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DEMOCRATS APPEAR PARALYZED. BERNIE SANDERS IS NOT.  
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Branko Marcetic
February 24, 2025
Jacobin
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_ Since Donald Trump’s election, his opposition party hasn’t
acted much like one. The same cannot be said of Bernie Sanders, who
hit the road this weekend in red states in an effort to stoke pushback
to Trump’s slash-and-burn plutocratic governance. _

Bernie Sanders, [ MATT ROURKE | AP ]

 

Four years ago, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was in Cedar Rapids touting
the benefits of Joe Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better bill to a
healthy but modest crowd of Iowans, whose mostly Republican members of
Congress were unlikely to back the legislation. This past weekend,
Sanders was back in the Hawkeye State, just twenty-seven miles away in
nearby Iowa City, to talk to them about the path forward under a
second Trump presidency — and drew an audience so big, he had to do
a second speech immediately afterward to an overflow crowd in a
separate venue.

“I’ve done a lot of speeches in my political life,” he said as
he came to the stage. “This is the first time I’ve given one right
after the other because we couldn’t fit into the first venue.”

Sanders’s appearance is part of what he calls
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coast-to-coast tour of the country, “especially in conservative
areas
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aimed at rallying the public against Donald Trump’s agenda. One
night earlier, thousands turned out, and hundreds were turned away, in
Omaha, Nebraska to see the senator speak. On Saturday morning,
hundreds more lined up in the cold Iowa winter to hear from the
senator.

“Hope,” Erin, forty-five, said she wanted from the event.

“It’s just nice to listen to him,” said Jai, forty-four, who
came from nearby Fairfield. “It’s been a tumultuous month, and a
Bernie pep talk will be nice.”

That’s more or less what attendees got. Sanders fused his familiar
criticisms of US oligarchy with the Trump administration’s unfolding
efforts to dismantle the federal government, which have seen the White
House work with billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and
the 2024 election’s single biggest donor
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to push through mass layoffs of federal workers and blanket
deregulation of corporations.

“If you want to know who’s running the US government, simply look
at Trump’s inauguration,” Sanders said, referring to the presence
of the three wealthiest [[link removed]] men in
America — Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — directly behind
Trump, and what he called the thirteen “junior billionaires” with
their net worths only in eleven figures, who he had tasked with
running federal agencies.

But Sanders also aimed to galvanize a crowd whose participants had,
before the rally, admitted feeling lost, worried, and even taking a
break from the news for their own peace of mind. In a speech heavy on
historical allusions, Sanders reminded the crowd that “doing
something important is never easy, ” insisted that “now is the
time to act” and get politically involved, and that US history is
filled with accomplishments that were meant to have been impossible,
but that movements of ordinary people made happen — whether
expanding suffrage, abolishing slavery, or winning independence from
the king of England (“an autocrat”).

“Trumpism is not going to be defeated by inside-the-Beltway
politicians,” he said.

Together with the overflow crowd, it was physical proof of the
dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party seen in polls and angry
phone calls to congressional offices, with voters complaining about a
dearth of leadership and opposition to Trump from Democratic
officials, and yearning for some kind of direction. Almost
everyone _Jacobin_ spoke to at Sanders’s Iowa event was, to
varying degrees, disappointed with the Democratic response to
Trump’s first month.

“What response?” said Steven, forty-four, from Fairfield.

“It’s been weak,” said Cole, twenty-four, from Iowa City.

“Hakeem Jeffries is useless,” said Jim, sixty-two, who had made
the trip to Iowa from the Chicago suburbs, about the Democrats’
leader in the House. “‘We can’t do anything.’ It’s
pathetic.”

Republicans in Congress, in concert with Trump, are currently planning
to pass a reconciliation bill that Sanders called “the Robin Hood
principle in reverse,” handing the rich $1 trillion
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tax cuts by making “massive cuts to programs working people
desperately need.” But they only had a three-person majority in the
House to do it, which meant just two of them voting “no” would
kill the bill. Sanders noted that some of those Republicans were in
the very districts he was visiting, and that they could be swayed by
hundreds of constituents phoning their office to oppose the
legislation.

“I’m in the Senate; it does matter,” Sanders stressed. While
congresspeople right now only worry about what their donors think, he
said, “your job is to make them worry about you.”

There are already signs
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vulnerable Republicans in districts whose communities heavily depend
on programs like Medicaid are feeling the heat
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their constituents over the planned cuts. Trump himself has felt the
need to claim, falsely
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Medicaid is not “going to be touched” and has already once had to
do a high-profile walkback
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his sweeping pause on federal grants after constituent outrage at the
resulting Medicaid disruptions put pressure
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GOP congresspeople.

For Sanders, this grassroots effort to defeat Trump’s agenda that he
hopes to breathe life into is part of a long American tradition.
Toward the end of his speech, he and the crowd together recited
Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and its call to ensure
“government of the people, by the people, for the people” survives
— not, Sanders stressed, “a government of the billionaire class,
by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

“That is what this struggle is about — one hundred and fifty years
later, same struggle,” he said.

There were signs that that struggle might be fought by a different
base of support than Sanders attracted in his first presidential run a
decade ago. Saturday’s was an overwhelmingly liberal crowd that
cheered and applauded Sanders’s references to women’s reproductive
rights and jeered mention of Trump’s cuts to the US Agency for
International Development and attacks on Ukrainian president Volodymyr
Zelensky. Jai told _Jacobin_ that many of his nonvoting friends in
Fairfield who had initially been drawn to Sanders were now fully on
the Trump train. Former union worker Otis, eighty-one, who had lived
in Iowa for decades and seen its partisan loyalty shift red, said many
of the young people he knew now supported Trump.

But at least among some, Sanders’s speech seemed to have had its
intended effect.

“I was that person who was complacent and checked out,” said
Audrey, twenty-seven, who had traveled the hour or so from Wapello to
see Sanders for the third time in her life. The speech had given her
the specific direction she had been yearning for.

For others, like Erin, who had come looking for hope, they found it
just by being among hundreds of others who felt the same: “I felt
alone, and now it doesn’t feel so much like that.”

_Branko Marcetic is a Jacobin staff writer and the author
of Yesterday’s Man: The Case Against Joe Biden._

Jacobin relies on your donations to publish. Contribute today.
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