AOC and Bernie’s Magical Misery Tour

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, April 17, 2025

 

‘We are living in the most dangerous moment in the modern history of this country,” Senator Bernie Sanders recently proclaimed. The 20,000 or so Salt Lake City residents who squeezed into the University of Utah’s Huntsman Center were enraptured. “We are living in a moment where a handful of billionaires control our government,” he continued. “We do not want a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class — we want a government that represents all of us.”

 

Sanders passed the mic to his co-star, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “We can either have extreme and growing wealth inequality with the toxic division and corruption that it requires to survive,” she warned, “or we can have a fair economy for working people along with the democracy and freedoms that uphold it.” There are only two mutually exclusive choices available to Americans now, AOC added: “Oligarchy or democracy.”

 

It’s not exactly a fresh shtick, but the progressive pair’s “Fight Oligarchy” tour is packing arenas across the country with audiences eager to hear all about how miserable everyone is — or, at least, ought to be. As is often the case with socialism, their class-conscious message suffers from a profound dearth of innovation.

 

The global stock market implodes, supply chains falter, and investors anticipate reduced corporate profits, and still, somehow, the rich are getting richer at the expense of the middle and lower class. Entrenched commercial interests object to the deregulation of their industries that allows upstart competitors to enter the market, increasing competition and putting downward pressure on consumer prices? That’s oligarchy, too. Even opportunistic sops to favored constituencies that are so economically inefficient they seem to have sprung straight from the progressive playbook can be evidence of kleptocracy if you’re clever enough. “You toss a crumb to us, and you give the farm to the big fish,” AOC said of proposals like eliminating taxes on income from tips and Social Security.

 

The stars of the “Fight Oligarchy” tour may not have the firmest grasp on sound economic policy, but they are teaching the left a lesson on markets, in a sense.

 

From the outset of the second Trump administration, the Democratic Party’s most passionate voters have found that their demand for futile, emotive gestures from their elected representatives outstripped the supply. Democratic greybeards like James Carville argued that the party would be better served by not making a spectacle of itself while it waits for the Trump administration to make an exploitable mistake. In the interim, the Trump administration has made many such mistakes. Carville’s assumption that Democratic elected leaders could capitalize on those errors was, however, too optimistic. They have tried and failed.

 

Meanwhile, the Democratic base’s desire to see their representatives self-immolate, if only to validate its members’ anxiety, has been unfulfilled. Some have tried to meet this market demand, and they have been rewarded for their efforts. But there is no substitute for the name brand in this sector, and nothing draws quite like the inchoate ardor on offer from the democratic-socialist wing of the party.

 

The mainstream press has gushed over the degree to which the “Fight Oligarchy” tour has attracted tens of thousands of progressive attendees in dark-blue metros and college towns across America. “Roughly 36,000 people in Los Angeles,” the New York Times reported. “More than 34,000 attendees in Denver. And another 30,000 on Tuesday night near Sacramento.” Sanders even made a brief guest appearance at the Coachella music festival, where he sought to convey to the youngish audience just how truly forsaken they are. The crowd ate it up.

 

That audience is right in the progressive wheelhouse. As Billboard reported, about 60 percent of Coachella attendees opted to enroll in a deferred payment plan when purchasing the concert’s tickets. Thus, the Gen Z–heavy audience attached unnecessary interest and fees onto ticket costs that already start at about $600. These concert-goers’ tenuous grasp of best financial practices renders Coachella a ripe target for progressive activism.

 

Unlike Coachella, the Sanders-AOC act isn’t primarily a hip, young experience. As the New York Post’s Kirsten Fleming wrote in a dispatch from the tour’s swing through Nampa, Idaho — home to Northwestern Nazarene University and the College of Western Idaho — the 12,500 in attendance was made up of “mostly retired Boomers.” The event had the feel of a “religious revival,” she observed; “it was their chance to be in communion with like-minded people.” And despite being bombarded with evidence of how awful everything is at the moment, the audience emerged elated. “It also felt like, dare I say, a Trump rally — only with different heroes and villains,” Fleming posited.

 

This is what our politics has become. Today, with the vast majority of voters tasked only with ratifying the verdicts rendered by an impossibly small, wildly unrepresentative cast of primary voters, American politics is a roadshow.

 

Today, like politics, the audiences for entertainment media are atomized. The proliferation of streaming services has greatly reduced the viewership required to be considered a hit. Commercial success is now measured in minutes spent rather than eyeballs attracted. Something similar might be said of national politics. A small but dedicated fan following can manufacture a cultural moment, even if most everyone else is unaware of it. And the product is increasingly tailored to the tastes not of the disaggregated majority but the fringe consumer base. That customer gets what he wants. And what he wants right now is to feel bad about the current state of affairs, so long as he gets to feel that way with the equally distraught.

 

The perverse phenomenon in which consumers of politics as a form of entertainment derive satisfaction from wallowing in catastrophism isn’t unique to progressive politics. The most plugged-in political hobbyists enjoy predictions of imminent cataclysm more than most.

 

The party out of power’s base voters always enjoy hearing about how awful things are. Typically, though, the party that is in power is leery of doom and gloom. As Karl Rove recently observed, “there’s something shocking about this White House to an old-school politico like me: It doesn’t spend much time drawing attention to the president’s successes.” Because that’s not what the base wants to hear. Unqualified accomplishments from which all benefit fail to satisfy the id. If there is no apocalypticism, no black hats and white hats, no looming Götterdämmerung in which the righteous will savor the tears of the vanquished, what’s the point?

 

That’s what the anguished are getting from Sanders and AOC. It is a retribution tour that promises to engineer a revolutionary reversal of fortunes for the elites (not our elites, of course, but theirs). There is, of course, a vague expectation among captive audiences that they will enjoy a better future, but the satisfaction is found in the expectation that all the right people will suffer soon enough.

 

Without a doubt, the “Fight Oligarchy” tour is a hit. Why wouldn’t it be? It is a formulaic rip-off of the kind of cultural fare to which modern audiences are accustomed. As much as it might seem like it is, the market for retributive paranoia is not yet saturated. And as a rule, the best performers leave them wanting more.