Bernie Sanders: Fight Oligarchy.

Since Donald Trump’s reelection, the United States Senator Bernie Sanders has been on the road to preach the word against oligarchy. This is a short book, but a longform version of his stump speech. For those who have been following Bernie Sanders’s career in politics, nothing here is new, but it is the most efficient packaging of his message and that of his brand of American socialism.

For those unfamiliar with Bernie Sanders: Born to a lower-middle class Jewish family in a working-class neighbourhood in Brooklyn, New York in 1941, Sanders came into politics as an activist on the left during the era of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War peace movement. His career in politics only came national prominence during the era of President George W. Bush, which was otherwise a nadir for left in the United States. In 2006, Sanders was the first socialist elected to the United States Senate running as an independent in Vermont. After a decade working with the Democratic caucus, he made a bid to run for president under their banner in 2016, but lost the bid to Hilary Clinton, who herself went on to lose the election to the Republican candidate, Donald Trump. Sanders went from the margins of American politics to becoming one of its most prominent figures as the left has seen a renaissance in the past decade. Although he once again lost the Democratic Party’s primary for presidential candidate in 2020, his early lead was only curtailed by the rest of the party closing ranks behind Joe Biden, who ultimately won the election.

The message throughout his political career has been remarkably consistent: the American economic and political system is slanted towards the rich and is unfair to the average American who deserves more from their government. He has been a longtime advocate of Medicare for All – the creation of a universal single-payer health care system – and the expansion of the welfare state in the United States to cover programs such as free post-secondary education, parental leave and childcare. Sanders speaks in the language of class solidarity that is rooted in the left politics of the 1960s and has at times struggled to adapt his appeal into more contemporary rhetorics of identity politics. But this has not prevented him from building a wide base of support from young people who feel like they have been cut out of the American dream since the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

In his role as elder statesman of the steadily growing caucus of democratic socialists (including New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has regularly joined him on his tour), Sanders has sought to keep the political agenda focused on his core issues and this book stands as a manifesto of both his life-long political project and diagnosis of the problems of politics right now.

The book opens with Sanders laying out his case that the United State is ruled by oligarchy and why this is harmful across all walks of life. While the USA is the richest country in the world, somehow millions of people are without the economic necessities of life and have no access to basic social benefits like health insurance or parental leave. There is a growing cleavage in the US between the poor and the rich and the ultra-rich, which is only getting worse.

Sanders argues that the many problems generated by oligarchy are interrelated and self-reinforcing: billionaires use their wealth to buy up even more of the economy and to increasingly take control of the political machinery that could oppose or even effectively regulate them. He rejects the idea that the left just needs to mobilize its own cadre of billionaires and blames the influence of mega donors like Mark Cuban for the loss of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in the race against Donald Trump in 2024. The media, increasingly in the hands of a small group of billionaires, refuses to report on the damage caused by growing oligarchical hegemony leaving the average American in the dark. This positions the government to pass legislation that increases the power of oligarchs through pressure from billionaires funding Political Action Committees and unrestricted dark money. As a reminder that Sanders is indeed 85 years old, he illustrates the arbitrary rule of the billionaire class with the example of how his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team were unceremoniously transplanted to Los Angeles by perfidious owners back in 1958.

Sanders moves from this state of affairs to the problem of authoritarianism. Instead of an American “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” it has become one of billionaires for other billionaires. The image of Elon Musk (Tesla/SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), sitting behind Donald Trump at his second inaugeration is a metaphor, but also a literal depiction of the structure of the current administration. As a result, the institutions of government have been handed over the billionaire class – labour protections have been gutted while sweetheart deals for massive contracts are handed out to the politically connected.

A key themes throughout is Sander’s argument that the Democratic Party is one of the authors of the present day crisis by abandoning working class politics. The party turned towards appeals to the educated upper middle class of coastal urban centers financed by big money donors. As a result, working class Americans lost faith in democratic participation and heeded the siren call of Donald Trump because he was willing to speak openly about how broken and corrupt the American system is. However, since Trump is a demagogue, he can only offer sexism, corruption, xenophobia and criminality as a solution. Rather than solving the problems of American oligarchy, he distracts from them up through a ever shifting series of scapegoats, which has only deepened the crisis.

Moving from the American political landscape to the global, Sanders sees the United States as both representative of the oligarchic takeover of the international economy, but also its purest form in that it has the highest concentration of billionaries in the world. Trumpism is not just an American phenomenon as he allows himself to be bought not just by domestic magnates but also by a global elite such as the rulers of Qatar or Saudi Arabia.

He is committed to demonstrating his points less through Marxist theory than through relentless citation of statistics to prove his points: Elon Musk worth more than 52% of Americans combined. (11) The United States has 800,000 homeless people and the worst child poverty rate in the developed world (30). 85 million Americans are underinsured and 60 thousand die every year because they are unable to acccess medical care in a timely fashion. (31). The four richest men in Africa have a combined fortune of 57 billion USD, which is more than the poorest 750 million on the continent, half of its total population. (55) The contrast is stark and in its repetition, it is an effective reminder of the widening inequality around the world and the lack of an effective social safety net in the United States compared to most other developed countries.

Sanders is often portrayed as a radical firebrand and his cantankerous politicial persona can reinforce this perception. The populist framing that blames the ills of america on a small conspiracy of oligarchs is balanced out by the conclusion on what is to be done where he he shifts gears to a message would not be out of place coming from any liberal democrat. “Politics is not a spectator sport” he declares near the end of the volume. (110) What is needed is a political revolution, but not one against the state but through the reivigoration democratic participation: Volunteering, running for office, listening to podcasts to get informed – all of the above if possible. This is a bloodless revolution of civic engagement more reminiscent of John F. Kennedy than V.I. Lenin.

In many way, Sanders is a throwback to the politics of the 1960s and that his politics represents a kind of lingering optimism in mass working class politics that clashes with political developments since his last run for president in 2020. There is no grappling with how the far right is mobilizing a coalition that is more multi-racial and cross-class than before. The internet is still viewed as a tool that can bring us together and foster greater participation in spite of Elon Musk’s conversion of Twitter into an organ for global far right radicalization. Sanders’s tries to make the case that Trump is betraying his own voters, which has created a window of opportunity for the left, but at the same time, Trump was able to win an election running on the slogan “mass deportation now.” In spite of millions of voters having actively chosen Trump’s brutal social cuts and program of widespread “remigration,” specifically because it promised to be brutal, Sanders still has deep faith in the American people. His politics is based on the idea that if everyone actually started paying attention and having a voice, things would get better.  He walks a fine line between a commitment to democracy and waving away problems of the United States as a simple function of the mass false-consciousness of the working class.

But this is not an academic treatise and it would be unfair to hold it to such standards. The purpose of this book is to motivate and mobilize, not to provide a full nuanced picture of the current state of affairs. As much as Sanders is one of the many voices saying that the system is broken, he does not descend into cynicism and it remains noteworthy that one of the voices that is most outspoken about the potential of liberal democracy in the United States is a socialist who has spent most of his career outside of the mainstream. If one is receptive to his message, it is an effective call to arms to demand more of the political system through greater participation and democratic engagement.

Bernie Sanders, 
Fight Oligarchy. Über Widerstand in autoritären Zeiten
Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 2026.