On Saturday, a modest crowd braved on-and-off thunderstorms to pack Brooklyn College’s 2,400-capacity Claire Tow Theater for the latest stop on Bernie Sanders’s “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. The town hall was far from the biggest stop on the tour, which drew tens of thousands to rallies earlier this year.
For many in attendance, though, this event was freighted with symbolism. It was a homecoming for Sanders, who briefly attended Brooklyn College and grew up close by. And it was the first time on the barnstorming tour that the Vermont senator was sharing the stage with Zohran Mamdani, the young democratic socialist front-runner for New York City mayor, who spoke at length about his political debt to Sanders.
“It was Bernie’s campaign for the presidency in 2016 that gave me the language of democratic socialism to describe my politics,” Mamdani said. “And it was Bernie’s Queensbridge rally on October 19, 2019, that was the first political event of my campaign for state assembly.”
Mamdani also pointed to Sanders’s insurgent 1981 campaign for mayor of Burlington, and his success in governing the city for the next eight years, as a model. Throughout the evening, Mamdani emphasized a long-standing theme of Sanders’s: that major social change will happen only if masses of ordinary people organize for it: “We are not just here together with the message to come out and vote in November, though that is critically important. We will continue to organize beyond the election. We will continue to organize because we have an agenda to win.”
Sanders was in typical fiery form, shouting as he railed against extreme inequality and consolidation of wealth and oligarchic control over the government and media. And he denounced Democratic…
Auteur: Nick French
