort people to vote for Bernie. Everyone is already on board with Bernie, after all. They are more like routine notifications of an ongoing movement in which everyone is assumed to be participating already.

Headline: Sanders leads in Oregon with 72.3%. This result is not surprising. The question all along was: would Bernie actually still be a viable candidate by the time the May 17 primary rolled around here in the Beaver State? I suspect it doesn't matter. He could endorse Hillary tomorrow and still receive this percentage of the vote, perhaps even more, out of sense of "endorsing what he stands for" going into the convention.

I would not be surprised if on a precinct level, the blocks I can see out my window as I type this are among the most solid for Bernie in the entire country.  There are places just as Democratic, perhaps, but few where Bernie would revered on the level of  a cult figure. All of this is exactly as I figured it would be.

What is surprising to me, however, is the level of anti-Hillary sentiment. I have yet to see anything against Trump, but last few the light poles were plastered with posters blaring "Why I'm not with Hillary."

A month ago, I was convicted of the idea that Bernie supporters would naturally migrate to supporting Hillary out of a sense that she was infinitely better than any Republican. Many certainly will still do, but I sense we have passed a tipping point, where, despite Bernie's own refusal to criticize Hillary in a way that might actually draw blood, the Sanders movement itself is now fueled by outright contempt of Hillary Clinton. For many in the Laurelhood, I think we have passed the point of no return.