The Flawed Logic of Bernie and AOC

Democratic leaders seem to be floating Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What is that possibly intended to achieve?

Over the last few months, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been touring America on a “Fighting Oligarchy” tour. This series of rallies is as much about politics as a celebrity event, with musical guests and even a quasi-stop at Coachella. Democratic-aligned figures in the media have covered the tour with excitement, publishing attendee numbers for each stop as evidence of its headliners’ grassroots pull. Everyone can see what this is about—Democratic leaders are flirting with making Bernie and AOC the new face of the party, and likely candidates for 2028.

What in the world are they thinking?

THE FLAWED LOGIC OF BERNIE AND AOC

It isn’t hard to grasp the chain of logic that might cause a Democratic consultant to believe Bernie and AOC would make good figureheads for a refreshed Democratic Party. The party’s support among working people has collapsed, and its leadership looks like a gerontocracy with too many top figures who entered politics back when disco was on the radio. As self-identified “Democratic Socialists,” Bernie and AOC claim to speak for the working class, and AOC is associated with youth. Problem solved!

That so many Democratic leaders have lined up behind this concept is a red flag. Does anyone truly believe middle-aged guys in trucker hats from Ohio and Wisconsin who left the Democratic Party to vote for Donald Trump deep down really wanted the Squad? Moving in this direction is alarming evidence that party leaders still fail to understand their party’s problems, and therefore have no chance of ever fixing them.

Pretend for a minute it would genuinely help the Democrats to embrace a high-value symbol that Democrats now want to win back working people and youth. Bernie-AOC is so far from accomplishing that it’s completely out of touch.

Wait, isn’t Bernie the Democrats’ most popular voice for the working class? Sure, Sanders is an old-school 1960s New Left Marxist by background. Throughout his career, he fought to increase social welfare programs and shift power from large national corporations and the people he calls “the millionaires and billionaires” towards labor. He’s now associated with the issues of his 2016 campaign—increasing taxes on high incomes, campaign finance reform, and finishing the last Great Society dream of universal healthcare or “Medicare for All”—and these remain the centerpieces of this Oligarchy tour. This was a legitimate working-class agenda when Bernie entered politics in 1972. Does anyone think this is what working people who shifted Red in 2024 want?

If the Democrats showed up at a MAGA rally and asked the working people there wearing red, white, and blue T-shirts what they wanted, do you think the answer would be Medicare for All and campaign finance reform? Or would they talk about respect, power, and jobs? I expect they would talk about deindustrialization, immigration, economic security, arbitrary power in corporate HR departments, affordable homes, and the price of eggs. They would talk about social and cultural power, the influence that a professional class that reliably votes Democratic has over their lives, and the disdain many with power seem to have for folks like them.

Bernie’s brand of “Democratic Socialism” isn’t what today’s working-class Americans who moved Red want. In fact, Democratic Socialism wasn’t ever a workers’ movement attracting middle-aged guys who work with their hands, but one of lefty Millennial college students who were anti-capitalist in the sense of Occupy Wall Street and WTO protests. It was a movement that produced the Squad, an intersectional group of mostly minority women invested in social justice and cultural politics—Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman. Is a movement fronted by controversial figures like Ilhan Omar the way to win back working people who moved right?

Wait again, what about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Isn’t she the real headliner? Isn’t she young, attractive, and exciting? Doesn’t she have a bold agenda appealing to young Americans that Democrats desperately need to win back? Sure, back in 2018.

It’s clear a lot of Democratic leaders now see AOC as their best star. She’s a savvy politician, and we all remember her as the young and attractive bartender who energized America’s youth when elected to Congress at 29. She was known to be a bomb-thrower who understood social media and eagerly challenged her party’s leaders. She personified the college-educated activists who were her party’s future. The problem is that moment is over, and AOC’s image is increasingly out of date. Ocasio-Cortez is now 35 years-old and an establishment politician in early middle age.

Ocasio-Cortez gave up her bomb-throwing image a long time ago in order to join her party’s establishment and climb its ladder. She no longer represents change, but the interests of Democratic power brokers and the consensus Democratic platform. She isn’t even still that young. If AOC were to run for Vice President or President in 2028, she would be a 39-year-old establishment Democrat. A 40-year-old politician isn’t old, but it’s no longer a fresh-faced kid. JD Vance is 40.

AOC isn’t even a member of America’s youngest voting demographic, the Zoomers, but a Millennial and elder Millennial at that. She embodies the Obama-era Millennial “Yes We Can” aesthetic that actual young people now consider cringe. Gen Z politics is entirely different from what now middle-aged Millennials understand, with Zoomer men no longer even part of the left, having moved hard toward the MAGA right. I hate to break it to you Millennials, but you’re no longer young people but lawnmower dads and wine moms. If AOC wins a New York Senate seat, after lining up all the powerful big names and moneybags necessary to do it, she will no longer even be the buzzy and interesting anti-establishment AOC. She will now be Senator Ocasio-Cortez. Crowning Bernie and AOC the fresh face of the Democratic Party feels like something 50-year-old marketing executives would come up with by checking boxes from a Deloitte study about what the kids like.

Bernie and AOC is a clumsy attempt to answer the question “how can Democratic leaders win back voters without changing the party’s message, coalition, or agenda?” The real answer is they can’t.

ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION

The biggest problem with Bernie-AOC as an idea isn’t even that it won’t accomplish its intended goal. The goal is wrong. This is an attempt to slap fresh paint on a organization that isn’t working without making real changes. Democratic leaders think they just have a messaging and marketing problem, when they have a substance and ideas problem.

Working people, young men, and increasingly the middle class, aren’t abandoning the Democrats because they failed to market their great ideas. People left because they didn’t like the ideas. They’re deeply worried about real problems affecting their lives that Democrats have shown no interest in or intention of solving, and mostly deny are even problems. This has opened the door to anyone at least willing to take these problems seriously, whether or not they have good solutions themselves. Democrats complain Republicans haven’t yet offered workable answers and are causing damage flailing about looking for them, while Democrats won’t yet even acknowledge the problems. The answer to that isn’t a fresh face, the same old message, and campaign finance reform.

What are the Democratic Party’s answers to the very real new problems of the middle class? What major structural changes do Democrats propose? How are they going to tear into the system to make things work differently? What systems are they going to tear down, and what new ones will they build? How are they going to restore Americans’ faith in democracy and the American Dream? Or is their only message to once again empower the same people, to implement the same ideas Americans have already rejected, so the same people can rule over them telling them they know best while failing in the exact same way as before?

It’s obvious why the Bernie-AOC national tour is an attractive answer to the people currently helming the party. They don’t think anything is substantively wrong. They just think they made mistakes selling their agenda. Embracing the solution of changing a few faces loosely associated with the demographics that have left them gives them a mental path to fixing things without actually having to change things. They can delude themselves that a path forward exists that doesn’t alienate any core constituency, reject any idea, touch anything insiders believe sacred, or disrupt the status quo. It’s a coping mechanism that feels like a solution, but absolves leaders of making the difficult but real changes they need.

What Democrats need now is soul-searching, innovation, and disruption. They need their own answers to address the problems that caused people to abandon the Democratic Party and blow open the Republicans. America needs two parties offering innovative and workable answers to this new world, where arguably it still has none. Worry not, if our two existing parties truly can’t restore stability and provide real solutions that restore opportunity and prosperity to ordinary Americans, others will come to do what they cannot.

What do you think of Bernie and AOC as figureheads of the new Democratic Party? Join the conversation in the comments.