Bernie Sanders is back on his ‘Eat the Rich’ tour, with AOC as his opener

The first big stadium tour of 2025 Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is on! Dubbed the “Fighting Oligarchy Tour," it features the fab duo playing all their greatest hits, with plenty of great merch on sale.

It's coming to an arena, outdoor grounds or stadium near you — don’t forget to contribute generously.

After laying a bit low in the final year of the Biden administration, Sanders is back doing what he loves most: soaking up praise and adulation from his fans like the rockstar he imagines himself to be. Dissipate some of the marijuana haze (but not all of it) and it all looks like the endless touring of the Grateful Dead, with Sanders as the late icon Jerry Garcia plus a shower. 

Like the Dead, Sanders trots out the same act, a repetitious medley of his old hits. Just as the Dead were stuck in the '60s along with their fans, Sanders is stuck in his own “eat the rich” time loop. There is nothing new with Sanders beyond his people versus billionaires rap, except to tepidly embrace whatever is in vogue within the leftist cultural zeitgeist. 

He does have the foresight to freshen up the show, bringing in Ocasio-Cortez. She has everything: she’s good-looking, young (relative to the current geriatric political class) and one of those handy three-letter initializations that are all the rage (AOC, MBS, RFK). Even better, she won’t upstage Sanders, as she herself has little new to say. 

In another echo of The Dead, Sanders was a pioneer early on. He tapped into a strain of American economic populism that has been around for nearly two centuries. Sanders opposed the Washington Consensus and the free trade agreements of the 1990s and early 2000s. 

But just like his rock-and-roll doppelgangers, Sanders lost control of the message and relevance. Economic populism turned into economic nationalism, with President Trump at the helm. Sanders could have had more than a moment if he had had the political dexterity to break away from toxic identity politics and dysfunctional progressive culture. But he was too obsessed with his own old message and too attached to the progressive label to do so. 

And, just like the Dead, Sanders has today lost much of his national relevance. He can still fill rallies, raise money and get publicity, but there is no sign he is truly influencing what the Democratic Party will look like in the coming years or how it will regain power. 

But this is really where Sanders has always lived. His acolytes in parts of the media and Hollywood have been deluding themselves for years that Sanders is a true national leader — a potential president only held down by the tentacles of the establishment. 

The fact is, Bernie Sanders has performed very poorly on the Democratic primary ballot. His strength is in caucuses and geographically, where there is a premium on organizing and participation is dominated by activists. But when you get into primaries, Sanders notably flops. In 2016, of the 22 states Sanders won (including his home state, next-door New Hampshire, tiny Rhode Island and nearby Maine), 12 were caucuses.

It’s worth noting that Sanders’s totals were propped up by the fact that he was the only real opposition to the unctuous, ham-handed Hillary Clinton. With the Democratic establishment firmly in Clinton’s camp, disgruntled anti-establishment progressives only had one protest option.

In 2020, facing a crowded field with no Clinton to kick around, Bernie tanked. If Sanders had just held on to his voters from 2016, he would have been in a position to keep up his fight to the convention. But he went backward. The Democratic Party pushed most states away from caucuses to primaries — a disaster for Sanders. Of the 12 caucus states he won in 2016, he carried only three in primaries.

His strong start was a chimera. Once the field had narrowed to him and Biden, Sanders won only four primaries. In some states, he didn’t carry a single county. 

Just as there are not enough Deadheads today for a No.1 record, there are no longer enough Sandernistas to nominate a president. 

Bernie may be back, but it’s just for his own ego. He is selling tickets and merch, getting rapturous applause and encores. Meanwhile, his liberal colleagues are stuck in the Senate and House trying to figure out a way to combat Trump. In statehouses and party meetings, Democrats are casting about for a new message and a way forward. 

But all that work is not for Bernie. The life of a rockstar is too much fun.

Keith Naughton is co-founder of Silent Majority Strategies, a public and regulatory affairs consulting firm, and a former Pennsylvania political campaign consultant.