What's going on with these Bernie/AOC rallies?

Bernie and AOC are staging rallies that draw tens of thousands of people in red areas; how will what emerges avoid the pitfalls of what led us to this point?

Over the weekend, I made the mistake of tweeting an admittedly salty defense of the Bernie/AOC rallies that have been popping up across the country while the Democratic party sits on their asses with little stars floating around their heads after a knockout punch. I say mistake but I’m being sarcastic; I used to get worried when tweets would breach containment and send innumerable faceless accounts screaming in my mentions, but I realized that it doesn’t matter and I’m just some guy. One time a QAnon psycho got the cops sent to my house over a tweet, which was admittedly scary, but after that I realized that most dunking campaigns are generally the result of a desire to feel superior to something that annoys you. Meanwhile our collective attention span can’t even make it through 22 minute TV comedies anymore without checking our phones, so just mute and move on.

I have a few articles I am procrastinating on right now, so naturally, instead of working on those, I decided to spend some time in the trenches on Sunday afternoon responding to some of the less outlandish replies in order to suss out what the vibes are like out there. To be clear, my original tweet was a subtweet of particularly smart leftists who are not merely offering the necessary critique that these rallies have to be more than just that, but rather people who I respect and look up to laughing off 36,000 people showing up in one collective voice to organize against this emergent terrifying fascist project. They were all but making fun of the people who showed up for being naive. I think that’s just pure nihilism. I think it is dangerous, and stupid; as my good friend Dennis Hogan later said more succinctly, “I’m never going to have a problem with gathering thousands of people together, at one of the darkest moments in our country’s political history, to tell them that it is up to them to fight for a better world.” He’s right, and that seems to me the only response for any leftist who takes seriously what it means to respond to our duty in the current moment rather than just having The Right Analysis, which I’m tired of feeling like we have in our various circles, far away from the halls of power.

What I found in responding to my replies didn’t really surprise me. I still feel very new to political organizing and being “a lefty” I guess, as I grew up in a conservative household during the 90s and early 00s. At the same time I have lived through multiple waves of political formations over the past few decades and have seen the left’s response to many of them. Sometimes I forget that people now entering early adulthood were in middle school when Trump got elected the first time and that the only world they have ever known is the one that is currently decomposing in front of our eyes. I really feel for how insane that must make one feel, even if I think it causes some to return to mistakes that repeatedly plague the history of the left.

So in what follows I want to offer some brief reactions to this experience and the resulting ideas about the future of our political situation it helped sharpen.

1. The organization putting on these rallies needs to figure out how to articulate their plan to break from the entrenched leadership and institutions of the Democratic Party, and fast, if they want the left to trust them.

This is to me the clear and reasonable read of the situation. It responds to the completely legitimate skepticism many leftists are expressing after the experience of defeat and betrayal over the past two decades, from Obama to Harris. One of the things that has made Bernie seem trustworthy to non-ideologically rigid Americans is the way he’s been consistently arguing the same ideas for decades without swerving into this or that clearly focus-grouped trend the parties often orchestrate as a way to articulate their changing platform and projects. But while consistency is an asset, it is also important to adapt to unforeseen swerves in history’s trajectory. Sometimes foundational commitments require new articulations to respond to changing conditions on the ground.

Today we find ourselves in such a moment. In addition to the radical nature of Trump 2.0’s assault on constitutional and political norms, a more useful recent change has been the level of disillusionment Democratic Party voters increasingly feel over being failed in very specific and visible ways since 2008. Since Harris’ loss, even previously committed Democrats are expressing revulsion at the party, all while leftists have only further intensified their distrust of the existing electoral structure in our society. A core component of Bernie’s ideology since his first run has been to shift from his decades-long outsider status in Congress to an adoption of a kind of entryism, where a political subculture (Bernie’s Independent affiliation, for example) decides to effectively stage an invasion into existing institutions with the goal of eventually taking them over. The right are masters at this; this is how they enacted their long march through the institutions over the years to weaken the old guard of the GOP and hand it over entirely to their new MAGA coalition. Leftists are skeptical of entryism for many reasons, and it is true we don’t have a great track record of success. Bernie’s version of this project failed throughout the 2010s, and as a result, many people reasonably feel skepticism it will work again this time. As a wise man once said, Fool me twice…can’t get fooled again!

But something is different this time. It’s not just lefties who are increasingly skeptical of the Democratic party. It’s the base, normie liberal voters who are beginning to realize this entire institution is rotten from the inside out. And these rallies aren’t mobilizing that anger towards just Trump; they target capital itself—what they are calling “Oligarchy”—which attacks not only Elon but forces that exist to fund and influence the Democratic Party itself.

This is a contrast from earlier moments in our recent history, such as the 2020 Democratic primary. It’s true that the party establishment interfered before Super Tuesday to tip the scales in Biden’s favor. But they didn’t do this in a conspiratorial, man-behind-the-curtain way. Democratic party structure has historically reproduced itself through seniority, giving outsized power to figures like Obama who have their own political machines behind them even after they leave office. These old-school staffing machines are exactly how Hillary Clinton cleared the field in 2016 to effectively become the nominee before the primaries even took place, her political machine became entrenched within the apparatus of the Democratic Party itself to prepare her run. This is how the Democratic Party itself has functioned over the past few decades; the Republicans’ inability to retain this level of vertical integration following the Tea Party insurgency is precisely how MAGA gained total power over the party.

But despite all the doomsdaying about the end of democracy, it is true that voters still determine the outcome of elections in the United States. The GOP has long been scheming about ways to interfere in the way these votes get counted, or who is allowed to vote, but they don’t hold sham elections like you hear about in former Eastern Bloc states. They don’t Hack the Mainframe to change national vote totals, they are surgical, operating within close contests they can influence just enough. As

ettingermentum

pointed out on X recently, all the party really did in 2020 was reduce the options on the ballot between their chosen establishment pick (Biden) and the resulting branding of their only opponent as an untrustworthy radical (Bernie). But guess what? A sizable plurality of Democratic voters are afraid of radical change, and these voters are a key cog in the overlapping institutional machine that holds the levers of power in American society. Once Obama told everyone to drop out, these voters followed suit and voted for Biden, who won because there were more of them than us where it mattered. Bernie should have known this was going to happen, and that’s a whole other can of worms to get into. But it’s important that we be clear about what actually happened in 2020 if we want to understand our current situation.

Today the story with these voters is different. Read polling and watch clips from town halls featuring your average American voter: the Democratic Party as such has seriously lost legitimacy with the groups it formerly relied on for buy-in (not THE GROUPS!!). In the past, these voters have been able to tip the scale in the Party’s favor due to their centrality to the Democratic coalition: they are made up of homeowning liberals (this is important: they have a distinct relation to capital itself) who are skeptical of radicalism because their ability to reproduce their lifestyle is indexed to the health of their investments. Those investments were not in crisis in 2024. But today? Today, their increasing skepticism of the Democrats, alongside the unfolding economic crisis, provides us an opportunity to siphon off voters who were skeptical of Bernie now more willing to move left.

It would be one thing if Democratic Party was merely in a (terminal?) crisis of legitimacy for the average voter. This brings me to my second change, which is that the party itself is in the middle of an unfolding crisis of reproduction that was not a central contradiction in 2016, 20, or 24. This crisis impacts not only voter buy-in, it impacts the party itself. Currently, aging Dem leaders are literally dying, they are increasingly unable to reproduce their historic levels of embeddedness in the various party apparatuses across the country. White knuckling the car, they don’t even realize they are Thelma and Louiseing themselves right off a cliff. If an alternative can be organized while they remain on this trajectory, it’s not beyond reason to argue established Democratic interests might not have as much material power over the electoral process, both at the levels of voter trust, and of staffing within the party, which is where I now turn. Capital itself is increasingly turning to the right, while the infrastructure of the world’s oldest active political party is still out there.

Whatever skepticism you may have over all this, the following is just true: we are currently entering a long overdue generational shift in Democratic Party leadership. It’s already underway as senior leadership does things like poop their pants in press conferences and fall asleep during high-stakes diplomatic events. If entrenched political power has kept these figures in power up until now, the law of entropy eventually will step in the process as they march ever forward towards the great nothing that awaits us all on the other side.

The shit that launched a thousand ships

While the party does have their own set of hand-picked candidates like Hakeem Jeffries waiting in the wings, these Gen-Xers and younger boomers do not have the same trust of the donor classes or the generationally, institutionally entrenched power that figures such as Pelosi and Schumer have had for decades. This provides an opportunity to capture these institutions unawares—the only reason Bernie was as successful as he was in 2016. But as I have been arguing, it is urgently necessary for this project to articulate its plan to gain the trust of the left. Establishment Democrats cannot be anywhere near the decision-making center of this emerging political apparatus. This apparatus can easily fail. To work, it will require an idealist mode of address to normie liberals, encouraging them to get on board, while also having a clear plan to push the Cory Bookers and Gavin Newsoms away from any kind of leverage of oversight. It is a difficult needle to thread, but I believe it is necessary.

2. The Third Party Question

I will keep this one brief. In our first-past-the-post electoral system, third parties have only been successful when they emerge out of existing parties that face legitimacy crises; history has proven this. I think an eventual third party that breaks off from the Democrats (but only after it gains a plurality), or an eventual merging with existing institutions like the DSA (if it chose to become a political party), are the only proven methods for the creation of new political institutions that can actually challenge entrenched power in American society. You may disagree and that is a debate to have, but I think this could be what comes from the energy in these rallies if done right. I trust that is possible, but many on the left do not, and with good reason. Again, if they want this to work, they need to figure out how to express this plan fast or else Jill Stein and her personal slush fund will await us all.

3. The Anti-Imperialist Umbrella

In my 2024 election postmortem, I coined a less-than-satisfactory term to describe the various tendencies and movements on the left that encompass everyone from anarchists to self-identified Marxist-Leninists and other radical movements that are skeptical of electoralism: The Anti-Imperialist Umbrella:

Some of the most principled leftists I have ever met and whom I respect head to toe fall under this camp, but so do twenty-two year old posters who listened to a podcast about Domenico Losurdo and think that being a Marxist-Leninist is when you put a hammer and sickle in your bio and not, yknow, being a card-carrying member of an organization that would send the FBI to your door before you finish reading this article. The Anti-Imperialist leftists are absolutely correct in their denunciation of US Empire and what it actually looks like to enforce the global economic and political system that allows a plurality of Americans to feel like $6 Cheetos are reason enough to make abortion illegal…(but) we don’t have any organized or coherent leftist institutions in this country, and everyone is hopeless and upset about the situation we find ourselves in with no plans to do anything about it.

Most of the angry responses to my tweet came from various corners of The Umbrella. At some level, this is just the mistake this tendency often makes, declaring electoralism doomed but then obsessing over its details like a Baptist preacher who can tell you all about the backwards messages brainwashing teenagers to worship satan in obscure 1980s heavy metal records from Europe. But there is a more substantial critique that overlaps with some of this tendency; I will try and explain how I understand it below.

I need to express that I am in complete solidarity with the anti-imperialist groups and the movement for Palestine; they have done crucial work at rejecting the State’s colonization of the terms to describe what is a genocide, as well as the Democratic Party’s central role in facilitating it to the extent that even the IDF was surprised they got away with what Biden allowed them to.

Skepticism over Bernie and AOC from this tendency is well deserved. Bernie is 83 years old and of a time in American society that saw the Israeli state project in a very different light than those of us who grew up after the Cold War, or within the increasingly diverse voices in contemporary American society. As a Jewish American, Sanders has been uniquely positioned to provide a consistent critique of the Netanyahu administration, and he has, to an extent. However, he is not doing this in a way that comes out of the youth-led movements to oppose the settler project of Zionism, its language, and its strategy. He resists focusing his critique onto the State itself, which as I argue above, is an overdetermined position, but his position nonetheless. This would be the precise moment for Bernie to adapt to changing conditions, to follow the efforts of groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and our many student leaders. Just as I am arguing the left will only succeed if we unite across all fronts, Bernie’s refusal to follow on this issue has been a core failure. But I don’t think this matters all that much for the future. He’s 83 and these rallies are clearly meant as a passing of the torch to AOC, and the sooner everyone left of center gets Bernie Derangement Syndrome out of their heads, the better.

This brings us to AOC, who has not proven herself to be a “Zionist stooge” like some critics make her out to be, but rather just inconsistent and in possession of questionable political instincts. Her failure to support the Palestinians at the DNC Convention and her baffling choice to suggest Biden was “working tirelessly” to end the genocide was, I think, a mistaken attempt to have it both ways in a party that is looking for any excuse to eject her from power. She was probably trying to juggle her precarious relationship to the party apparatus while anxiously trying to assuage pro-Palestinian voices, who the rest of the DNC basically hopes fuck off forever. But this was a mistake. She needs to address this; whether she will be “Bernie’s successor” or just a crucial voice in the House. Her relationship to this project is important and she has to get this right.

So I can understand the skepticism of these two figures that results from these mistakes, or even the proposal to work within the Democratic Party itself. They very well might be right! But I worry this is an expression of political helplessness, as we watch our institutions either fail to stop the genocide or willingly go along with it as a crucial load-bearing policy to support American hegemony across the world (which might not be long for this world). What worries me about this from a strategic point of view is that with all of its refusal to engage with corrupted and complicit institutions, it seems to operate with a sense that swaying public opinion or mildly slowing down certain gears is effective enough to break through the entrenched power of these institutions and a bipartisan, transnational, imperial project.

Thankfully, Americans are proving themselves less and less amenable to blind support for the war as the genocide continues to unfold, and getting them there was largely the work of the movement for Palestine and its tireless efforts at getting the truth out past American and Israeli interests. This is good. All that stuff is necessary, but also insufficient. We do not live in such a world where the State will respond to consciousness raising in such a way that won’t just destroy us in the process. Look at what is happening to Columbia right now, a clearly targeted punishment for “allowing” students to bravely occupy campus last spring (with a twin goal of destroying higher ed in the process). Grad students on green cards are being deported for writing op-eds, and its entirely possible citizens will not be far behind them. Meanwhile, a plurality of Americans, fed and fantasizing about political violence against people they see as enemies to American society, get off on visible displays of state repression rather than, say, being jarred while watching a television broadcast of firehoses being deployed against civil rights protestors in the 1960s. This is a dangerous time. It seems critical that we think clearly about what our strategy to fight for Palestine looks like in a country that is quickly becoming more fascist by the day. Moral victories alone will not suffice when mere vocal dissent is being criminalized.

It is time to do something with the awareness these efforts called into being. Defeating all forms of fascism requires a mass movement that acts beyond the level of consciousness raising, a necessary step but one that now must be overcome by a political project that has legitimacy within the state apparatus. And this is not just a strategic electoral strategy but a moral one, almost at the level of metaphysics: any left wing project that does not place justice for Palestinians at its core is doomed to fail, just as any attempt to dismantle fascist state power will require mass organization across all groups who suffer. Dismissing attempts to bring normies into the project is a doomed strategy.

Now, are Bernie and AOC the only way to do this? Of course not. But the crises facing American society are manifold, they are all rooted in the reality of global capitalism which manifests in symptoms that run the gamut from genocide to the slashing of Medicare and the destruction of higher education. We can’t act as if disagreement absolves us of complicity. One of the critiques my tweet produced was that it seems horrific to care about the minimum wage while people are being murdered en masse in Palestine. But they are connected; this is the hidden truth of the world. Capitalism, in its current stage of declining American and Western hegemony (which relies on the Israeli state project as a load-bearing institution) is in serious crisis, and it is responding by disposing of people it considers superfluous or dangerous at the same time as it seeks to turn others into slaves to produce value for shareholders of capital. That is the reality of what faces us today, and no project that sees these various crises as anything but completely intertwined will be able to do anything about it.

Instead of lecturing comrades over what should be done for the movement for Palestine, which is not my place, expertise, or positionality, I will simply say that I don’t think it’s Zionist or evil to want to organize normie Americans into a political coalition that seeks to fight the darkness that is rapidly overtaking the entire planet. America has 350 million people in it, and whatever you think of them, they stand between us and power. Fantasies that we can do anything about this in smaller groups without organization or overlap ignore how much American society is still a complex web of institutions with infrastructure and a multilayered class system that gives disproportionate power to homeowning Americans. These fantasies also are naive as to what it would look like if those institutions actually collapsed. Organizing in those conditions is unthinkable with any conceptual apparatus we can inhabit, and despite the horror unfolding by the day, we remain far from such a world. But it is waiting around the corner unless we do something about it.

So anyway, these are some thoughts I had over the weekend thinking about these rallies. I felt extremely hopeless between March 2020-November 2025, like, clinically depressed and hopeless. It felt like everything was lost, that we were facing decades of barbarism where our only hope was to survive and sit out a collapsing social order and then begin rebuilding the pieces in that same scenario I attempted to describe above, which is not a heathy way to think. I’m not saying these rallies will fix it all, but they are a sign that people are still willing to come together and fight for a better world, that our society’s Overton window is dramatically shifting both as a result of norms broken by the Trump administration as well as the growing awareness by all that only radical change can save us.

When I saw that these rallies drew over 12,000 people at a stop in Idaho—fucking IDAHO—I felt hope again, similar to the hope I felt in 2011 standing in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square listening to the human microphone or after Bernie’s victory in the 2020 Nevada caucuses. The rallies alone are insufficient and they need to quickly become more than just a place to be with people who feel the same as you. But mass politics is still the only way out of this and they have the base of numbers that can be channeled into something bigger. I refuse to give up and let the nihilism in, and encourage you to do the same.

(thanks to those who helped me work out some of these ideas on short notice)