Fighting Oligarchy 

On April 12, 2025, an estimated 36,000 attendees descended on Los Angeles Grand Park for Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Fighting Oligarchy Tour, which has been drawing major crowds in states across the U.S. Los Angeles was the tour’s largest to date and served as an opportunity for LA’s broad Left (and center-Left) to come together, commiserate, and co-imagine a totally different version of this country in contrast to everything we’ve seen coming out of the Trump administration 2.0.–where instead of ICE raids, slashed budgets for education, health, science and art institutions, and unbridled benefits for the elite one percent, we have universal healthcare, a strengthened social security net, and broad access to social service programs to help our most in need.

It is incredibly hopeful to see masses of people out in droves at these events expressing their shared outrage with the first five months of Trumpism. While many of them might not consider themselves socialists, it is critical for principled socialists to harness this moment to welcome would-be newcomers and build bridges to socialist organizations if we are truly committed to fighting fascism. The history of fascism teaches us that hope and disaffection with this administration alone are not enough to wage that fight. Building the power necessary to win a transformational political agenda requires leadership from the working class to paint a concrete vision for a socialist alternative, as well as mass support from aggrieved middle-class actors, small business owners, and working professionals who are being told that immigrants and anti-genocide college students are ruining the country.

While the opportunity to unite in such massive numbers might have felt powerful and motivating, there’s been palatable disappointment with what is becoming the now third-wave of a “Bernie Sanders plurality” that will inevitably leave supporters and activists feeling dismayed and depressed, again. What’s to keep this momentum and energy from again being handed over to the Democratic Party establishment for them to continue to ignore calls for meaningful and material commitments to improve working class strife? Bernie and AOC’s vision doesn’t include power building outside of the Democratic Party. Volunteers and voters, many of whom worked extensively to build enough power for Bernie Sanders to have meaningful influence in shaping party politics, only resulted in a 2024 presidential candidate who was committed to having the world’s strongest military stand with Israel. Bernie’s latest idea from a recent campaign email? Everyone should run for office.

The cult of personality surrounding Bernie and AOC coupled with four years of Bidenomics (which was a boon for business but scraps for workers) has not resulted in delivering on meaningful policing reform after a summer of national uprisings. They have failed to stop a genocide and are failing to stand against the dissolution of due process, let alone the erosion of the paltry public resources that exist for healthcare, education, and protections gainst pollution.

While Bernie and AOC might be barometers for a raised class-consciousness, they were never going to be able to lead the fight against our current fascism-in-formation. Trump 2.0 and its alignment with the settler colonial state of Israel are together exposing the shortcomings of bourgeois democracy’s ability to actually preserve a lasting state apparatus that benefits working people. Left stalwarts like Bernie and AOC are only barely able to amass enough popular support to strengthen their individual positions within what will be left of a gutted and hollowed out government that will continue to exist primarily to facilitate profit for the wealthy, business and tech elite currently consolidating around Trump. Unlike the first time, this second term will also facilitate the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people and an increased militarized police-state punishing youth and criminalizing free speech and dissent.

In fact, none of the Democratic party establishment can be counted on to lead the fight against fascism, nor is it even willing to take steps to defend itself from outside forces consolidating their power, as in AIPAC and the case of now former Congressman Jamal Bowman of New York. After facing a whopping $23 million dollar opposition campaign in large part coordinated by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other aligned super PACs, the onetime member of “The Squad” is launching his own Super PAC to compete with the ever increasing cost of monied interests in elections, instead of renewing his commitment to progressive politics by getting more money out.

Democrats, even those like Bowman, Bernie and AOC, are unwilling to wage a fight outside of the conventions that rule our bourgeois democracy. For them, working within the system that relies on money to win, and never challenging that system after successfully getting elected, will continue to be their tendency. Is this why Bernie finds it so important to begin all of his speeches with his declaration that Israel has a right to defend itself? Their willingness to go along with the same insider, monied tactics and their unwillingness to challenge radical fascist groups like AIPAC doesn’t resonate with working people as the way to win while we’re all watching the public institutions many of us depend on get crushed or ignored right before our eyes.

The fight, be it against oligarchy, fascism, or genocide, was never going to be headed by anyone elected on the Democratic Party ticket. As Ta-Nehisi Coates so sharply put it, “If Democrats can’t draw the line at genocide, they can’t draw the line at democracy.” This fight can only come from working people coming together in a real, organized, socialist Left. While the US Left is currently fragmented and at what seems like constant odds with itself, this is not a permanent condition. If we’re going to adequately resist Trump, as well as resist the conditions that lay the groundwork for Trump-like administrations, we can’t rely on the Democratic Party that refuses to take meaningful steps to challenge the existing power structure of our bourgeois democracy. We’re going to need many, large, organized groups of principled leftists who both understand and are willing to fight the bourgeois tendencies that have for generations failed working people while burning our planet, shipped jobs overseas, vilified welfare recipients and deregulated business while commodifying everything we need to live a life of dignity.

In 2016, following my frustration with Hillary Clinton’s nomination and Trump’s win, I was part of a wave of people who joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DSA went from a steady 6,000 members in 2016 to nearly 100,000 today, growing 16 times its size in 8 years. While I don’t consider the DSA my political home anymore (given their proximity to the Democratic Party) the experience opened me to participating more fully in mutual aid work, organizing alongside tenants fighting slumlords, and even organizing my own workplace. Most profound for me was that organizing created a way for me to engage critically on why I was continually disappointed in the shortcomings of elected Democrats across all levels of government. It helped me understand that without a working class Left, organized in groups of varying sizes and influence, challenging the fascistic tendencies that are becoming our political norms, we’ll never amass what it takes to force a kind of politics that entrenches rights for working people.

That principled, cohesive socialist Left has yet to be built in this country, but right now there are clusters of people working together who may one day become what will make up that broader left. They’re the groups actively undermining ICE deportations in communities, supporting families and building organizations through mutual aid, organizing their neighbors against shitty landlords or forming a union at their job. Of course, many may  also be working on getting someone elected, but that shouldn’t be where one’s activism stops.

These are examples of just some of the kinds of left formations we’re going to need to fight fascism and build the kind of working-class politics that can withstand the assault we’ll continue to face during the Trump administration. Everyone everywhere should be focusing on identifying socialist or leftist formations that they can commit to and doing the work they think is needed in their communities. The experience of shared struggle, being part of small democratic groups of political actors, working through making tough decisions, and dealing with the personal relationships and circumstances that seep into collective work are all the kinds of “training-ground” opportunities that we need for larger and larger formations and coalitions of  the Left. The society we want to build won’t come from the vision of the Democratic Party. It will be from the ground up and will require politicization as part of the work.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Gage Skidmore and Ted Eytan; modified by Tempest.