In a recent CNN town hall, an audience member named Grace Thomas asked Bernie Sanders how the Democrats could win back men, particularly white men, without abandoning marginalized communities. A fiery Sanders, who moments later would be shouting at Anderson Cooper about CNN’s insufficient attention to America’s health care crisis, answered Grace with his nice-Jewish-grandpa-explains-right-and-wrong voice. There are certainly things that Americans disagree over, he said, but there are also many things most of us agree on, particularly when it comes to economic issues that impact people’s daily lives.
To illustrate, Sanders asked the bipartisan audience a question of his own: “Who thinks the American health care system is broken?” Everyone raised their hands.
While President Donald Trump and his brigade of billionaires ransack the federal government, Sanders is one of the few opposition politicians actually trying to do politics. His tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has drawn packed crowds across the country. Their message: fight oligarchy by standing up to corporations and addressing the pressing needs of the working majority.
Despite drawing these huge crowds, the energy that Bernie and AOC are gathering has few places to go in electoral politics. There is no way to get the kinds of policies they talk about through the current legislature, neither of them are running for office at the moment, and the Democratic Party has proven that it will resist its social democratic wing harder than it does MAGA.
The Fighting Oligarchy Tour’s success is driven by Bernie’s and AOC’s ability to validate the frustrations of the American majority and connect working-class grievances to commonsense solutions that put people before…
Auteur: Ben Case
