An aging star playing to massive crowds of supporters in head-to-toe merch? It’s not the Grateful Dead, it’s the Fighting Oligarchy tour.
To witness one of Bernie Sanders’s Fighting Oligarchy tour stops, which rolled through Nevada, Colorado and Arizona this weekend, is to stumble through time.
It’s 2025, but when Mr. Sanders, the senior senator from Vermont, delivers lines, in his still-intact Brooklyn drawl, about “millionaires and billionaires” and the 1 percent keeping the working class underfoot, it could be 2015, or 2005. Even further back than that, perhaps.
It is not merely Mr. Sanders’s speech. At 83, his image is unmoving — even if his hairline sits a bit further back than it used to. He wears, as he has for years, wire frames no fancier than the ones you’d find in the drugstore checkout line, unremarkable navy suits and cornflower blue dress shirts. His younger sparring partners in the Democratic Party — Barack Obama, Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, among them — long ago shed their sport coats to stump in shirt sleeves. Not Bernie. Like an aging accountant, his blazer stays on.
The out-of-time feeling extends beyond the stage at the Fighting Oligarchy tour. The crowds that fill these whistle stops (which Mr. Sanders has said are the among the largest of his political career) wear “Bernie 2016” T-shirts and “Bernie 2020” caps — dusted off keepsakes of Mr. Sanders’s prior presidential runs, but also reminders that he has been a Democratic bridesmaid for longer than some in his crowd have been able to vote.