Fighting the Oligarchs by Lars Quadfasel. 6/5/2025

Fighting the oligarchs

Left-wing and right-wing populism go together better in the US than one might think

Populism is characterized by democratic pathos and socio-political demands, but it also has regressive traits, which is why its right-wing variant is more successful today. However, left-wing populist Bernie Sanders is leading the Democrats’ protest against Donald Trump.

By Lars Quadfasel

[This article posted on 6/5/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/23/linkspopulismus-usa-kampf-den-oligarchen.]

The “Populist Party” storming the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. William Jennings Bryan (right) in a cartoon from 1896.

Populism, which emerged in the late 19th century in rural Midwest, is the United States’ most distinctive contribution to bourgeois ideology. The founding fathers around Thomas Jefferson had envisioned their republic as one of free and equal farmers; in the boom years after the Civil War, mockingly referred to by Mark Twain as the “gilded age,” their representatives, decked out with stately beards and a fervor for righteousness, set out to claim their rights. In 1892, the People’s Party, better known as the Populist Party, was founded as a coalition of farmers and craft-based workers’ organizations.

The protest against the impoverishment promoted by large landowners, railroad magnates, and financial speculators was, of course, ambiguous from the outset. Populism expressed everything that was part of the resentment against the so-called elites: anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, and the glorification of poverty and narrow-mindedness. There is no better symbol of this ambiguity than William Jennings Bryan, who ran unsuccessfully for president three times as the Democratic candidate after the decline of the Populist Party.

Populism expressed everything that is part of resentment against the so-called elites: anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, the glorification of poverty and narrow-mindedness.

Bryan’s main demand was an increase in the money supply – adding a silver standard to the gold standard of the US dollar – in order to alleviate the debt burden of small farmers.

His “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, in which he proclaimed that the “financial magnates” should not “nail the working masses to a cross of gold,” a masterpiece of political rhetoric, made him famous; but today Bryan is remembered primarily for his role as chief prosecutor in the 1925 Scopes Trial, a court case concerning the use of the theory of evolution in state biology classes, which made him and his revivalist Christian co-conspirators the laughing stock of the nation.

Populism therefore exists in both a right-wing and a left-wing flavor, depending on where the line between top and bottom is drawn: both as a defense of the “silent majority” against cultural Bolsheviks and as a declaration of war by the 99% against the 1%. Both variants celebrated their big comeback in the 2016 presidential election.

But while Donald Trump’s rhetoric could draw on a rich conservative tradition, the strong showing of Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont, in the Democratic primaries came almost out of nowhere. What was actually intended as an opportunity to use the campaign stage to denounce the power of the rich and promote national health care ultimately ensured that Hillary Clinton’s nomination as the Democratic candidate was temporarily thrown into doubt.
Without Sanders, there would be no Jeremy Corbyn

This surprise success had an impact far beyond the US. If even in the land of “hire and fire” a “democratic socialist” – as Sanders describes himself – is suddenly in demand, then left-wing social policy must really be on the rise. Without Sanders, one might suspect, there would be no Jeremy Corbyn and perhaps not even a party called La France insoumise (LFI, Unbowed France) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

In the US, on the other hand, after Trump’s election victory, Sanders’ opponents within his own party adopted his interpretation of his supporters: that the 2016 election was a revolt against neoliberalism and that only “Bernie” could have beaten Trump. The Democrats subsequently shifted noticeably to the left; in the 2020 primaries, almost all of their candidates outdid each other with progressive demands for more immigration, stricter gun laws, protection of minorities, and state redistribution policies.

It seemed like a prelude, but in retrospect, it turned out to have been the climax. In 2020, in Sanders’ second attempt to become the Democratic presidential candidate, his share of the vote fell well short of his 2016 result. The masses had not been secretly waiting for a savior with a social democratic program, but simply needed one to express their dislike of Clinton – regardless of whether it was her support for the Iraq War or the fact that career women are simply unpopular. Without Clinton on the ballot, Sanders was left with only his hard core of young activists, disillusioned trade unionists, and precarious intellectuals.

Just because you write “working class” on the label doesn’t mean it’s working class inside.

And many felt the same way as Sanders. In 2018, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first self-identified democratic socialists were elected to the House of Representatives as Democrats, forming a kind of opposition within the opposition. In the following elections, however, it became clear that their representatives could only win elections in Democratic strongholds; the group has since shrunk back to its original four members.

Corbyn suffered a veritable election debacle as Labour’s leading candidate in 2019, and instead of recapturing the “red wall” in proletarian northern England, the only constituencies Labour was able to win under his leadership were in London’s most affluent districts, where people were fed up with Brexit.

Just because you write “working class” on the label doesn’t mean it’s working class inside. In general, there is a strange mismatch between content and packaging. Sanders’ campaign organization, “Our Revolution,” does not advocate the expropriation of the expropriators, but rather an expansion of the Fordist welfare state. Even those who have little objection to this will have to concede that revolutionaries of earlier generations would probably not have settled for the nationalization of health insurance companies, even if such a demand seems revolutionary against the backdrop of US social history.
Habitual conservatism

The fact that the imagination is not sufficient for more can hardly be blamed on the protagonists alone. Under the given circumstances, anyone who struggles politically against the countless flagrant injustices of contemporary capitalism almost automatically ends up fighting defensive battles: In response to ever-increasing social cuts, the left invokes the class compromise of the post-war era, when trade unions were still strong and the top rate of income tax in the US was over 90 percent.

Sanders and his supporters lament that the Democrats have turned away from “their roots” and invoke Roosevelt’s New Deal policies as a counterexample—as if these had not been perfectly compatible with the (incidentally, decidedly anti-union) apartheid regime in the southern states.

Despite all the desire for change, this gives rise to a habitual conservatism whose longing for the 1950s bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the “Make America Great Again” nostalgia. Sanders himself—and this is to his credit—does not draw the obvious conclusion.

Even in 2020, the change was hard to miss. The candidate who four years earlier had brusquely rejected identity politics was now courting Black and Latino voters with outreach operations. The populist who had been almost single-mindedly fixated on “millionaires and billionaires” had become a perfectly normal modern left-wing liberal.
A reliable Democrat on voting issues

This is evident even in the “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, with which Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are currently stirring up sentiment against the Trump administration and attracting tens of thousands of spectators in numerous cities. The corruption of the Trump administration and the Republicans’ planned cuts in social spending provide ample ammunition for Sanders’ populist criticism of the power of the wealthy; at the same time, he warns that Trump wants to transform US democracy into an “authoritarian society,” fueling the enthusiasm of Democratic voters and the party’s activist base.

Today, Sanders is essentially an eccentric but reliable Democrat on voting issues, albeit one without a party membership card. And Ocasio-Cortez also clearly sees her future in the party leadership, not in some nebulous third way.

Some of Sanders’ former companions demonstrate what that might look like.

Former staffers and prominent supporters, including journalists David Sirota, Briahna Joy Gray, Glenn Greenwald, and Matt Taibbi, concluded from the defeats of 2016 and 2020 that the proletarian uprising failed not because of a lack of numbers, but because of the machinations of the Democratic Party—and that Trump’s election was therefore its just punishment.

If you have the same enemies as the MAGA mob, why not join forces?

That’s why they sought proximity to the so-called dirtbag left, a movement centered around podcasts such as “Chapo Trap House” and “Red Scare,” where there is no greater evil than well-meaning suburban liberals, the shitlibs. The dirtbag left engages in a kind of postmodern proletarian cult: belonging to the working class is no longer demonstrated by a willingness to make sacrifices and pride in hard work, but by telling dirty jokes.

From there, it’s only a small step to the far right. If you have the same enemies as the MAGA mob – equality politics, “wokeness,” the professional-managerial class – why not join forces? Greenwald tours with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and praises Republicans as the lesser evil; Taibbi, on behalf of Elon Musk, exposes moderation decisions made by former Twitter executives as sinister censorship measures against conservatives; the podcast “Red Scare” engages in cross-front politics with the chief ideologues of the New Right, always with a wink of irony, of course. Thus, populism is reunited.