Bernie Is Back
The most popular politician in the country is at it again
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is launching what he calls his Fighting Oligarchy tour in Republican-held House districts that Pres. Joe Biden and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris won. Districts where Democrats could turn the tables and reclaim the House next year. If people mobilize.
“Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go From Here” begins with these town halls:
Feb. 21, 5:30pm: Laborers International Union Hall Local 1140, Omaha, NE — Rep. Don Bacon
Feb. 22, 8:30am: Englert Theater, Iowa City, IA — Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks
(It looks like you can sign up for Iowa City here. I’d keep an eye on BernieSanders.com for Omaha, too.)
As Politico reports, Sanders isn’t just thinking about 2026 elections. He’s pointing at two congressional Republicans who might, with enough popular pressure, block Pres. Donald Trump’s agenda of massive tax cuts for the rich and cuts in aid to working-class Americans, kids, and the elderly.
The Nebraska and Iowa events are being seen in Sanders-world as a stinging rebuke to the tepid opposition of congressional Democrats, some of whom seem to think the only power they have is House votes. Demonstrating the power of the bully pulpit, Sanders presumably hopes, will offer a stark contrast to that meek passivity.
“If the Democrats listened to Bernie, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I assume he feels a deep level of disgust,” Sanders friend and former labor leader RoseAnn DeMoro told Politico. “I think he’s trying to inspire a very strong resistance to the oligarchy.”
The timing may be significant, too. In November, Sanders warned that “the first job of a new DNC [Democratic National Committee] Chair is to get super-PAC money out of Democratic primaries.”
On Feb. 1, Ken Martin was elected DNC chair after saying he’s okay with money from good billionaires.
Martin and Sanders represent two poles in the party, now agonizing over its future. Should the party take a cue from the policies espoused by Trump during the campaign? Or move more left than Harris was?
Centrist Democrats argue that Harris lost due to the popularity of some Trump policies: Anti-inflation, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+. Progressives, meanwhile, argue that Democrats weren’t far enough to the left on economic issues.
It may be the wrong debate.
Yes, it makes sense to emulate the guy who won two out of the last three. But you don’t have to emulate his policies. What worked were his tactics.
The finest minds in Democratic strategy have repeated that Harris lost because the political environment was just too rough. Inflation. A fictional invasion.
But the playing field was far less tilted against Harris than it was against Trump when he first emerged/descended. He won because he did what Democrats should’ve done in 2016, 2020, and 2024, the thing that political strategy is supposed to do: Change the political environment rather than moan about it and respond to it.
Trump did that with help from both right-wing and mainstream media.
So why are corporate media ignoring Sanders launching a new effort now, in two states very much on the political map? In theory, you could rightly expect that news of a much more popular politician launching a major political tour would dominate the airwaves. Alas.
One theory is that the media are in the tank for Trump. Some are. Collectively, they’re not.
The real biases are insidious. Trump is easy to talk about. He says simple things, discussed easily on TV with virtually zero research or deep thought.
Sanders discusses policy and a philosophy of government. Many in media are actively disinterested. They’re here for politics — tactical analysis, interrogating candidate “essences” (who they “really” are), and outcome-speculation.
Few news organizations engage with policy; fewer still in ways that are, uh, engaging.
So, if Sanders and the Democrats can’t get coverage for their policies, what can they learn from Trump’s tactics?
As Ana Marie Cox wrote for The New Republic, in admirably TFN style:
…any effort expended trying to craft policies that might attract conservative (or “moderate”) voters will be met by their preference for those policies’ full-fat variety. No, what the Democrats need to do is ape the tactics and the artifice that bring the extremist right to power.
So, fuck it: Let’s indeed go more extreme.
As Cox points out, that worked for Trump because Republican “centrists” didn’t stop it, the way Democratic centrists do to progressives (stranding the party in a no-person’s land with No Labels and no voters).
Simple proposals that everyone can understand — as opposed to the Band-Aid™-economic proposals of Democratic proposals that taught a generation of Americans to distrust Democrats — make for great TV. Here’s Trump re-scripted as a Democrat:
Trump: Illegal immigrants are stealing our jobs and killing us. Biden invites them in and now we have to get rid of them.
Democrats: Insurance companies are stealing our livelihoods and killing us. Trump invites them in and now we have to get rid of them.
Trump had the disadvantage of reality arrayed against him and the fact that most people know immigrants to be cool1. Democrats have the advantages of truth and popular opinion.
The only disadvantage Democrats have is that they won’t say obvious and super-popular things. Even though it worked for Trump with lies.
I’m not a Bernie Bro. I don’t seethe with fury at centrist Democratic candidates or their consultants. I certainly don’t think centrists “really” wanted Trump to win.
And I disagree with Sanders on lots of stuff. I could’ve done without his gun policies back in the day.
I do appreciate that Sanders focuses so much — including in his oligarchy video a couple days ago — on the actual, real-life, flesh-and-blood oligarchs in our midst, and the dangers they pose.
That willingness to name names — Muskerberzos — is an absolute pre-requisite for winning the trust of voters. Especially disengaged voters.
You won’t tell me who the enemy is? Fuck right off.
But I also worry that Sanders’s focus on oligarchs embiggens their footprint in the popular imagination.
I suspect most people don’t resent Muskerberzos as much as Sanders imagines. In fact, I’d guess lots of people get a little thrill-by-proxy from the exploits of the super-rich. It feels as if extravagant success is still possible. Which must be evidence of a meritocracy, right? Right?!?
Sanders wrote after the election that the American working class wants to know why “the very rich are getting much richer” and “the food industry enjoys record-breaking profits.”
I think he’s wrong. I don’t hear many people wondering why food-industry profits are at record levels.
And lots of people may not ask because they already have answers, tragic ones. “I’ve gotta work harder.” “If only I were smarter.” “I shoulda learned to code.”
What people do know is that shit is hard. The future scary. Life less fulfilling.
America’s economic transformation has reshaped our culture. Our very brains.
Regulatory machinery built to constrain big companies has been hijacked and now enables our exploitation by suppressing potential rivals to those big companies.
Young people who aspired to be leaders, to exert their will on the world, once saw opportunities all around. Start a business. Run your own store.
America’s wanderers had space and time and a country to roam. Hop a train. Wash dishes at a greasy spoon and spend the rest of the week fishing or surfing.
Our world has been flattened and codified and tasked to the needs of maximal commerce. To slash tax rates for the rich. To unleash “entrepreneurism.” To let rich people buy companies with loans they make those companies pay off before stripping the remains for parts.
Today’s tax rates and rules of corporate governance legalize and incentivize the pursuit of instant riches via extraction and exploitation. The old rules led to wealth if you produced something of value, earned a name for it, built a reputation, and succeeded over the course of a career rather than a single leveraged buyout.
People miss the freedom — not of autonomy, but of open pathways — that Americans once had, even if we know it only as a surreal element of the movies and books from decades gone.
The way we think today has been deformed by our economics. Republicans — and even some Democrats — talk about “the dignity of work.”
That phrase arose as a shield for people who did work seen as menial. There was dignity in it because the work benefited society and let workers provide for themselves and others. Those who had to work had dignity, no matter what their labor.
Our mindsets are so warped now that “the dignity of work” means that those (poor) who don’t work lack dignity. We saw this in the contempt of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin for the poor in his own state.
And this new, false “dignity of work” is so precious that it enables politicians to justify starving people who lack it.
The heat of our all-consuming commerce has desicated the human values of play and fun and laughter and art and friendship and socializing and learning and daydreams. We should be working. Respect the hustle.
Because the other paths are closed.
We’ve memory-holed the goal of past generations to ease the burden of work. Because those dreams didn’t serve the few who seek to profit from our labor.
Conversely, we see as enemies the robots among us, the automation creeping into our workplaces, the machine intelligences robbing us of the dignity of work.
America’s leaders once dreamt of their arrival, that they might liberate us from the shackles — not the dignity — of labor. Robots and electronic brains became our enemies because we were deprived of their benefits, which flow instead to our real-life Saurons.
Machines aren’t the enemy. Other workers aren’t the enemy. The enemy is those hoarding the bounty of both.
But we can’t see those enemies until we remember who we were and what true freedom once looked like, the future our ancestors wanted for us.
So my own preference is to focus on what awaits us beyond oligarchy, the actual promise of genuine democracy: Lives free of economic anxiety. Never wondering whether you’ll make rent. Immune to the terrors of medical bills. Liberated from struggling to get your kid an education so they might escape these terrors.
That’s what I think. But y’know what? Fuck what I think.
If Sanders or someone else ignites a revolution in the same direction — but driven by different concepts or tactics than mine — I’ll happily shelve my conceits and pitch in.
I thought Democrats handled the election wrong last year, and said so, but I didn’t take my ball and go home. I played along for the good of the team the country.
Just like Sanders did.
And just like centrists can fucking well do right now for the first time in recorded human history.
Just once. Just this once. You got your candidate in 2016 and 2020. Twice in 2024. Progressives fell in line.
Now it’s your turn. Just this once.
Some ur-centrists — James Carville — have already allowed that their time may have passed and Sanders’s is overdue. Good for them. Truly.
So let’s hear Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) get out there and cheer for Sanders or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), or whoever becomes the progressive standard-bearer.
Because historically, it’s the supposed wild-eyed radical progressives who actually fall in line more than the supposedly moderate centrists do.
What only progressive fringes sound like, centrist leaders sound like. It wasn’t Ilhan Omar calling Netanyahu supporters a cancer. It was Gottheimer calling congressional Democrats who supported Palestinian human rights a cancer.
So now it’s their turn to acquiesce. And if their ethics won’t permit it, just say so.
Don’t hide behind tactics. Don’t tell us what you guess Americans will or won’t vote for.
Just say so if you oppose — on principle, not tactically — retooling government so that Americans get what Europeans get. Just say you’re honor-bound to battle universal housing, health care, high-speed rail, and education for everyone because it’s wrong.
But if not, if it’s just tactics, well, we tried your way. Now we get a turn. Just this once.
So centrists can now muster the same unity of purpose that progressives do every four years. They can bite their tongues about preferred tactics and smile as they clap for “universal health care” and “$25 minimum wage.”
It won’t be Sanders leading the charge; he’s trying to inspire our next leaders. But it’s on us — progressives and centrists — to swallow our pride and set aside our certainty about tactics or whatever.
Not just to fight the oligarchy, but also to rewire our brains to remember and show our fellow Americans the awesome scope of human potential, and to fight for the future we once had.
Jonathan Larsen is a longtime TV news producer and journalist who’s worked at MSNBC, CNN, The Daily Show, Air America Radio, and The Young Turks.
Hi, Mom!
People might not be wondering why food company profits are so high, but they damn sure wonder why their groceries are so expensive. They might not care about corporate landlords using a third-party app to collude on prices, but they're pissed that their rent takes so much of their paychecks and keeps going up. It's complicated trying to explain that private equity firms have rolled up all the manufacturers of firetrucks, but if you can name the companies and say, "these assholes are part of why fire departments weren't able to keep all of those buildings from burning down," it makes it a little easier. Also, given how people reacted to Luigi, I feel like there is definitely some rage at the billionaires and CEOs at the top.
"Centrist Democrats argue that Harris lost due to the popularity of some Trump policies: Anti-inflation, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ+. Progressives, meanwhile, argue that Democrats weren’t far enough to the left on economic issues."
You're leaving out the third argument: THE DEMOCRATS WERE VERY GOOD LEFT AND GOT NO FUCKING CREDIT FOR IT FROM PEOPLE WHO SAID THEY CARED.
Oh sorry, was I yelling?