Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are currently on a tour of the United States that is focused on those swing states that switched from Democrat to Republican in the last election.1
Titled ‘Fighting Oligarchy,’ the tour is hailed by the liberal press for drawing large crowds in Las Vegas, Tempe and Denver. The message is by and large the Bernie Sanders stump speech from 2016 and 2020. For example, on Colorado Public Radio, Sanders stated:
“The American people are saying loud and clear, we will not accept an oligarchic form of society. We will not accept the richest guy in the world running all over Washington, making cuts to the Social Security Administration, cuts to the Veterans Administration, almost destroying the Department of Education – all so that they could give over a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the wealthiest 1%.”2
While these demands for reform that are more reminiscent of Occupy Wall Street than Black Lives Matter may sound soothing to some – particularly federal workers whose jobs have been axed by the Celebrity Apprentice mafia don and Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsaw – they are being made after the entire Democratic Party establishment orchestrated a coup against Sanders in the 2020 nomination race, after which ‘Not Me, Us’ transmogrified into ‘Me and My Friend Joe.’ This is also after this bourgeois party did next to nothing to prevent Donald Trump’s attempt to coup his own country and impose himself as leader. From that day onward, the entire liberal left, including para-left journalists and commentators, played down the seriousness of the January 6 insurrection, going so far as to deny that the mobsters were armed, much in the same the way anti-vaxxers played down the seriousness of COVID-19, opting instead to perpetuate a lab leak conspiracy that lasts to this day.3 It took three years rather than three months for the Biden administration to charge Trump with anything substantial and by then the Supreme Court had ratified Trump vs. United States, giving the office of President exceptional powers beyond the reach of the law. This travesty of the Constitution was passed on to a convicted criminal.
Despite his policy platform, Sanders spent the last four years providing cover for the Biden administration’s “nothing will change” strategy of privatization plus neo-imperial carnage, which was most heinously expressed in Gaza. It’s no secret that the Democratic Party is a party of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%, as Joseph Stiglitz put it in 2011. Indeed, nothing has changed in that department and the Democratic Party is more than ever the graveyard of social movements. Independents are welcome so long as they don’t go in the direction of third party challenges.
Whereas the Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 made it seem as though the left could politicize the party in much the same way that Trump had done from the right within the Republican Party, the chastened Sanders is now simply a celebrity endorser for the Democrats, whose Wall Street, Silicon Valley, CIA, Pentagon and union brass forces are oblivious to criticism. This tour is not about impeaching the presiding Führer or abolishing billionaires. It is not about protecting the Bill of Rights, international law, the environment, science research, public schools or good-paying jobs. If it were, Sanders would be working with others to build a socialist movement outside the Democratic Party. No, this horse and pony show is public relations work and advance marketing for the rotten Democratic Party in the lead-up to the next election. After stumping for the Biden administration’s every concession to the investor class, Sanders and AOC are on a salvage operation, using populist rhetoric against “left and right” divisiveness. For example, in her Denver speech, AOC stated:
“Foxx News and the right wing will have you believe that … American values are something out of The Communist Manifesto. That we believe these things because we went to some fancy school or read them in a book somewhere. But I will tell you. I don’t believe in health care, labour and human dignity because I’m an extremist. I believe these things because I was a waitress. Because I scrubbed toilets with my mom to afford school. Because I worked double shifts to keep the lights on. Because I did lose my dad as a kid and had to see my mom open the hospital bills a few days later. And I don’t want us to live like this anymore. We deserve better. And this isn’t just about Republicans. 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.”4
This reassurance that AOC doesn’t read books but knows all about toilets, you could say, is the Tim Walz formula kicking into gear – a nostalgic, feel good, all-American, Erin Brockovich, Bruce Springsteen and Melvin Van Peebles pitch for a public that is as credulous as it is needy. But if one was to take Brockovich at her word, “superman’s not coming.” This could serve to question the graphics used for the tour podium, a font with perspective lines that are reminiscent of superhero comics, or the radical chic ‘Watch Out’ that pops up towards the end of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Putting the community on tour in this case means putting on the community. One of the ways this is being done is with retro styling. Like AOC’s 1980s mom jeans, the retro fonts that are used in this case are reminiscent of American counterculture, from the Whole Earth Catalog to Woody Allen film titles and Curtis Mayfield LPs. According to graphic designer Elizabeth Goodspeed, such fonts represent “a safe retreat into the past.” This, she argues, contrasts with mid-century fonts such as Swiss Style, which, she argues, “can bleed into fascism.” Instead, according to Lisa Smith, what people want is something friendly, earnest and comforting, which connotes wellness, alternative medicine or the joy of cooking.5
This post-Biden-is-the-new-FDR-fail attempt, it should be said, does seem safer than the breakneck regression that is presently on display through Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to disappear political opponents, Linda McMahon’s piledrive of the Department of Education or RFK Jr.’s medical malpractice. And of course, when reaction is the order of the day, some safe progression might seem better than none. Yet, two steps backward and one step forward has been the order of the day in American politics since at least the 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. That’s why the billionaires now have all the money and not only control politics but have blatantly, demonstrably, dismantled the pretence of democracy. However, tough talk about billionaires in the populist manner of Bernie Sanders on the left, or Luigi Mangione on the right, simply avoids the bitter pill of class-based organization and socialist politics. Although there are deep material forces at work that make this conflict clear to the capitalist class, there are also ideological, cultural and psychological dimensions to our moment that are worth noting, especially as these mystify the majority.
Among his many executive orders – which if nothing else prove that executive power can be wielded when there is a will to do so – Trump passed in January 2025 the action to “End Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling.”6 Couched in the language of family values and patriotism, the presidential order calls on schools to cease imposing on parents and students ideologies that compel people to adopt positions as either victims or oppressors, and that relate these modalities to immutable characteristics like gender, race or sexuality. With the purpose of defending people from “gender ideology extremism” and “restoring biological truth,” equity ideology is defined as discriminatory, in particular, as it considers members of specific groups “morally or inherently superior,” as “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive,” or responsible for the “actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex, or national origin, in which the individual played no part.” The order calls for the dismantling of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies and in its staid encourages the validation of individuality, excellence, hard work, fairness, objectivity, racial colourblindness and patriotism.
The objectivity and universalism that is proposed here, which has been the hobby horse of the conservative side of the culture war since at least the 1980s, of course has little to do with fairness or objectivity and more to do with capitalist realism. Although this policy agenda has some merit against the excesses of the postmodern left, which serves the upper middle class more than the majority, it is designed to further dismantle public institutions. It is also made to inflame cultural conflict for the purposes of authoritarian neoliberal restructuring, with conservative notions of respectability imposed by force, much like Trump and J.D. Vance’s dressing down of Volodymyr Zelensky as the U.S. plans to carve out some of the spoils of the Russian victory over Ukraine.7 The authoritarian intentions of the document is obvious insofar as it says nothing about economic inequality and class exploitation. In this it is no better than the so-called wokeism and the DEI policies it opposes. By ignoring the question of class, it seeks to suppress the conscious understanding of the crises of global capital. Moreover, it mythologizes irrational relations of domination in the name of patriotism, as seen most obviously in the neo-fascist “warrior ethos” of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, which provides an alibi for white Christian nationalism. If anything proves Ellen Meiksins Wood’s argument that capitalism can do without racism, this could be it, albeit through inverted and thoroughly inconsistent means.8
Against the universality of capital, which is hegemonic, the only known alternative is socialist anti-capitalism, currently at a standstill, even in developing China. The anti-oppression discourses that have been developed in anti-socialist directions by the postmodern pseudo and post-left were transformed in the 2000s into DEI mandates that legitimized toxic forms of anti-liberal cancel culture in institutions and the workplace. Seemingly progressive, the difference and diversity agenda facilitated the career aspirations of a minority of middle-class professionals at the expense of genuine demands for socio-economic equality, not to mention a strategy for achieving the slightest gain in this direction, which cannot be biased, at the outset, against universalism. While the Republicans have successfully exploited the structural flaws of anti-Enlightenment anti-universalism for their own purposes, the New Democrats played the game of loyal anti-oppression opposition for several decades, for largely the same reasons – as if anyone could even think that black and female ciphers like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton were progressives. Neoliberalism left and right was served equally well, for example, by racism as by anti-racism, and by patriarchy as by anti-patriarchy, and as all of the major global challenges were brushed under the carpet. And this, apparently, for the sake of grifters such as Joe Manchin or Nikole Hannah-Jones.
At this critical conjuncture, when left forces could be gaining momentum, the Democratic Party machine seems to have taken half a page from critics like Mark Lilla and abandoned some of the virtue signalling that marked the period 2014 to 2024.9 If the neoliberal think tank Third Way is to be believed – a name that should cause some nervous twitching at minimum – the reasons why the Democratic Party has lost touch with the working class is because it has over-emphasized identity politics, been dismissive towards those who do not have elite education, and been too attached to institutions like academia, the media and government, which are far from the political base that is associated with churches, small businesses and police.10 Lacking a positive national identity and message, the Party has latched on to buzzwords such as “pregnant people” rather than the issues that are important to the majority of voters. Given its political slant, the document is intended more as a propaganda directive for the Party than an objective assessment of people’s needs. It nevertheless recognizes that having failed to define its own positions, the Democratic Party allowed the Republicans to lead with “cultural” issues such as crime and immigration. The working class no longer trusts the Democratic Party, the report argues, because it vilifies success, because it looks at economics abstractly rather than in everyday terms of high prices and stagnant wages, because it prioritizes America’s flaws (racism, sexism, inequality) rather than dreams of prosperity, and because it favours excessive regulation, redistribution, climate change mitigation and government spending rather than aspiration and wealth creation. To reconnect culturally with the working class, Third Way recommends moving away from elite and confusing identity politics towards shared values, community, patriotism and traditional American imagery. As part of this agenda, the Party should “ban” far-left purity tests and meet real people in real places, such as gun shows, local restaurants and churches, or through sports broadcasting and social media. Traditional values like masculinity, rugged individualism and entrepreneurialism should be recentred as Democratic values. Policies should steer away from “handouts” like student loan forgiveness and universal basic income, which, they argue, do not recognize the struggles of hard-working Americans. Tangible, aspirational policies that connect with local business, Third Way argues, should use populist messaging to gain credibility and showcase working-class people and candidates.11
Clearly, the Fight Oligarchy tour is to the left of these recommendations on how to rebrand the Democratic Party along Republican lines, even as Sanders blames Russia rather than the U.S. and NATO for starting the war in Ukraine. Whatever his goals may be, Trump’s obscure plans to bring the US-EU-NATO-Ukraine-Russia conflict to an end coincides with the desires of most Ukrainians.12 Sanders blames Trump for supporting Israel’s Netanyahu regime, though he himself is pro-Israel and pro-Palestine in equal measure, which devolves to U.S. foreign policy objectives. Having United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain on hand at the Warren, Michigan rally changes nothing on that issue, despite a few cheaply bought words on occasion. Regardless, what Third Way has in mind for the Democrats is a replay of sorts of American politics from the late 1960s to the 1980s, but with the two sides of the duopoly now thoroughly confused, a later phase of the same old trick.
In Fear of Falling, Barbara Ehrenreich argues that the middle class developed its sense of complete distinction from the working class in the 1960s.13 After the 1968 Democratic Party convention, journalists uncovered the fact that most “middle” Americans did not identify with the student protesters. The view that the middle class, including its countercultural offspring, was elitist and permissive, rather than inclusive, led it to become increasingly self-interested, through to the yuppie 80s. In the 1970s, the intellectual backlash against the student left led to equivocations between left and right politics. Conservatives could hardly denounce the counterculture without at the same time attacking the consumer society that spawned it. Whatever the cause of the disconnect between activists and hard-working middle Americans, and whether this was explained in terms of sociological or New Right theories, what emerged at this moment was the autonomization of middle-class consciousness, which hitched its notion of professional service to the prime directive of saving itself from socio-economic ruin. Over the years, pulling the ladder up after yourself became the sine qua non of success. Since that time, the ingenuity of the middle class, Ehrenreich argues, has been to take the anger and yearning of the working class and sell this to the restless middle class.14 After the debates over political correctness in the 1980s and 90s, the conservative right has done something similar by taking countercultural tropes like transgressive anti-normativity – which was never part of a socialist agenda – and repackage these as “alt-right” militancy.15
The working class remains the byproduct of this bipartisan political dynamic as wages, social benefits and public services get raided by financiers, corporations and asset strippers. In today’s petty-bourgeois reimagining of fin de siècle fantasy, the working class is cast once again as a symbol of the past, a dangerous revenant that is manipulated by Mabuse and Caligari-type villains. With Musk as the official-unofficial agent of policy directives, Trump can play two roles, the populist demagogue or strong leader who will stand up for the little guy, all the while corrupting him as his minion, and the middle manager sergeant at arms, who is willing to do the dirty work of belt-tightening and downsizing, all in the name of shareholder profits and investor confidence. Trump is the paroxysmal expression of these contradictions, seen elsewhere in Conan O’Brien’s anti-Trump quip at the 2025 Oscars ceremony, to the effect that Sean Baker’s Anora is a depiction of someone who is not afraid to stand up to a powerful Russian. Yet, is Anora not also a portrait of a poor and disoriented working girl who would gladly have married one.16 Or how about Cornel West’s recent admonition against William Robinson and others for “going hard” against Cedric Robinson’s non-Marxist concept of racial capitalism.17 Note that when Heidi Hartmann came out in 1979 with her paper on the “unhappy marriage” of Marxism and feminism, with its nascent privilege theory and allyship argument against “patriarchal capitalism,” a much less anaemic academy produced less than two years later an anthology dedicated to thinking about what might be wrong with Hartmann’s approach, including an essay by also-ran Emily Hicks titled “Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice.”18 And all of these were feminist scholars! In those days, it seems, people were still working to answer burning questions rather than burning the answers to questions that people were still working on. Along these lines, how is it that Bill Burr’s recent stand-up comedy film, Drop Dead Years, can be lionized for a few paltry words about Gaza when at the same time he laments not knowing, because he’s middle-aged, what word he can use to replace “faggot,” which has a nice alliterative sound, he says, when combined with “fucking”?18 When people are tired of feeling cowed, a minor exception like Burr, or perhaps mushrooms, might be effective as a release. But the middle class has its uses for the working class, in entertainment, art and politics, as it does in employment, or as the object of its professional ministrations. One might think that this mystique runs deep indeed when the working class – unemployed, sick, humiliated, impoverished, downsized, offshored, homeless, flexibilized, deported, maimed and bombed – thinks of itself as middle-class and is impressed by a cloying Democratic Party rump, fearing for good reason to draw the same conclusions as the survivors of the Holocaust: never again.
Notes
1. Walter Einenkel, “Watch AOC and Sanders rip into Republicans on powerful swing state tour,” Daily Kos (March 21, 2025), https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/21/2311693/-Watch-AOC-and-Sanders-rip-into-Republicans-on-powerful-swing-state-tour.
2. Cited in Eloise Goldsmith, “Sanders, AOC Draw Biggest Crowd of Their Careers at Rally to Fight ‘Oligarchy’ in Denver,” Common Dreams (March 22, 2025), https://www.commondreams.org/news/sanders-aoc-fight-oligarchy-denver.
3. For the latest on this front, see Benjamin Mateus, “New York Times resurrects debunked Wuhan Lab Lie,” World Socialist Web Site (March 21, 2025), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/03/22/amgj-m22.html. This article indirectly criticizes the attack on gain of function research by critics like Andrew Kimbrell, as promoted for example by the Ralph Nader Radio Hour. See Editor, “Next Lab Leak [sic] Could Kill Hundreds of Millions,” Corporate Crime Reporter (February 21, 2025), https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/next-lab-leak-could-kill-hundreds-of-millions/.
4. See 9news, “AOC, Bernie Sanders holding ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ rallies in Denver,” YouTube (March 21, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C232Zq_MUFA.
5. See Eliza Brooke, “Why funky ’70s-style fonts are popping up on brands like Chobani and Glossier,” Vox (April 10, 2019), https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/4/10/18302108/noticed-70s-fonts-serifs-chobani-flesh-glossier-play. On this subject, see in comparison, Owen Hatherley, “Sheer Noise,” NLR Sidecar (February 19, 2025), https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sheer-noise.
6. The White House, Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, January 29, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/.
7. Ben Norton, “Trump plans to make Ukraine a US economic colony, exploiting its critical minerals,” Geopolitical Economy Report (March 2, 2025), https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/03/02/trump-ukraine-us-economic-colony-minerals/. On the problems with postmodern leftism, see, from the left, Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., No Politics But Class Politics, eds. Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora (London: Eris, 2022). And from the right (problematic but nevertheless helpful), see Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity (Durham: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
8. Consider for example, Vance’s opportunist criticism of Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts as a reflection of the fact that it is a South African who is making him look bad. Sabby Sabs, “JD Vance EXPLODES In Leaked Audio?” YouTube (March 24, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8Nem5Ks1Ec.
9. Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper Collins, 2017).
10. See Third Way, “Comeback Retreat,” Politico (February 2025), https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000195-5511-d4a2-afbf-dd7121940000.
11. See also Report, “Renewing the Democratic Party,” Third Way (February 2, 2025), https://www.thirdway.org/report/renewing-the-democratic-party.
12. Benedict Viggers, “Half of Ukrainians Want Quick, Negotiated End to War,” Gallup (November 19, 2024), https://news.gallup.com/poll/653495/half-ukrainians-quick-negotiated-end-war.aspx.
13. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).
14. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 96.
15. See Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan to Tumblr (Winchester: Zero Books, 2017).
15. Mike Bedigan, “Oscars’ host Conan O’Brien draws resounding applause for crack about ‘standing up to a powerful Russian’,” The Independent (March 3, 2025), https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/conan-obrien-trump-joke-oscars-russia-b2707738.html.
16. Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, “Marx 10/13 | Marx and Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism with Cornel West [HD],” YouTube (March 12, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jt1hvsZcHSQ. See on this subject Greg Meyerson, “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Cultural Logic, vol.6 (April 2000), https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192628; William I. Robinson, Salvador Rangel and Hilbourne A. Watson, “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique,” The Philosophical Salon (October 3, 2022), https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cult-of-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism-a-proletarian-critique/; Cedric Johnson, “The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism,” nonsite (January 29, 2025), https://nonsite.org/the-wrong-duree-the-politics-of-cedric-j-robinsons-racial-capitalism/.
17. See Lydia Sargent, ed. Women & Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981).
18. See for example, Due Dissidence, “Bill Burr TRASHES Israel and Elon, MAGA Can’t Handle It,” YouTube (March 22, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx59jfVksBk; Secular Talk, “WATCH: Comedian Bill Burr GOES OFF On Israel | The Kyle Kulinski Show,” YouTube (March 18, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5DSFcucGjM.