Why Bernie Sanders Went to Coachella [View all]

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Loud applause erupted as the senator declared, “That is what this struggle is about! One hundred fifty years later, it’s the same struggle.… We believe in a government of the people, by the people, for the people—not a government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

Maybe it was that moment. Maybe it was a few weeks later, when US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez began to join Sanders on stage, amplifying and extending his message with a pitch-perfect critique of the how “an extreme concentration of power, greed and corruption is taking over this country like never before.” But at some point, the tour became more than an exercise in rallying the ideologically and politically faithful opponents of Trump and Musk. Suddenly, it became crystal clear that this was about movement building. Yes, a movement against Trump’s authoritarianism and Musk’s madness. But it was more than that. The Fighting Oligarchy tour moved beyond the desperation of Trump’s first 100 days toward something bigger: the hope that another politics, better than what Republicans or Democrats had offered, might really be possible.

That hope was on display on Saturday in Los Angeles, as 36,000 people—the largest crowd of Sanders’s decades-long political career— turned out to cheer the senator, AOC, former Congressional Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), California House members Ro Khanna and Jimmy Gomez, and Neil Young, Joan Baez, Maggie Rogers, and the Raise Gospel Choir. When thunderous roars of “Bernie! Bernie!” erupted from the crowd, Sanders said, “It’s not Bernie! It’s you!”

“Your presence here today is making Donald Trump and Elon Musk very nervous,” declared Sanders. What, undoubtedly, made the oligarchs even more nervous came next, when the tour turned out 20,000 at Salt Lake City in the ruby-red state of Utah on Sunday and 12,500 on Monday in an Idaho county that gave 72 percent of its vote to Trump just last year. And when Sanders and AOC returned to California on Tuesday and drew an estimated 30,000 at Folsom Lake Community College in a swing district that has a Republican congressman and backed Trump, the tour’s success was self-evident.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/bernie-sanders-coachella-speech-reaction/