Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fight the Oligarchy

On a recent Saturday, a group of rank-and-file Democrats, standing in the blinding midday sun on a football field in Tucson, Arizona, spoke about their frustrations with their party.

“They’re not stepping up,” a retired nurse named Mark Creal said. “No spine, no backbone,” he added. “They’re not doing their jobs.” He wore a button that said “Proud Democrat.”

It was shortly before noon, and thousands of people were in the process of filing through a security checkpoint onto the field at Catalina High School. They were there for the latest stop of the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, a series of rallies organized by Senator Bernie Sanders which have, in recent weeks, garnered attention for attracting significant crowds: at a rally in Denver the day before, Sanders and the New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had reportedly drawn thirty-four thousand people. (By way of comparison, Vice-President Kamala Harris’s appearance in Houston, with Beyoncé, late in her campaign, had drawn some thirty thousand people; President Trump’s preëlection extravaganza at Madison Square Garden had had an audience of nearly twenty thousand.) But the 2024 election proved that in-person displays of enthusiasm are not an adequate measure of political strength—the collective political imagination is increasingly defined by social media. Still, in Tucson, it seemed striking that thousands of people (the organizers reported a crowd of twenty thousand) had turned out on a Saturday to see three out-of-state politicians—Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Greg Casar, a young congressman from Austin—none of whom is actively campaigning for national office. As an attendee named Cindy Brooks told me, “I’ve never really heard Bernie speak from end to end, and that’s why I’m here, because I want to hear everything that he has to say.”

Sanders had begun the tour in late February, starting with stops in Midwestern congressional districts where Republicans had eked out narrow majorities. It’s not the first time the senator has held rallies in the off-season—in 2017, during Trump’s first six months in office, Sanders held more than a dozen events promoting progressive issues. In the speeches on this tour, his policy proposals hadn’t changed much: Medicare for All, free tuition for college and trade schools, building more affordable housing, taxing the rich. Now, however, the mood was different. As Trump, in collaboration with Elon Musk, has embarked on efforts to decimate the federal government, public political gatherings—in particular, appearances by Republicans in their home districts—have become flash points for an angry citizenry. In March, House Speaker Mike Johnson encouraged Republican lawmakers to skip town halls to avoid confrontations with what he claimed were paid protesters, and during last week’s congressional recess many Republican lawmakers avoided open forums.

On March 14th, following Sanders’s lead and perhaps attempting to fill the vacuum left by Republicans, the Democratic Party announced that it would be holding its own series of “People’s Town Halls” in congressional districts won by Republicans they consider to be vulnerable. Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota and losing 2024 Vice-Presidential candidate, hit the road, paying visits to G.O.P. districts in Wisconsin and Iowa, and Ro Khanna, the California congressman whose district includes parts of the Bay Area, toured three of his state’s red districts. But, at a time when the Democratic Party’s approval rating is at a historic low, constituents are venting their exasperation with their party as well. After Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer supported a Republican spending bill to prevent a government shutdown, public outcry against him was pronounced enough that he postponed a planned book tour. And rock-bottom favorability ratings aren’t the Party’s only problem: it’s also facing a grim map for Senate races in 2026; a demographic crisis, as the populations of its strongholds shrink; and legislative incapacitation because of conservative majorities in both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court.

Sanders, who at eighty-three years old is not up for reëlection until 2030, has suggested that this term may be his last, although he has filed papers for his Senate candidacy. He had arrived in Tucson on Saturday after what was a contentious week in Arizona. There was a protest of several hundred people outside a Tucson Tesla dealership, and constituents at a meeting in Scottsdale accused Arizona’s Democratic senators, Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego, of not putting up enough of a fight against Republicans. In Chandler, at an event where Republican congressman Andy Biggs appeared, only registered Republicans were allowed to attend, leaving those excluded to protest outside. Instead, protesters gathered outside and denounced him. Several hundred protesters also visited the office of Representative Juan Ciscomani, a Republican whose district includes parts parts of Tucson, to criticize him for not holding any public meetings at all.

But none of these gatherings had attracted the same attention, or the same crowds, as Sanders and his special guest, Ocasio-Cortez. The people I spoke to had shown up in part because Sanders is an Independent. “I don’t know if I’m part of the Party anymore—they’ve really failed us in a lot of ways,” a twenty-eight-year-old named Brendan Crowley said to me, of the Democrats. “They need to work on messaging, they need to work on getting the Old Guard out of office and actually letting the progressive wing of the Party that represents the people through.” Out in the crowd, a medic was called to attend to someone who’d fainted in the heat—the first of several such incidents. Crowley, who had dressed practically for the weather in a sun hoodie and a wide-brimmed hat, works as an H.V.A.C. technician—“a tradesman,” he said. He scanned the crowd. “There aren’t a lot of us here.” I asked about those of his co-workers who support Trump. “They have grievances against the economic state of America. They feel left behind, they feel that their voices aren’t heard,” he said. “The grandstanding of the Democratic Party has totally looked down on them.”

“Nothing’s happening that’s supposed to be happening,” a forty-year-old named Nikki Montaño Brown told me. She was at the rally with her adult daughter. Brown lives in Tucson, where she has worked as a cashier at the grocery chain Albertsons for twenty-five years. “It’s always been a fight, but this is the biggest fight we’ve had right now in my whole life,” she said. “That’s it, no one’s helping us at all.”

The crowd’s attire was a retrospective of Democratic memes dating back to at least 2016: I saw a coconut; I saw merchandise from Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns, and Moms Demand Action T-shirts. Had it not been for the weather, there probably would have been a pussy hat. I asked an attendee, Tracy Wood, whether she thought rallies really accomplished anything. “They’re important emotionally,” she said. “It lifts you up to know that this many people actually care.”

“I wanted to hear the positive message after all the negative that’s been going on,” another attendee, Matilda Martinez, told me. She is of the Navajo clan Naakai Dine’é and had travelled to the rally from her home on the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. She expressed her disappointment in Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader. “They are not fighting for us,” she said. “The only ones that I see speaking out are Jasmine Crockett”—a congresswoman from Texas—“A.O.C., and Bernie Sanders.”

Shannon Hardnock wore a beige visor and a shirt that said “MORONS ARE GOVERNING AMERICA.” “We’re really being taken over by a dictatorship, and it’s a really scary time,” she said. She expressed worry about the cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs—her husband is a veteran who had a traumatic brain injury during a training exercise before a planned deployment to Afghanistan in 2001. She was not angry at the Democrats, though—“I feel like their hands are tied,” she said.

After a performance by the indie rock band Calexico and an introduction by one of the late Raúl Grijalva’s daughters—Grijalva was a long-serving Democratic congressman from Tucson, who died on March 13th—the headliners gave their speeches. Standing at a lectern affixed with a “FIGHT OLIGARCHY” sign, they hammered home a single message: the government has been taken hostage by a cabal of billionaires, and the only way to wrest it back is by unifying the working class. “In the nineteen-twenties, the robber barons, the Elon Musks of their day—they took over our government, enriched themselves, and caused the Great Depression,” Casar, who in his two years in office has risen to chair the House Progressive Caucus, said. “But people just like you didn’t play dead.”

Ocasio-Cortez followed this speech with more. “Donald Trump and the Republican Party’s disdain for the working class doesn’t just come from not being raised right,” she said. “It’s a shorthand for the right wing’s entire political agenda and a certain ugly kind of politics that at its core is about lying to and screwing over working- and middle-class Americans.” She continued, “But there’s a word for this kind of thing, Tucson. You know it: ‘corruption.’ ”

When Sanders took to the stage, he stood between his young protégés, putting his arms around their shoulders like a proud uncle. He spoke of the “other Alexandrias and Alexanders” out there in America, waiting to run for office. Sanders has been warning about the growing threat of an oligarchy for years. Now, he implied in his speech, he no longer needed to explain what it meant to the American people. In January, he said, he’d had a front-row seat to an Inauguration at which the President took the oath of office flanked by Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk—the three richest men in America—with at least a dozen other billionaires arrayed behind them.

“The truth is that right now in America, the people on top have never, ever in the history of our country, had it so good,” Sanders said. “These guys literally don’t know what to do with their money. They buy one mansion, two mansions, not enough. They’ve got five mansions. They want to get around? They own their own jet planes; they own their own helicopters. Send their kids to the best private schools, the best colleges. Go on vacation, they don’t go to Motel 6. They own their own islands, and just for kicks, the very rich decide to take a trip to outer space.”

His audience erupted into loud boos. But both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez seemed to acknowledge that many Americans prefer to ally themselves with the richest person rather than the poorest, or have lost faith entirely in the idea of a functioning government. “What Republicans do is that they try to make working people like you and me feel like we’re just one step outside of that club, that if we just work a little bit harder, maybe we’ll be a billionaire too,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Except those kinds of spoils aren’t earned, Tucson. They’re stolen.”

Where does that leave demoralized progressives? After the rally, Sanders spoke with reporters in the high-school gym. He seemed tired but not defeated. For the most recent events, he said, a majority of the people who R.S.V.P.ed weren’t already in his campaign’s database. He brushed away concerns that young adults voted more conservatively in the most recent election than they had before, and he came back to people’s views of the Democrats. “They’re seeing their position on supporting Netanyahu,” he said. “These young people can’t pay rent. They’re earning horrific wages. The standard of living is going to be lower than their parents’. They say, ‘Where are the Democrats?’ ” After Sanders departed, Casar stayed on. He acknowledged that whatever might pass as mass resistance to the policies of Trump’s second term had been slower to materialize than resistance to the President’s policies the first time around. But he suggested that the divide within the Democratic Party was less between right and left than between what he called “fighters and folders,” the latter being “people who say, ‘Well, the Democratic Party should just not do much, they should just fold and let the Republicans look bad.’ But that is playing some sort of political game,” he continued, “where most people don’t think of their lives as a political game. They think of their lives as their only life on earth.” ♦