Bernie Sanders Is Packing Arenas on His Anti-oligarchy Tour: “People Are Really, Really Concerned”

It was a Friday night in Wisconsin, and Bernie Sanders was about to kick off the second leg of his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour—a series of campaign-style rallies in Republican districts that had already taken him to Iowa and Nebraska, where there seemed to be a rare font of energy in what has otherwise been a season of deep Democratic despair. Outside the De Simone Arena at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, a few people in MAGA hats stood behind a sign reading, “Get the hell out of my state, commie.” Inside, though, the place was buzzing as a capacity crowd waited for the Vermont senator to take the stage.

But waiting in the wings were reporters to spar with first. “Just don’t ask any stupid questions,” he told me as he sat down next to me in a back hallway of the stadium, after cutting off two other interviewers who’d asked questions related to the leadership void at the top of the Democratic Party. “I’ll try not to,” I replied.

We were just outside Kenosha—the site of the deadly 2020 Black Lives Matter protest shooting that made Kyle Rittenhouse a right-wing cause célèbre. The small city is represented mostly by Democrats, but Kenosha County, long a blue stronghold, went for Donald Trump in the last three cycles. In fact, in the 2024 election, he won the county by just over six points—a reflection of Democrats’ waning power outside urban centers and with the working-class voters who once formed the core of their political base.

Which is why I launched into a question about the blistering statement Sanders had issued after his own party’s disastrous 2024 election. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he’d written, wondering if party members would “learn any real lessons” from the loss. “Probably not,” he’d concluded in that November assessment. I wanted to know if the party had done anything in the four months since to give him hope he might be proved wrong.

“Oh, you’re off to a stupid remark. I don’t want to talk about the Democrats,” Sanders said. “You want to talk to the Democrats? I’ll give you Chuck Schumer’s number.”

What he wanted to talk about was the greed and corruption he’s been railing against his whole career. It’s the same kind of greed and corruption that has seemed to be reaching its apex in Trump’s government—a radical, historically wealthy administration that has been bulldozing America’s democracy, demolishing its institutions, and reconstituting the rubble according to its specifications. “People are really, really concerned about what’s going on in Washington right now,” the independent senator said. “They are concerned that we’re moving into an oligarchy, with people like [Elon] Musk having uncontrollable power. They’re concerned about the movement toward authoritarianism, where Trump is ignoring the separation of powers. And they are very concerned about this legislation coming down the pike—which is why I am in this district at this time—where there’ll be huge tax breaks for billionaires and cuts in Medicaid, nutrition, education.”

The message was akin to the one he’s been hammering for over a decade, which powered two insurgent but ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaigns and inspired a new class of rising Democratic stars, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now—weeks into Trump’s second term—it seemed to be just about the only message from the opposition party that was resonating.

That energy was on display when Sanders took the stage, following a set by the punk musician Laura Jane Grace and rousing speeches by local Democrats, including Representative Mark Pocan and Randy “IronStache” Bryce, who mounted a progressive run for then Speaker Paul Ryan’s seat in 2018.

“I didn’t know there were this many people in Kenosha!” Sanders said over “Bernie!” chants.

The Division II arena—home of the Parkside Rangers—was filled to the rafters with 3,000 people. Another 500 watched from an overflow room, and the senator’s team said 500 more were turned away at the door. What, exactly, crowds like this mean has become a matter of political debate. To some more moderate figures in the Democratic ecosphere, such turnout may just seem to be a reflection of Sanders’s celebrity: Of course a two-time presidential candidate is going to draw a few thousand people in places like Kenosha, the Wisconsin city of Altoona, and Warren, Michigan, where he was headed the next day. He’s Bernie! But others see something more in all this—a political hunger that has yet to be sated by the Democratic establishment.

Some in the crowd had been following him for a long time; one guy told me he’d gotten the shirt he was wearing with Sanders’s face on it years ago—before the senator’s 2016 run for the Democratic nomination—when Sanders had spoken at Fighting Bob Fest, the annual celebration of Wisconsin political icon Robert La Follette. (In addition to the Sanders shirt, the man wore a hat with about a dozen political pins on it, along with one that read: “IT’S WEIRD TO BE THE SAME AGE AS OLD PEOPLE.”)

But there were many younger people there, like Alex McDonough, a farmer who came from about three hours away to see Sanders speak: “He’s not like a regular Democrat,” McDonough told me. Like a lot of people in the room that Friday night, McDonough had been feeling demoralized by the Democrats’ loss in November and exhausted by Trump’s relentless onslaught over the last six weeks. But he loves Sanders’s policies and idealism, he told me, and was especially struck by the senator’s plea to the crowd that “despair is not an option”: “We are here to say loudly and clearly that in our great nation, we will not accept oligarchy. We will not accept authoritarianism. We will not accept kleptocracy,” Sanders said at the top of his remarks. “We’re here to make it clear that we’re gonna fight back and we are going to win.”

“The oligarchs are enormously powerful,” he added later. But “I am convinced that they can be beaten.”

The question hanging over all this—another “stupid” one, maybe?—is how.

With Democrats shut out of formal power in Washington, some, like James Carville, have suggested that the only option they have is to “play dead” and let Republicans destroy themselves—a strategy he likened to the “rope-a-dope” tactic Muhammad Ali used to defeat George Foreman in 1974’s Rumble in the Jungle. (The analogy is a bit on the nose, perhaps, for Carville, the embodiment of a strategist class that has too often treated politics as sport.) Sanders has rejected that approach—“Democrats have been playing dead for too many years,” he said on Meet the Press recently—and called for a more assertive response: “Giving up,” he told the Kenosha crowd, “is not acceptable.” If they can notch some victories—including in Wisconsin’s upcoming state Supreme Court election, which Musk-backed groups have been pouring money into—and turn up the pressure on the Republican lawmakers who do have power in DC, maybe they can at least slow the handful of billionaires running the country. “Ninety-nine percent,” Sanders said, “is a hell of a lot bigger number than 1%.”

But those in the 99% need leaders, and Democrats have a void at the top. Sanders seems as vigorous as ever—the same charming curmudgeon he was as the Trump era dawned during the 2016 cycle. But at 83, he is older than both the president and his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden, the two oldest men to occupy the office. Which is to say that America isn’t only an oligarchy; it’s a gerontocracy that’s desperate for a new generation to take the reins.

The problem, perhaps, for progressives—and Democrats more broadly, maybe? Even as figures like AOC come into their own, “there’s not an heir apparent for Bernie Sanders right now,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the Sanders-founded organization Our Revolution, told me recently. There’s no one quite as galvanizing, quite as uncompromising, quite as “able to speak truth, to provide an accurate interpretation of what’s happening without having to look over his shoulder.”

Which is a shame: Looking out over the crowd, I saw real energy waiting to be harnessed. It wasn’t just agony over America’s current backslide or fear for the future of the country; it was anger over the precarity that had set in over so many Americans’ lives in recent decades. Trump won over many of those “forgotten” Americans merely by acknowledging their malaise, even as he and his plutocratic allies loot the nation’s institutions and aggravate the problems already facing its citizens. Winning them back in the long term—and combating the ascendent MAGA movement more immediately—may require Democratic leadership capable of actually confronting that disillusionment. “To fight a false populist” like Trump, as Geevarghese put it, “you need a real populist.”