I think she's reasonably questioning to what degree that lack of popularity was constructed by the media hammering certain narratives (like the Bernie Bros narrative) that were later shown to be mostly false.
The point of her article is that narratives in the online world can be generated by a tiny number of people, but can then seem to represent a majority view, come to shape the majority view and create self-fulfilling prophecies.
>...the DNC, did their best to sideline his campaign, possibly even with some hanky-panky in the SC and Super Tuesday elections. The "Bernie Bros" narrative is perhaps part of that, but just as a Red Herring....
I don't disagree that the mainstream media may have hurt him(though I'm not convinced they did). I'm mainly disagreeing that anything bad happened during the primary process with sc and super tuesday.
In a two-party system, massive clout accrues to people who are in the game for the longest time. Offices, lobbyists, donors, name recognition. Prior to the advances of the modern medicine, natural aging would push back against this trend. But now we are seeing ever more old people in positions of power.
It is somewhat better in Europe (Sunak and Macron are relatively young, so is Zelensky), but America seems to be very susceptible to that - not just in politics, in business, too (the average age of Fortune 500 CEOs increased a lot since 2000).
Something else has changed.
Listen to how ridiculous this sounds. He was so “unpopular“ that the moderates needed to circle the wagons against him in order to make him lose.
The idea that Bernie's loss is because he "wasn't that popular" withers under the fact that Biden won the election. Biden wasn't even popular among Democratic Party insiders, they just 1) had no leverage to make him stop his campaign, and 2) their preferred candidates like Harris and Buttigieg were far more repulsive to the public than Biden.
The fairness of voting, auctions, etc. wither under collusion.
The reason Biden wasn't popular among insiders is that they didn't think he could win. People like Obama specifically declined to endorse anyone until the winner was clear so that he wouldn't bias the outcomes and hurt their chances in the general. They fell in line when they saw Biden win the primaries.
Bernie losing could be explained by him simply not being popular. Trump was in a similar position, but trashed the Republican primaries because he was genuinely popular.
If you think the idea that politicians were colluding with each other (or cooperating for a more neutral word) is conspiratorial then you should just be disqualified from this conversation.
Not to mention that his cohort of rabid online supporters were as insufferable as those supporting the orange man; thus giving his campaign a similar kool aid drinking cult vibe.
As far as the talk about other candidates forming a coalition against him … that whole line of argument is pretty laughable. This is politics. Success in politics is achieved by building coalitions among constituencies and their representatives to advance policy.
If Bernie were such an effective politician then why was he unable to get someone else to stay in the primary to split the establishment vote?