The Bernie and AOC Show

By Abe Greenwald

Monday, March 24, 2025

 

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are reportedly drawing massive crowds on their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour through swing states. Apparently, AOC opens the show with some boilerplate class-warfare talk before bringing out Sanders, who appears to rapturous applause and then runs through his greatest hits. Legacy media are citing the large audiences and their supposedly deep wells of public anger as evidence that the two socialists are up to something politically important. They’re not.

 

Bernie and AOC aren’t the next big thing. They became an oldies act the moment Donald Trump was reelected, like a glam-metal band stranded in the wake of Nirvana’s breakthrough album. Trump and JD Vance own class warfare now. Brookings notes that NBC exit polls showed “working-class voters, defined as voters without a college degree, split 56% for Trump to 42% for Harris. The same polls tell us that white working-class voters favored Trump over Harris by 66% to 32%, and that Trump won a larger share of working-class Black and Latino voters than he did in 2020.”

 

Sanders and AOC can, and do, rail against their fellow Democrats all they like, but most working-class Americans aren’t listening anymore. Blue-collar voters who have given up on the Democratic Party don’t want to hear bluster and bad ideas from two of its most visible and vocal extremists. What’s more, as the New York Times points out, Sanders is “not really saying anything new.” AOC, still peddling the identity politics that the working class neither needs nor wants, “called for everyone from Trump voters to families of trans kids to come together and organize locally.”

 

The ongoing poverty of their thinking is reflected in the tour’s name. Like “Saving Democracy,” “Fighting Oligarchy,” is a hyperbolic abstraction that offers nothing tangible to people in need. Americans feeling the financial pinch are hoping that the “oligarchy” lowers taxes, slows inflation, and creates more jobs. They don’t know if it will happen; but they know the Democrats—neoliberals and socialists, alike—failed them.

 

Which is not to accept the premise that the Trump administration is oligarchic in the first place. Thomas Sowell is quoted as saying, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” Sanders and AOC, in pretending that we’re living under an oligarchy, is doing neither. As Ross Douthat explained in a New York Times column on Saturday, Trump has tasked some of the world’s richest men to advance policies that he, rightly or wrongly, believes will help everyday Americans—and that scare the hell out of billionaire CEOs: the imposition of steep tariffs, DOGE’s potential elimination of private-public-sector contracts, and so on.

 

But more important, most Americans are reserving judgment on this administration until there’s something to show for all the drama. And if Trump fails to deliver on the issues people care most about, he will be attacked for his failures, not the make-up of his advisory team.

 

Sure, Sanders and AOC are drawing big crowds in swing states. But the people who show up wearing “Eat the Rich” T-shirts and leading “Tax the rich” chants would be there whether Elon Musk was involved in the administration or not. They’re not angry about American oligarchy. They’re angry because their side lost, their agenda is in tatters, and there’s nothing else to do about it. And they show up because they’re part of a political subculture that sees in Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a charisma that’s lost on the rest of us.

 

Mötley Crüe still sell out big rooms, but that doesn’t put them back at the top of the charts.