Bernie and AOC Are Starting a New Political Movement Before Our Eyes [View all]

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Naturally, this crowd was far from apathetic; indifference isn’t a strong enough force to get the average person to stand in the Los Angeles sun all day. Here, the heat was punishing: Sanders had to stop his speech several times to call medics into the crowd, as did several of the other speakers. At one point, the nurses’ union rushed off the stage to help. And their assistance was limited to the people they could see: If there really were 36,000 people at this thing, only about 10,000 of them were visible from the stage; the rest were on the other side of a treebank and the press riser.

That crowd stood in a dirt lot watching a Jumbotron. Beyond them, the streets were filled with people too, just standing. The mood became more vague as you worked your way through the outer reaches; in the further orbit, there was less of that sense of passion and determination. Still, even at the margins there was a consensus among the furthest-flung that this was, for reasons they couldn’t articulate, the place to be. Here on the periphery you’d encounter a hollowed-out dumpster with a younger group perched on the rim, just sitting, watching the event unfold on the big screen.

Again, 36,000 people—from the dumpster sitters to the gleeful crowd in the front bouncing a beach ball—is a hard number to do much but generalize. But this crowd showed up for something, and you could hear that among them. Onstage, you could see that something taking shape. During her oration, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez connected local action—last week, an L.A. school superintendent turned away Department of Homeland Security officers attempting to enter his school—to the billionaire takeover of the government. “This moment did not come out of nowhere,” she said. “The destruction of our rights and democracy is directly tied to the growing and extreme wealth inequality that has been growing for years in America.”

This was where the nerve was most visibly touched: Attacks against the encroaching oligarchy received noticeably louder responses even than attacks against Trump. One union leader’s remark lambasting a “bone-spurred chicken-hawk commander in chief” didn’t receive quite the same boos as her line hitting the “one percent and the corrupt politicians who got richer out of the market manipulation we saw last week.”

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https://newrepublic.com/article/193748/bernie-aoc-los-angeles-rally-oligarchy-trump