#aoc

[emrinalex]

Bakersfield CA and Folsom CA on April 15th

[cynicalclassicist]

The Democrat party needs to be replaced all round! Biden stayed on too long, and we're living with the consequences! Ruth Bader Ginsburg wanted to keep going, and we're living with the consequences! Chuck Schumer is so out of touch with most of his senators! Even Nancy Pelosi thinks that he should go! But she should also go! The party needs replacing!

“Even Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) faces a progressive challenge for the San Francisco seat she’s held since the eighties. While it’s a longshot—unless the 85-year-old retires—former Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) chief of staff Saikat Chakrabarti is running promising fresh ideas, new energy and a break with the Democratic Party of yesteryear. Chakrabarti is 39 years old—even though Pelosi has been a member of Congress for the past 37 years—and says it’s time for new Democratic leaders. “I don’t understand how D.C.’s Democratic leaders are so paralyzed and unprepared for this moment after living through President Trump’s first term,” Chakrabarti said in his February campaign announcement. “I respect what Nancy Pelosi has accomplished in her career, but we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics.””

—

‘Angry across the board’: Inside the civil war raging in the Democratic Party

It’s almost like too many Democrats are old as fuck, entirely comfortable and insulated from the consequences of their inaction, and determined to hold on to power and lobbyist money as long as possible, our Democracy be dammed.

I’m serious: replace them all.

[political-us]

[republicansaretheproblem]

MTG is notorious for this. Nothing will come of it as long as Republicans are in power.

[tilbageidanmark]

Bernie and AOC

[strawlessandbraless]

Best anti ai advertisement I’ve seen

See on Bluesky

[the-beastmodality]

@red0-3 you’ve done it again

[liberalsarecool]

Men assault women. End of story.

[theobjectivemind]

[odinsblog]

Imma enjoy my last few hours of Trump not being in the White House

[ourrace-sexraceandculture]

FUCK OFF!!!

[political-us]

[saywhat-politics]

[hesitatenight]

is that....?

[in4newz]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2, and in BLOOMINGTON on Apr 4. More tour dates here.

It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been made headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/

These people-powered movements are mobilizing directly against Musk's dark money operation, like the Wisconsin Supreme Court election where Musk is paying people $100 each to vote against Susan Crawford, a progressive candidate:

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-03-21-wisconsin-court-election-drawing-elon-musks-money/

The campaign is using online RSVPs to build out mailing lists. One interesting fact from Sifry's article: 65% of the signups are from people who are new to Sanders' mailing lists. 107,000 people have RSVPed so far. You can sign up here:

https://berniesanders.com/oligarchy/

Rationalization is easy to slip into and impossible to avoid. Politicians who make themselves beholden to organized supporters who really care about the issues are armoring themselves against the enormous pressure on elected representatives to make compromises. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have made compromises in their careers that I disagree with. I don't support them because I think they're perfect or immune to self-serving justifications. I support them because they are deliberately putting themselves in a position where it's much harder for them to make excuses and get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/26/not-me-us/#the-people-no

Image: Matt A.J. (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sanders_rally_Council_Bluffs_IMG_4014_(49036624512).jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en