HERE COMES THE BERNIEBRO: THE YOUNG, MALE, AND EARNEST BERNIE SANDERS SUPPORTERS: The Atlantic, which knows something about cults, considering the check it took from Scientology for a staggeringly ill-advised infomercial a couple of years ago, and for the many checks the magazine paid out to Andrew Sullivan’s uterus detective agency, spots yet another socialist cult in its nascent stage:

The Berniebro is not every Bernie Sanders supporter. Sanders’s support skews young, but not particularly male. The Berniebro is male, though. Very male.

The Berniebro is someone you may only have encountered if you’re somewhat similar to him: white; well-educated; middle-class (or, delicately, “upper middle-class”); and aware of NPR podcasts and jangly bearded bands.

The Berniebro might loathe one NPR podcast in particular.

The Berniebro might get into big performative arguments about how feminism saved his life. Or, the Berniebro might always seem like he’s going to say that we need economic equality for all genders but doesn’t actually say it, because he knows that it wouldn’t go over well.

The Berniebro says that Sanders isn’t only driving Hillary to the left, which you may agree is a good thing. Bernie, says the Berniebro, really could win.

The Berniebro doesn’t really have a good answer when you ask why the Democratic Party, which has spent six years explaining how its market-based health care policies aren’t socialist, would ever find national success nominating an actual democratic socialist.

That last line is the key; the Berniebro likely looks very much like this fellow, though perhaps, since this is 2015, with some serious chinbeard action — or at least an earnest attempt to cultivate it, along with the equally de rigueur top knot:

obamadouche

As they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine, “Inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out,” and Bernie’s err, nationalist-oriented socialism represents the last, best chance for the beta male Berniebro to really stick good and hard it to his more forthright conservative neighbors — or perhaps even to mom and dad themselves, those ancient reactionaries.

Though in the back of his mind, perhaps the Berniebro may be hearing a tiny voice uttering the concern that Christopher Caldwell wrote a decade ago at the Weekly Standard in answering why “the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation” — “If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”

I’m sure he’ll quickly tamp out such concerns, though. There’s a moral equivalent of war to be fought after all — which way to the front?