Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is speaking to a crowd of tens of thousands of people, joined onstage by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their calls to get money out of politics, for Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, a $15 federal minimum wage, tuition-free college, and taxes on the wealthiest Americans are met with raucous cheers. Sanders rails against Trump and the billionaires who run politics in the United States.
But this isn’t 2019, it’s March 2025. Sanders is speaking to a crowd of over 34,000 people in Denver, Colorado in the first months of Donald Trump’s second term. He has a fire that was largely extinguished during the Biden years as the progressive wing of the Democratic Party fell in line with his policies, including funding the genocide in Gaza. This rally is larger than any Harris or Trump rally during the 2024 campaign, larger than any of Sanders’ rallies during either of his two campaigns for president. But neither Sanders nor AOC are running for office.
AOC and Sanders are touring the country — speaking in red and blue states alike — as part of a series of rallies and events titled: “Fighting Oligarchy.” Each stop along the way draws thousands of people, often tens of thousands. The message they are projecting is one of unity from below against the attacks of the Trump administration which, with Elon Musk’s prestigious place in the White House, signify the open alliance between the government and the billionaires — a new golden era of American “oligarchy.”
They are rallying against Trump, providing an outlet for the anger at the administration, creating a point of convergence for widespread sectors who are discontent with both Trump and the supposed opposition in the Democratic Party. Spinning its wheels in the first months of Trump’s onslaught of attacks against the working class and instability internationally, the Democratic Party finds itself in a new phase of a historic crisis, and is trying to rewrite its relationship with the working class and youth. Sanders and AOC — with the lineup of fresh progressive faces that accompany them in each city — are paving the way toward one possible future for the Democrats.
But the futures of working people cannot be gambled away on another doomed attempt to transform the Democratic Party from a capitalist party into a vehicle for incremental change for the working class and oppressed.
A Magnet for Anti-Trump Sentiment
The thousands of people showing up at Sanders’ rallies show that there is anger simmering among working class and young people. There is a thirst to fight against Trump and his attacks on democratic rights and the last tendrils of the welfare state; there is immense outrage at the fact that a billionaire like Elon Musk has been given total access to government agencies to cut the workforce and ease the way for his business ventures. As one rally-goer succinctly put it: “Fuck all the fucking oligarchies that are trying to run this country. Because you are not it.”
That outrage is reflected in Trump’s drooping approval ratings, which have dipped over 14 percent over the last three months, taking a nosedive after his “Liberation Day.” We’ve seen this anger expressed in town halls across the country, where Republican politicians are being lambasted for supporting Trump’s proposed cuts to social programs he said he wouldn’t touch, and Democrats are being excoriated for not standing up to these policies as they promised. Amid all of Trump’s chaos, people don’t see their situation getting any better. It is beginning to spill over into the streets, with the hundreds of thousands of people who mobilized as part of “Hands Off!” protests across the country on April 5.
Sanders and AOC’s rallies give some insight into just how widespread — albeit unorganized and, as of yet, contained — this outrage is. Indeed, they are not just stopping in progressive strongholds; the first leg of their tour, for one, has been focused on the midwest and southwest United States, drawing thousands of people to rallies in states that went to Trump in the 2024 election by large margins, like Montana and Nevada.
In that sense these rallies are a cross-section of anti-Trump sentiment, bringing together union members, reproductive rights activists, immigrants rights activists, die-hard “Bernie Bros,” Hillary Clinton supporters, and even former life-long Republicans. Young people wearing keffiyehs stand next to people who could have been wearing MAGA hats in 2016. Not all of these people are Sanders supporters or even Democrats. In fact, over half of the people who signed up to attend the tour had not attended one of Sanders’ events before or ever been part of his network of supporters. These are people who are afraid and angry at the chaos of the Trump administration as much as they are outraged by the lack of fight from the Democratic Party and are looking, not just for an alternative, but also a way to fight back.
Outrage at the Democratic Party
It’s not just that AOC and Sanders are in the right place at the right time — the immense turn out at their rallies is a product of anger at Trump, but also at the Democratic Party, which paved the way for Trumpism in 2016 and again in 2024, and which now has nothing to offer people in the face of widespread attacks on immigrants, the right to protest and free speech, against trans people, and on social services and jobs. The comments of one rally-goer in Las Vegas are illustrative:
If someone got on the stage that very day … and asked the crowd to march all the way to Washington to protest against Mr. Trump, [I] would take that long walk without hesitation — I swear to God. But there’s nobody like that. There’s nobody giving anybody any kind of direction. I think everybody is really scared and lost.
Sanders and AOC are responding to the widespread recognition that the Democratic Party has failed and is still failing to mount a serious opposition to Trump and the Far Right in Congress and the courts. But it goes beyond the last ten years — AOC and Sanders gesture to what many people have known for a long time: The Democrats have formed their identity around preserving a status quo that works for Wall Street while working people suffer. The anger at the Democrats is so great that Sanders is forced to acknowledge this, even partially:
I would not be telling you the truth if I didn’t tell you that within the Democratic Party there are billionaires who have undue influence … Democracy is one person one vote, not billionaires buying elections.
AOC goes even further, criticizing Democrats who seek to endear themselves to sectors of Trump’s base by playing to the right on questions of immigration and trans rights, telling them to step aside:
To those leaders on either side of the aisle, who are willing to put their fellow Americans down so that they can get ahead or feel better about themselves, they may best find a home somewhere else. And if you’re an LGBT kid or a family, we can’t throw you under the bus to win an election.
While in their program Sanders and AOC maintain a strict economic populism, in rhetoric they are course-correcting from the idea that the problem with the Democratic Party is that it pays too much attention to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. This time, their message is one of unity against the billionaires and the Far Right who “specialize in getting us to turn against one another, along lines of Left and Right, race and gender, creed and culture.”
Sanders and AOC depart from the classic narrative of the Democratic Party, admitting that Trump is not an aberration, but a natural outcome of a system rigged by the ultra-wealthy, drawing a clear line between the billionaire class and the suffering of ordinary people — a system defended by the Democratic Party.
Democratic Party Damage Control
Sanders and AOC are not launching a rogue insurgency from outside the party. Despite their criticisms, Sanders and AOC are doing damage control for the Democratic Party, trying to transform disillusionment back into support for an imperialist party in crisis that is facing record low approval ratings in recent months. Their rhetoric and progressive program is in the service of rejuvenating the party — in the short term, to contain discontent and, in the long term, to repair its relationship with the working class.
This is at the center of these rallies; Sanders and AOC are testing out one hypothesis for how to bring the working class back into the suffocating embrace of the Democratic Party with a progressive program. Far from Harris’s vague pandering to the “middle class” during the election — which AOC threw her full weight behind at the time — Sanders and AOC tailor their dialogue specifically to working people in the United States.
In his typical populist fashion, Sanders devotes a portion of his speeches to hearing from members of the crowd. “What kind of stress are working people living under today?” he asks the audience in Greeley, Colorado. “Financial stress,” shouts one person. “Tuition,” cries another. “Workplace safety” and “Mental health” also ring out from the crowd. Interviews with rally-goers reveal a singular theme: people can’t make ends meet at jobs where capitalist profit is always put over their lives.
Beyond the meek gestures of defiance from the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, Sanders and AOC are following a simple political logic: people need something to fight against, but they also need something to fight for. Platitudes and proceduralism are not enough. People want healthcare. They want the right to an abortion. They want housing. They want a living wage. They want an education. They want unions. They want climate action. And they want to fight for their interests, not have them serve as bargaining chips for politicians.
But Sanders and AOC have had to add other points to their program. They need to bring young people and other alienated voters back under the wing of the Democrats. It’s not just stunts like Sanders opening for Clairo at Coachella. The Democrats lost significant support in this sector in the last election, particularly over the question of the genocide in Gaza. This is big enough to warrant Sanders breaking his usual focus on domestic issues to speak about the genocide, saying that not another penny must be sent to Netanyahu’s war on the Palestinian people.
The purpose of these rallies is to get working people behind the idea that they can use the Democratic Party for their own ends; that they can vote the right Democrats into office and be rewarded with a program that utilizes the massive imperialist wealth of the United States toward social programs for the working class and poor, that empowers unions and limits the open influence of billionaires like Elon Musk.
This is not just a footnote or an inconvenient detail. AOC and Sanders defend a nationalist program that ultimately pits the working class of other countries against those living in the United States — swinging between more overt interventionist policies and, now, more toward Trump’s “America First” xenophobic agenda that will spell more hardship for the working class on the other sides of U.S. borders. Just last month Sanders reaffirmed that he approves of Trump’s immigration policies, saying that the president was “making sure our borders are stronger …I don’t think it’s appropriate for people to be coming across the border illegally, so we’ve got to work now on comprehensive immigration reform.”
Even as outliers functioning very much within the bipartisan system, the program that AOC and Sanders are putting forward is one that mediates the relationship between the working class and the capitalist class in order to keep the gears of U.S. imperialism grinding on. That has only become a more urgent task ten years after Sanders first ran for president as the United States struggles to maintain its hegemony on the world stage, facing a volatile economy, more open conflicts between powers, and potential challengers. Sanders acknowledges this in his speeches. “In a competitive global economy, we need the best educated workforce in the world,” Sanders says, nodding to the competition with China. Sanders and AOC know as well as Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi that the ruling class needs workers on board if the United States is going to regain its standing on the world stage.
For all their vim and vigor, and all their talk of organizing communities and “class solidarity,” Sanders and AOC have only one prescription: vote for Democrats. As AOC ends all her speeches:
We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us too. And that means communities choosing and voting for Democrats and elected officials who know how to stand for the working class […] We need to come together and spend every day for the next year working to educate our neighbors, reach out to them in order to give these Republicans the boot and replace them with brawling Democrats.
The Anger at Trump Can’t Be Contained by the Democratic Party
Again, the tens of thousands of people showing up to the “Fighting Oligarchy” events show that there is brewing anger against Trump that cannot be fully contained by the Democratic Party establishment — there is a willingness to fight and a recognition on some level that we need to carve out an alternative to the ossified, pro-capitalist parties.
Writing for the Guardian, Eric Blanc celebrates the rallies while calling on Sanders and AOC to unite broad sectors to mobilize towards protests against Musk and other initiatives against Trump, including elections. In a sense, he’s right. Politicians of the working class should be conduits of class struggle, uplifting the demands of working people and actively mobilizing people to the streets — just look at the example of the socialists in congress in Argentina who are out in the streets on the front lines against Milei. Last Thursday, after months of building rage and increasing class struggle in Argentina, the working class put forward a fantastic National Strike against Javier Milei’s right-wing agenda. The socialist congresspeople of the PTS-FIT such as Myriam Bregman, Christian Castillo, Nicolas del Caño and Andrea D’Atri played an important role agitating the need to join the strike. The day before the strike, during the weekly protests by retirees against government cuts that have become flash points for the struggle against Milei, the socialists in the Argentinean Congress mobilized next to the community supporting retirees. Imagine if these “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies were places where workers, students, and communities could discuss and vote together on an actual plan of action to denounce Trump’s policies.
Today the progressive wing faces different challenges in providing left cover for the Democrats than they did four or eight or ten years ago. The working class is angry and fed up — but it is also politicized. It has gone through significant chapters of class struggle and conscious-shifting events, from the first Trump administration to Black Lives Matter to the Pandemic to strike waves to a resurgent student movement. And from that we have an opportunity like never before to show that it is only the independent mobilization of the working class that can win against the Far Right and fight so that the futures of our class are not sold to save capitalism from the crises it creates.