Activism
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April 16, 2025
The senator is constructing a motion, and he is aware of younger voters are important to creating it work.
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Bernie Sanders on the Coachella music competition.
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When Bernie Sanders noticed that Democrats in Washington have been failing to mount a sufficiently efficient, not to mention inspiring, opposition to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the impartial senator from Vermont determined to guess on the folks of the US. As a billionaire president and the richest man on this planet have been ripping aside the social security web to be able to fund huge tax cuts for themselves and their elite cabal of Mar-a-Lago visiting supplicants, Sanders made no secret in late January and early February of the truth that he was annoyed with the unfocused and sometimes muted pushback from the congressional Democrats who repeatedly underestimated the menace posed by the brand new administration’s growing authoritarianism—and by the all-too-obvious plan of Trump and Musk to consolidate wealth and energy within the palms of their billionaire class. But he held out religion that grassroots Individuals noticed the menace and have been able to push again in opposition to it.
So Sanders launched the “Preventing Oligarchy” tour, an initially modest initiative that focused Republican-held congressional districts the place, Sanders hoped, it could be doable to rally sufficient folks to persuade GOP representatives to push again in opposition to a number of the worst, and most unpopular strikes by Trump and Musk: threats to Social Safety, Medicare and Medicaid; assaults on packages to struggle starvation and assist veterans; the wholesale abandonment of efforts to fight the local weather disaster; and tax schemes that may actually redistribute wealth upwards.
Sanders began on February 21 in Omaha, and 1000’s confirmed up. Hundreds extra got here the following day in Iowa Metropolis. By the point he bought to Kenosha, Wisconsin, in early March, the tour had moved from theaters to sports activities arenas. Then, the rallies moved open air, as tens of 1000’s of indignant, frightened, and but decided Individuals confirmed up in Denver and Tucson and communities throughout the West.
The senator, who bought effectively acquainted with massive rallies throughout his 2016 and 2020 rebel bids for the Democratic presidential nomination, was now drawing even greater crowds for a marketing campaign that was not a couple of candidate however fairly a couple of trigger—one he summed up at early rallies with a mirrored image on Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Tackle.
“Lincoln was looking on the fields of Gettysburg, the place 1000’s and 1000’s of troopers had died in a horribly bloody battle to finish the horror of slavery,” he advised the gang that packed an overflow room in downtown Iowa Metropolis on a frigid day in February. “And he seems out on that battlefield, the place so many individuals had died only a few days earlier than, and that is what he mentioned: ‘We right here extremely resolve that these useless shall not have died in useless—that this nation, below God, shall have a brand new start of freedom and that authorities of the folks, by the folks, for the folks shall not perish from the earth.’”
As Sanders spoke Lincoln’s phrases, the gang started to echo them, with a chant rising from the again of the corridor and surging all through the room the place college students, younger mother and father, public staff, and retirees had gathered to take again American politics, to take again their nation, to take again their future.
“Of the folks…”
“By the folks…”
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“For the folks…”
Loud applause erupted because the senator declared, “That’s what this wrestle is about! 100 fifty years later, it’s the identical wrestle.… We consider in a authorities of the folks, by the folks, for the folks—not a authorities of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”
Perhaps it was that second. Perhaps it was a number of weeks later, when US Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez started to affix Sanders on stage, amplifying and increasing his message with a pitch-perfect critique of the how “an excessive focus of energy, greed and corruption is taking up this nation like by no means earlier than.” However sooner or later, the tour grew to become greater than an train in rallying the ideologically and politically devoted opponents of Trump and Musk. Instantly, it grew to become crystal clear that this was about motion constructing. Sure, a motion in opposition to Trump’s authoritarianism and Musk’s insanity. Nevertheless it was greater than that. The Preventing Oligarchy tour moved past the desperation of Trump’s first 100 days towards one thing greater: the hope that one other politics, higher than what Republicans or Democrats had supplied, would possibly actually be doable.
That hope was on show on Saturday in Los Angeles, as 36,000 folks—the most important crowd of Sanders’s decades-long political profession— turned out to cheer the senator, AOC, former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), California Home members Ro Khanna and Jimmy Gomez, and Neil Younger, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, and the Increase Gospel Choir. When thunderous roars of “Bernie! Bernie!” erupted from the gang, Sanders mentioned, “It’s not Bernie! It’s you!”
“Your presence right here at this time is making Donald Trump and Elon Musk very nervous,” declared Sanders. What, undoubtedly, made the oligarchs much more nervous got here subsequent, when the tour turned out 20,000 at Salt Lake Metropolis within the ruby-red state of Utah on Sunday and 12,500 on Monday in an Idaho county that gave 72 p.c of its vote to Trump simply final 12 months. And when Sanders and AOC returned to California on Tuesday and drew an estimated 30,000 at Folsom Lake Group Faculty in a swing district that has a Republican congressman and backed Trump, the tour’s success was self-evident.
Nevertheless it was not simply the scheduled occasions that illustrated the audacious ambition of the “Preventing Oligarchy” tour. It was a shock cease at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Competition on Saturday evening that illustrated Sanders’s hanging willpower to construct the motion.
After the LA rally, the indefatigable 83-year-old senator traveled into the arid California desert to take the stage earlier than 1000’s of followers who had gathered to listen to singer-songwriter Claire Elizabeth Cottrill, who performs as Clairo. Talking on a Saturday evening, earlier than probably the most anticipated performances at one of many largest music festivals on this planet, just isn’t a typical transfer for a political determine. However it’s what motion builders do. And that’s what Sanders and the youngest member of the US Home, 28-year-old Florida Democrat Maxwell Frost, did at Coachella. The gang hadn’t turned up for a political occasion—although Clairo has lengthy been engaged with political and humanitarian causes—however they gave Sanders and Frost a wildly enthusiastic response all the identical.
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Sanders got here to Coachella with counsel for younger folks, whom polls present are more and more against Trump however who’re additionally justifiably annoyed with a Democratic Celebration that has didn’t operate as an efficient opposition. “This nation faces some very troublesome challenges,” the senator mentioned. “And the way forward for what occurs to America depends upon your era. And you’ll flip away and ignore what goes on, however if you happen to try this, you try this at your personal peril.”
That’s a message that Sanders will take to extra younger folks in additional venues, together with rallies in city facilities with free music, occasions on college and neighborhood school campuses, and, closest to his coronary heart, mobilizations at workplaces the place staff are organizing unions. The cease at Coachella was vital primarily as a result of it confirmed simply how far the Preventing Oligarchy tour can and can go to interrupt the boundaries of latest politics.
Talking for only some minutes from the live performance stage, Sanders rapidly did what too many Democrats fail to do: He sincerely requested younger Individuals to be part of a motion to beat Trump and Musk—and to form the long run that rejects oligarchy and authoritarianism.
“We want you to struggle for justice, to struggle for financial justice, social justice, and racial justice,” he mentioned as cheers rose from the 1000’s of concertgoers. “We’ve bought a president of the US…” Because the senator referenced Trump, the gang erupted with boos and worse. Unfazed, Sanders shouted, “I agree!” Then he ripped into Trump, saying, “He thinks that local weather change is a hoax. He’s dangerously incorrect. And also you and I are going to have to face as much as the fossil gasoline trade and inform them to cease destroying this planet.”
Particularly, Sanders invited younger voters to embrace the struggle in opposition to oligarchy, telling the concertgoers, “We’ve an financial system at this time that’s working very effectively for the billionaire class, however not for working households. We want you to assist us to create an financial system that works effectively for everyone, not simply the 1 p.c. We’ve a healthcare system that’s damaged. We’re the one main nation to not assure healthcare to all folks. We want you to face as much as the insurance coverage firms and the drug firms and perceive that healthcare is a human proper.”
However the senator didn’t cease there. He particularly referenced the Israeli assault on Gaza, an enormous difficulty with younger voters however one which too many Democrats keep away from addressing. Referencing Clairo’s political advocacy, he mentioned, “I’m right here as a result of Clairo has used her prominence to struggle for girls’s rights, to attempt to finish the horrible, brutal warfare in Gaza, the place 1000’s of girls and kids are being killed.”
The point out of Gaza, the place greater than 48,000 Palestinian males, ladies, and kids have died throughout an ongoing Israeli assault on the enclave, spoke to the gang—and to the nice mass of younger voters who might be important to blocking Trump and Musk electorally in 2025 and 2026. Sanders acknowledged that reality together with his cease at Coachella, and with the respect he confirmed for the problems and the beliefs that should underpin the motion he and AOC and so many others are constructing, in purple states and blue states, at mass rallies in congressional swing districts, and on Saturday nights at music festivals within the deserts of Southern California.
The chaos and cruelty of the Trump administration reaches new lows every week.
Trump’s catastrophic “Liberation Day” has wreaked havoc on the world financial system and arrange yet one more constitutional disaster at house. Plainclothes officers proceed to abduct college college students off the streets. So-called “enemy aliens” are flown overseas to a mega jail in opposition to the orders of the courts. And Signalgate guarantees to be the primary of many incompetence scandals that expose the brutal violence on the core of the American empire.
At a time when elite universities, highly effective legislation corporations, and influential media retailers are capitulating to Trump’s intimidation, The Nation is extra decided than ever earlier than to carry the highly effective to account.
In simply the final month, we’ve revealed reporting on how Trump outsources his mass deportation agenda to different nations, uncovered the administration’s enchantment to obscure legal guidelines to hold out its repressive agenda, and amplified the voices of courageous pupil activists focused by universities.
We additionally proceed to inform the tales of those that struggle again in opposition to Trump and Musk, whether or not on the streets in rising protest actions, on the town halls throughout the nation, or in vital state elections—like Wisconsin’s latest state Supreme Courtroom race—that present a mannequin for resisting Trumpism and show that Musk can’t purchase our democracy.
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In solidarity,
The Editors
The Nation
John Nichols
John Nichols is a nationwide affairs correspondent for The Nation. He has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on subjects starting from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Celebration to analyses of US and world media techniques. His newest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Instances bestseller It is OK to Be Indignant About Capitalism.
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