Donald Trump’s authoritarian assault on the country has drawn several different responses from Democrats. James Carville suggested that Democratic politicians should play dead. New Jersey senator Cory Booker talked on the Senate floor for twenty-five consecutive hours. Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer tried to bargain with Trump and found herself turned into a stage prop in the Oval Office. Of course, it is genuinely hard to know what Democrats should do. They’re shut out of both houses of Congress, the party’s brand is badly tarnished, and they’re up against a foe willing to wield executive power to extort, silence, and jail perceived enemies. Still, embarrassed negotiation, performative resistance, and doing nothing all seem like inadequate options.
For his part, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders has taken to the road. His “Fighting Oligarchy Tour,” which has featured Democratic Congress members like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Ro Khanna of California, has drawn crowds of more than thirty thousand people. Without an election in sight, Sanders’s crowds are regularly exceeding what both Trump and Kamala Harris drew during the 2024 campaign. I don’t want to indulge in what President Obama once called Trump’s “weird obsession with crowd sizes.” Still, for a party whose favorability ratings have dropped to an all-time low, the tour’s popularity is a sign of hope.
The trouble for Democrats—as always with the movement behind Sanders—is that he’s not one. His winding path with the party has taken yet another turn. After a surprisingly successful attempt to win the party’s presidential nomination in 2016, a somewhat more traditional campaign in 2020 led to some measure of influence over the Biden agenda. Now, Sanders is back to a more familiar position, once again more openly critical of the party and trying to foster a movement that will operate outside it if necessary. “If there’s any hope for the Democratic Party,” he told The New York Times, “it is that they’re going to...open the doors and...let working-class leadership come into the party. If not, people will be running as independents, I think, all over this country.”
Besides Sanders’s advocacy for universalist social programs like Medicare for All, a central difference between him and the Democratic Party’s current leadership lies right there in the title of the tour. It’s not the “Fighting Trump Tour.” Sanders’s diagnosis of Trumpism has always been more structural, while mainstream party messaging has tended toward the personal. Of course, criticism of Trump’s character and behavior is warranted and welcome—even necessary—but focusing only on his personal defects, and not on problems of inequality and corporate power, has been an abject failure. One could argue it has only made Trump stronger. Meanwhile, the alliance between MAGA and big business, especially the tech industry, has given the Sanders diagnosis yet more validation. “This moment did not come out of nowhere,” as Ocasio-Cortez put it at the tour’s Los Angeles stop. “The destruction of our rights and democracy is directly tied to the…extreme wealth inequality that has been growing for years in America.”
How will centrist Democrats react? In policy circles, much of the recent focus has been on Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundance, which places blame for our current predicament on well-intentioned but stifling progressive regulation. Matt Yglesias, meanwhile, sees in Trump’s tariff fiasco an opportunity for the Democrats to win back the tech industry. Whatever one thinks of these ideas, they lack popular resonance and recall the missteps of the neoliberal Clinton and Obama years. More importantly, they fail to give any account of the dire transformation the country now seems to be completing, from liberal democracy to authoritarian plutocracy. There is no longer any plausible way to oppose Trump without opposing the larger forces that facilitated his rise to power.
