We can't afford to ignore what Rashida Tlaib booing Hillary Clinton means for the 2020 election

We have failed to learn the hardest lessons of 2016

On Friday night, Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan led the crowd in a chant of boos as she participated in a Bernie Sanders event in Iowa, just days before the Iowa caucus. Who were those boos directed at? Not Trump, who, that very same day, was granted a full pass from Republican senators, who voted to call no witnesses in his impeachment trial. No, Rep. Tlaib's self-designated Enemy Number One was former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, 2016 nominee from the Democratic Party and winner of over 65,000,000 votes in that year's general election.

The long-simmering feud between Sanders supporters and former Clinton supporters is frothing over. A few weeks ago, Emerson College released a poll stating that only 53 per cent of Bernie Sanders supporters were committed to voting for the Democratic candidate regardless of who that candidate was (as compared to 90 per cent of Warren supporters).

Sanders' brand of populism, which has ignited a notably assertive white male rage, feels a whole lot like Trump's. In 2016, it was Trump who had cornered the market on booing. It wasn't that long ago that "Lock Her Up" was the phrase of the moment, a pulsing, crowd-baiting attempt to pin criminal acts on a fellow political candidate. If we believed that the left was above such immature rollicking, Sanders’ coterie is here to prove us wrong. Worried about Russian divisiveness? Why not worry about the threat in our very own backyard, the Democratic members (Ilhan Omar laughed at Tlaib's boos, rather than dismiss them as inappropriate) reducing the party to pettiness?

Tlaib has since issued an apology, and she was right to own up. “In this instance, I allowed my disappointment with Secretary Clinton's latest comments about Senator Sanders and his supporters get the best of me,” she said by statement. “You all, my sisters-in-service on stage, and our movement deserve better." And while Tlaib’s response was appropriate, the fact that she felt compelled to boo from the outset speaks to the nature of populism, and its dark underbelly.

The rabble-rousing identity of this brand of populism, with its appeal to our lesser angels, is particularly ripe for such devolution. It's not Sanders or his good ideas that are the problem — though he certainly didn't come out against the Congresswoman's ridiculous chant, and his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, publicly backed Tlaib on Saturday morning. No, the problem is the idea that only disenfranchised, blue-collar (and largely white) people deserve to have an opinion about the America we share. It’s the idea that women who support female candidates with progressive views are solely on board because of “identity politics” — a buzz term used to make women feel bad about our desire for equal representation. It’s the idea that only one person represents the best interests of a nation, when the truth of politics is far murkier than this type of deus ex machina.

There are plenty of Americans who voted for Secretary Clinton, plenty of voters who believed that the former Senator’s record — in which she voted in tandem with Senator Sanders over 90 per cent of the time — was an indication of how she would capably perform in the presidency. There are plenty of Americans, too, who believe that discourse can exist between people who share the same system of values but differ on the road to enacting those values as policy.

Those Americans are nowhere to be seen in the shuffle of populism, with its sweeping language, broad view, and push toward conflict. Where Trump represented the 2016 call for the masses to rise up, that arena is now owned by Senator Sanders, who has allowed the train to leave the station unchecked, millions of angry followers erupting into the political air with grievances to settle.

Rashida Tlaib's boos are a too-familiar reminder that populism carries with it the throb of anger that is effective in its exclusiveness. It disenfranchises the very people it is meant to bring together. It's not about policy. It's about who yells the loudest. It’s about the micro-aggressions we hold close to us rather than the macro-considerations we should be looking at when we seek to change the world.

No candidate is perfect, and some candidates have far better ideas than others. But the angry mob — of which Rashida Tlaib allowed herself, briefly, to be a part — indicates that although, four years ago, we failed to connect, we failed to listen to one another, and we failed to see the greater good as fundamental to a functional democracy, we never really learned the lesson that failure should have taught us.