I won't defend everything Bernie's campaign said in the last month or two, but the DNC definitely did/does deserve flak for its complacency and taking the left for granted while pandering to the center right and donors over the years. You can argue that it's necessary to win (though I would counter that outside of the presidency, they aren't doing a good job at winning either), but I don't like the attempts to stifle criticism of "our side." Especially when it's equated to support for the Orange fascist. Bernie didn't create this disaffection with the DNC, it was already there and he tapped into it.
Also, that attitude in the bolded part, which I saw a lot of in the primary ("he's not even a real democrat"), just seems weird/creepy/off-putting to me. Not a fan of that tribalism shit.
How can you be dissatisfied with something you have had zero history being interested in or involved in?
The group of voters who followed Sanders followed him because they, for some reason, think that nothing matters and their votes don't matter and the only solution to anything is what ever isn't being done now. They don't want actual progress, they don't want to know how our government actually works, they just want disruption of the current system and basically a revolution to get everything they think is a good idea into a working state.
People forget that our parties are already basically coalitions of different ideas and views of things. "Why don't we have a more liberal party!?" I hear my Facebook feed cry. Well, it's because we have to deal with other democrats from conservative areas who also need to be voted in and deal with their own people to satisfy their needs. "Why can't we just stop fracking and destroying ourselves!!??" Well, that's because we have states that kinda rely on it for their local economy, and having a platform in the general election about basically taking away a towns/states source of income will most likely make you lose those states.
The people who are dissatisfied with the democrats and saw Sanders as some beacon of hope don't understand and don't want to understand why things are dirty, complex, fucking shitty. They wanted magic answers to the ills of the nation and were told the issue we haven't fixed anything was because of
them not trying hard enough. We're dealing with a party this is branded together by a pretty diverse set of views, so much so that the ACA had to be rammed down the dems throats because of blue dogs crying about it. They think the democrats are a single entity that have simply failed to have major progress because there is no will for it, where the real problem is the country is just way more conservative than the Sanders wing wants to recognize, and that includes portions of the democrats because (news shock), we have 50 states with different needs for each one.
So when I say that "he's not a democrat", I mean it in the idea that he wanted to basically hijack the party and potentially send it down a road it might not have been able to recover from if he actually platformed on his policies. I don't want to go down a what-if cycle of hypotheticals of if he had the nomination, because he didn't, but when I say stuff like that, it's because his political views are the equivalent of selling everything you own, putting it on a single hand of blackjack and then hoping you get a 20/21.
Now this doesn't apply to all Sanders supporters, but there is a general group of voters who this does apply to and is directed at.
