In fight against oligarchy, Bernie Sanders and AOC call California to join | Opinion
It makes me angry that President Donald Trump presides over an administration that lacks empathy for working people. Trump and House Republicans seem poised to cut billions from Medicaid, the vital social safety net providing affordable health care for people who come from backgrounds like mine. I’m a 30-year-old Black man from the South who has experienced homelessness, food insecurity, and a lack of reliable health care. I’m a renter, I have student debt and I worry about my financial future. I came of age in the time of 9/11, perpetual wars, COVID and Trump.
There has to be an alternative to alter the wrong turns America has taken during my lifetime. There has to be an alternative to the Department of Government Efficiency and billionaire Elon Musk, who was empowered by Trump to gut valuable government agencies that provide services for people who know the fear of lacking enough money for rent and groceries.
I know those fears, even if Trump and the billionaires he surrounds himself with seem indifferent to them.
With Democratic party leadership lost, I wonder if the alternative to Trump and Trumpism will be found at Folsom Lake College today, when U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bring their “Fighting Oligarchy” message to the Sacramento region as part of their national speaking tour.
Based on previous stops in other cities, their message to angry Americans looking for answers to Trump is: Let’s stand up to the rich.
“I understand the disdain that the wealthiest people in this country have for the working class doesn’t just come from them not being raised right,” AOC said in Colorado during the tour. “It’s shorthand for the right wing’s entire political agenda and a certain ugly kind of politics. A politics that involves lying to and screwing working and middle class Americans...there’s a word for this kind of thing: corruption.”
One might have imagined the two progressive heroes - Sanders, 83 and Ocasio-Cortez, 35 - would stick to blue cities but, they’ve mixed it up from liberal Denver to small conservative communities like Nampa, Idaho, a Boise suburb that voted mostly for Trump.
The tour scrapped a stop in red Auburn for a more purple Folsom, which is closer to Sacramento and perhaps would afford them a more willing audience.
Why fighting against the oligarchy could work
Democrats ran and lost to Trump last November on a campaign of anti-Trump rhetoric and the expectation that campaigning for access to abortion would beat Trump. It didn’t in the presidential election between Trump and former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Sanders and AOC are telling Americans what they can do with their ballot if they choose to use it. They can end the oligarchy. They can improve their struggle. That sentiment reaches far more people from every background than issues wrapped in the culture war.
What comes next needs to be an education on what an oligarchy is and what it does.
A recent Data and Progress poll shows that 36% of voters say that they could confidently explain what “oligarchy” means. However, when asked to select the definition of “oligarchy,”55% of voters could correctly define it as a “government where power is concentrated in the hands of a small, wealthy elite.” Sixty-five percent said they had heard of oligarchy but couldn’t define it.
It’s important to know what an oligarchy is so we can see that Trump’s proposed polices of huge tax cuts that benefit the richest Americans, while the social safety net programs face significant cuts, is not a coincidence.
Trump’s plan to keep the rich on top can’t work in America.
Working-class people are angry. They see alerts on their phones of program cuts and federal job layoffs and they grow more concerned about the future.
“Fighting the Oligarchy” tour captures that anger and provides a road map to change. Hopefully it takes us far.
