“Fighting Oligarchy” and “the Billionaire Class” but not FASCISM: Old Timey Bernie is Missing the Moment

Still Sheep Dogging after All These Years

As Trumpism-fascism moves rapidly towards potential full consolidation in the United States – it is already further down that path than many might imagine (for some chilling evidence see the last section of this essay) – the “socialist’ US Senator Bernie Sanders is misleading his many progressive fans and followers in four related and overlapping ways.

Meaningless Fetishization of Democracy

First, he continually frames the proper goal of left politics as the defense and promotion of “democracy” and suggests that the US has had an actual democracy for Trump to destroy. This is wrongheaded. The proper goal of a left politics worthy of respect is socialist revolution on the path to a world beyond class rule and other and related forms of exploitation and oppression. As the revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian has pointed out:

“In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequalities, to talk about ‘democracy’ --without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves--is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no ‘democracy for all’: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.”

Avakian’s formulation highlights the absurdity of the name of a progressive news show that leftish folks have been watching for many years: “Democracy Now!” Democracy “now,” in a class-ruled nation where the top tenth of the upper One Percent holds more wealth than the bottom 90 percent? Seriously? Democracy without the revolutionary “abolition of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality”? No, sorry Bernie, it doesn’t work like that.

(Curiously enough, the demand for democracy goes away when that revolutionary transformation occurs since “the abolition of class divisions and corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality” means the end of the use of state power as a force for the rule of some over others.)

Even as he accuses Trump and Elon Musk of attacking America’s “democracy,” Bernie Sanders knows very well that the United States was a class ruled nation long before Trump arose. Here is part of a speech Sanders gave kicking off his 2016 presidential campaign in 2015:

“American democracy is not about billionaires being able to buy candidates and elections. It is not about the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson and other incredibly wealthy individuals spending billions of dollars to elect candidates who will make the rich richer and everyone else poorer. According to media reports the Koch brothers alone, one family, will spend more money in this election cycle than either the Democratic or Republican parties. This is not democracy. This is oligarchy.”

One didn’t have to be a socialist or populist to understand the accuracy of Sanders’ 2015 description of the USA as an oligarchy. As the distinguished mainstream liberal political scientists like Benjamin Page (Northwestern) and Marin Gilens (Princeton), showed in their well-titled 2017 book Democracy in America?:

“the best evidence indicates that the wishes of ordinary Americans…have…little or no impact on the making of federal government policy. Wealthy individuals and organized interest groups—especially business corporations—have…much more political clout…the general public [is] … virtually powerless . . . The will of majorities is…thwarted by the affluent and the well-organized, who block popular policy proposals and enact special favors for themselves …Large majorities of America favor various programs to help provide jobs, increase wages, help the unemployed, provide universal medical insurance, ensure decent retirement pensions, and pay for such programs with progressive taxes. Most Americans also want to cut ‘corporate welfare.’ Yet the wealthy, business groups, and structural gridlock have mostly blocked such new policies [and programs] (emphasis added)…government policy . . . reflects the wishes of those with money, not the wishes of the millions of ordinary citizens who turn out every two years to choose among the pre-approved, money-vetted candidates for federal office” (emphasis added).

(See also my 2014 book They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy, which shows that plutocratic campaign fiannce is just the tip of the “billionaire class” rule iceberg)

Refusing to Forthrightly and Consistently Say the F-Word

Second, Sanders, currently on a “Fighting Oligarchy Tour” in Iowa and Nebraska, persists in refusing or otherwise failing to forthrightly call Trump and Trumpism what they really are: FASCIST. What does it mean to be a fascist? As the Refuse Fascism website usefully instructs:

“Fascism is not just a gross combination of horrific reactionary policies. It is a qualitative change in how society is governed. Fascism foments and relies on xenophobic nationalism, racism, misogyny, and the aggressive re-institution of oppressive ‘traditional values.’ Fascist mobs and threats of violence are unleashed to build the movement and consolidate power. What is crucial to understand is that once in power fascism essentially eliminates traditional democratic rights….Dissent is piece by piece criminalized. The truth is bludgeoned. Group after group is demonized and targeted along a trajectory that leads to real horrors. All of this [took] dramatic leaps under the Trump Regime. History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late.”

I and other researchers and commentators have been showing since 2016 how Trump and MAGA check off all these and more boxes identifying them as fundamentally fascist. But as late as the fall of 2020 (as I showed in my 2021 book This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America), Sanders stubbornly refused to call Trump and Trumpism by their proper name – fascist – when pushed to do so by the progressive radio talk show host Dean Obeidallah. He clung to the empirically false notion that the Trump base was full of decent working-class people who are just waiting for a progressive Democratic Party to free itself from the clutches of “the billionaire class.”

Perhaps Bernie changed his old-timey tune somewhat after January 6; I certainly hope so, for God’s sake. But even if he has (I defer to any researchers who can Google up Sanders saying “the F-word” on or after January 6), the big and widely viewed speech he gave against Trump and Musk on the floor of the US Senate eight days ago didn’t say the F-word even once (for the same sad Sanders silence see also his recent appearance on CNN). Not once – this even after Kamala Harris and other Democratic politicians and talking heads positioned to his right felt compelled to accurately describe Trump and Trumpism as fascist in the three weeks leading up to the 2024 elections.

Sanders’ Senate speech harped instead on two accurate but incomplete and inadequate terms to describe Trump and Trumpism: “authoritarianism” and “oligarchy.”

The first term leaves out the historical specificity of fascist authoritarianism (as defined above in the passage I quoted from Refuse Fascism) as a product and iron-heeled defender of capitalism. “Authoritarianism” accurately describes aspects of Trumpism and MAGA, to be sure, but it tells you nothing about the core social and ideological content of the authoritarian regime Trump and his backers want to ram down America’s throat. Lenin and Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China are commonly seen as authoritarian states under the standard definitions but no serious analyst should call those states fascist. These communist-led governments were anti-fascist socialist states (however flawed) that (for decades) supplanted capitalism with socialist planning and control. Fascism supplants a capitalist political form – what Marxists have long called “bourgeois democracy” – not of course with socialist authority (a “dictatorship of the proletariat”) but with a new political superstructure atop persistent capitalist rule – the continuing underlying material core of bourgeois dominance with the outer (bourgeois-)democratic shell torn off.

The problem with constantly characterizing the Trump fascist regime as “oligarchy” is that government for and by the parasitic wealthy Few (‘the billionaire class”) is frankly characteristic of capitalist rule in general. The United States has essentially been a capitalist oligarchy/plutocracy for as long as I can remember – the term applies accurately to every previous US presidential administration of the last half century at least, and this regardless of which of the two dominant US capitalist parties has held the White House. The current forming “Trump-Musk oligarchy” is distinct from what preceded it in two ways: the extreme degree of grotesque “transactional” and “gangster-capitalist” venality (what Sanders calls “kleptocracy”) involved in Trump’s rule and above all is core FASCIST nature.

It is worth mentioning here that the Afrikaner turned Amerikaner Musk is more than merely a selfish plutocrat/oligarch trying to become yet more absurdly rich and powerful. He is also a Seig-Heiling neo-Nazi maniac, a racist and hyper-masculinist spawn of apartheid South Africa’s white supremacist and Third World Fascist ruling class who is riddled with the core poisonous values of fascism.

Economistic Class Reductionism: Pritzker Ahead of Bernie?

Third, Sanders’ framing of Trumpism’s essence as top-down “billionaire class” war on “the working class” is excessively economistic and class reductionist. Here is the language of Sanders’ press release for his current “Fighting Oligarchy” tour: “Today, the oligarchs and the billionaire class are getting richer and richer and have more and more power. Meanwhile, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and most of our people are struggling to pay for health care, childcare, and housing. This country belongs to all of us, not just the few. We must fight back.” A friendly Iowa report on Sanders’ tour says the following:

“Sanders, who won second place in the Iowa Caucuses as a Democratic presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, announced Wednesday the launch of his ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ campaign…The new campaign will target areas won by President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election that elected a Republican to the U.S. House in 2024. Events will focus on issues facing working-class people, according to a news release, and will ‘outline how Americans can fight back against President Trump and Elon Musk.’”

What the fascism-avoiding f#*k! Hello? Sanders’ old-timey language here misses the historical moment. It could apply accurately to just about any time in the last thirty-plus years. It contains no reference to the attempted consolidation of fascist rule across US government and society in the opening “Shock and Awe” weeks of the new Mein Trumpf regime!

(Yes, Sanders’ also now brings up the menace of “authoritarianism,” but that word too in accurate but inadequate for reasons given above.)

Four days ago, I went to a union rally for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) workers. I had some polite conversations with some of these highly educated workers about the (rather Bernie-ite) protest signs they held, which said the oligarchs and billionaires are oppressing workers. Everyone I spoke with agreed candidly that it’s been billionaires waging top-down class war against workers for a half century (the "neoliberal' era) but that now Trump and MAGA also waging a racist, sexist, nativist, Christian fundamentalist, anti-science/-intellectual, violent/thuggish, ecocidal and all-around fascist war against humanity and a livable planet. Standing up for our color-, gender-, and nationality-blind paychecks and “welfare” benefits in the name of “working people” is not sufficient in the face of this cohesive if many-sided fascist offensive.

Even now, in a time when Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump has led with the claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” and has released sexist and white supremacist paramilitary putschists from prison to terrorize decent people, Sanders continues to have a big blind spot when it comes to “corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality” (Avakian) besides oligarchic billionaire class rule. Even now, with fascism ascendant on the basic of virulent racism and sexism, Sanders channels an economistic class reductionism that can't seriously grasp white supremacism, patriarchy, nativism, and LGBT-bashing – critical components of Amerikaner Trumpism-fascism – as anything deeper or more fundamental to what we face than top-down billionaire/ruling class divide-and-rule.[1]

(Sanders also has a related problem with US.-American imperialism, as is seen in his long problematic foreign policy record and in his repeated and continuing references to US military veterans as people who “served to defend our country.” Please: the US military is an historically unprecedented imperial force with more than 800 bases spread across more than 80 countries and a long record of mass murderous intervention, regime change, and invasion abroad!).

Outflanked by the Billionaire Pritzker?

It is curious and perhaps ironic to see the anti-billionaire “socialist” Sanders morally outflanked on the nature of the Trump regime by the billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker. Look at this passage from Pritzker’s “State of the State” speech two days ago:

“I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame. The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too ‘female’ and ‘nonwhite.’ The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it…If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

Yes, Pritzker also does not say the F-word. But he doesn’t’ really need to since he “invokes the specter of the Nazis,” who stood atop the classic horrific fascist regime of modern history. Notice how seriously Pritzker takes the racism, sexism, nativism and LGBT-bashing that lay at the dark heart of Trumpism-fascism, understanding them not just as “divide and conquer” tools of top-down economic class war but as problems in their own right.[1]

Still Sheep Dogging After All These Years

Fourth, while Sanders occasionally says nice things in support of people protesting in the streets, we should never forget that Bernie: (a) speaks at the end of the day as a de facto Democratic Party electoralist from an idiosyncratic perch in an aristocratic, deeply conservative parliamentary body (the absurdly malapportioned and right-tilted US Senate); (b) has long been all about sheep-dogging folks into the imperialist Democratic Party and, more broadly, into the lethal quicksand that is America’s right-tilted and money-dominated major party electoral politics – an outlier Minority Rule version of modern bourgeois democracy that has become practically the plaything of the Trumpist Republi-fascists.

A January 2020 Truthout interview of Noam Chomsky was published under one of the most misleading titles in the history of left publishing: “Noam Chomsky: Sanders Threatens the Establishment by Inspiring Popular Movements.” The interview is still worth reading for Chomsky’s critique of Trump as “the most dangerous criminal in human history,” but the title (which unfortunately matched Chomsky’s comments) was nonsense. Sanders has long served the establishment by sheep-dogging people out of extra-electoral movements and into what Chomsky once rightly denounced as quadrennial “electoral extravaganzas” that function as “a method of marginalizing the population.” The real and urgent task, Chomsky argued in 2004, is not candidate-centered electoral politics but “for popular progressive groups to grow and become strong enough so that centers of power can’t ignore them” --- to become “forces for change that…come up from the grass roots …[to] shake…society to its core.”

Sanders right now claims to be on a tour in Iowa and Nebraska to talk to “the working class” about Trumpist oligarchy and authoritarianism. One of his great proletarian stops is the bright blue middle and upper-middle class university town of Iowa City – the neoliberal imperialist Barack Obama’s all-time favorite campaign stop. Why Iowa City? Because it sits in the middle of a purple Congressional district where a centrist Democrat has lost the last two US House races by tiny vote margins. Bottom line: beneath all the working class talk, the “Berndog” is coming here (I’m in iowa City right now!) to help the dismal neoliberal Weimar Dems pick up a US House seat in 2026.

That’s what Bernie’s all about at the end of the day: sheep-dogging, Judas Goating, and (to use Avakian’s excellent metaphors) quick-sanding and siren-singing people into a Democratic Party that (as Refuse Fascism says) cannot and will not fight fascism the way it needs to be fought –into an electoral system wired for class rule and right-wing capture.

“They’re Scared Shitless”

Speaking of fascism, please see this recent report: Gabriel Sherman, “‘They’re Scared Shitless’: The Threat of Political Violence Informing Trump’s Grip on Congress,” Vanity Fair, February 19, 2025, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/trump-congress-political-violence. Along with reminding us that numerous Republicans in Congress refused to impeach and indict Trump for January 6 because of fear that Trump’s fascist supporters would kill them or their family members if they voted to properly punish their party’s orange-sprayed Dear Leader for trying to overthrow previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law, Sherman reports this chilling finding about the recent confirmation of the open Christian Fascist and white nationalist Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense:

“According to one source with direct knowledge of the events, North Carolina senator Thom Tillis told people that the FBI warned him about ‘credible death threats’ when he was considering voting against Pete Hegseth’s nomination for defense secretary. Tillis ultimately provided the crucial 50th vote to confirm the former Fox & Friends host to lead the Pentagon. According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.”

More from Sherman:

“Republican Peter Meijer, then a Michigan representative, told Atlantic writer Tim Alberta in 2021 that one colleague seemed to nearly have a nervous breakdown over fears of being harmed by MAGA supporters if he were to vote to certify the 2020 election results: ‘He asked his new colleague if he was okay,’ Alberta reported. ‘The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,’ Meijer says. ‘If they’re willing to come after you inside the US Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?’

Trump’s mass pardoning of January 6 participants has recentered those events in Republican minds of late. ‘A guy sends a mob into your workplace to kill you, and you’re okay with that?’ [Stuart] Stevens [a senior adviser to the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project] tells me, speaking about his frustration with congressional Republicans. Stevens says the clemencies send the message to Republicans that Trump will defend those who commit political violence in his name.

‘I talked to Lincoln Project donors,’ Stevens says. ‘These are powerful and wealthy people. And I can tell you a percentage of them are talking about leaving the country.’”

Sanders might want to talk to some of his fellow Senators and Congresspersons about this. Their fear of their family members or themselves being killed by Three Percenters, Proud Boys, or Oath Keepers if they had done their constitutional duty and convicted Trump for insurrection in January 2021 was about something worse than billionaire class oligarchy! It was about fascist terror. Same goes for the “credible death threats” against Senator Tillis – death threats meant to force a vote for a fascist who thinks that the nation’s top enemies are “within”: homeland liberals and leftists.

Endnote

1. If you are still struggling with the false notion that one must choose between anti-racism and anti-capitalism, between anti-sexism and anti-capitalism, between anti-nativism and anti-capitalism, and/or between anti-LGBT-bashing and anti-capitalism, please review the Revcoms’ excellent formulation on “The Five Stops” here. As Avakian explains:

“The 5 STOPS refers to five major social contradictions and forms of oppression and devastation that are built into this system of capitalism-imperialism and which can only be eliminated through a revolution to overthrow this system. The 5 STOPS are:

STOP Genocidal Persecution, Mass Incarceration, Police Brutality and Murder of Black and Brown People!

STOP The Patriarchal Degradation, Dehumanization, and Subjugation of All Women Everywhere, and All Oppression Based on Gender and Sexual Orientation!

STOP Wars of Empire, Armies of Occupation, and Crimes Against Humanity!

STOP The Demonization, Criminalization and Deportations of Immigrants and the Militarization of the Border!

STOP Capitalism-imperialism from Destroying Our Planet.”