Not exactly spry anymore. Credit: Getty
Progressives are feeling ambivalent about the fact that none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders has emerged as the de facto leader of the resistance against the two-headed monster in the White House.
On the one hand, it’s a marvel to behold the indefatigable Vermont socialist getting the band back together for his barnstorming “Stop Oligarchy” tour — one that first drew sizable crowds in the Midwest and is now drawing tens of thousands on the second leg across the Mountain West, co-headlined with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Sanders has been decrying the evils of oligarchy for decades, and now, with Elon Musk all but co-presidenting with Trump, he looks like a prophet.
On the other hand, there is very little that Sanders (even with AOC by his side) can accomplish. The Democrats are the minority party and act afraid of their own shadow, while Sanders is a not-so-spry 83 years old and stooping more by the year. The experience of seeing Sanders rail against capitalism and the One Percent doesn’t quite hit like it did a decade ago, It’s akin to catching a Rolling Stones show in 2025 — it’s great to hear the timeless hits and all — but the thrills are fleeting. You ask yourself: Are you still Feeling the Bern, or is that just actual heartburn?
That’s a legitimate question, because it isn’t just Bernie who is getting long in the tooth — so are his supporters and those currently raging against the Trump machine. A decade ago, I described the Sanders run as a “punk-rock presidential campaign,” a middle finger to the political establishment that was far and away most popular with bright-eyed but downwardly mobile college students and 20-somethings. That dynamic played out in the 2016 Democratic primary, in which Sanders thumped Hillary Clinton among under-30 voters, including 83% of young people in New Hampshire.
Not anymore. Today, those packing into high-school auditoriums to cheer Bernie or busy marching in the streets aren’t quite replicating Lollapalooza; it’s more like a particularly raucous school-board meeting. The same Millennials who helped make Left populism cool in the 2010s and marched for a racial reckoning five years ago are now slouching towards middle age. Meanwhile, white-haired dissidents at Tesla protests in 2025 outnumber those too young to rent a car. It’s a changing of the guard — but, ironically, back to the old guard.
The youth have been missing for so long, it’s a wonder that progressives don’t print their faces on milk cartons. College campuses have been quiet, noted Inside Higher Ed, even among institutions where activism is practically an intramural sport. “I haven’t seen a whole lot, which is kind of uncharacteristic of our campus”, observed a student at American University in Washington, DC.
In online forums, political organisers are also making noise about the missing youth. “The last two Tesla protests I went to — the majority were elderly, and I appreciate their support, but why no young people?”, reads a viral post in the subreddit for the 50501 movement, the online group coordinating the anti-Trump capital city protests and others. “If at age 30, I’m the youngest showing up, there’s a problem”. Another post suggested that there were more elderly Trump voters opposing the president’s overreach than young liberals.
It’s no coincidence, then, that the most significant impact made by the Resistance thus far has been a consumer boycott by older Democrats refusing to buy Teslas — it’s not as if many 20-year-old baristas and other members of the precariat are the ones withholding their Cybertruck purchases. Otherwise, with young people gone, the Big Dad Energy at 2025 rallies isn’t enough to make a major impact. The size of the Sanders rallies are impressive, but other protests have largely been a fraction of the size they were during Trump’s first term.
Where did the kids go? The best answer is that most of them didn’t vote at all. The peak of the hyperpolitics era is behind us, and election turnout in November trended downward for young adults. They’re growing more disillusioned with all institutions — the courts, the media, and politicians — no matter which party they’re affiliated with. A new analysis of Gallup data found that less than a third of under-30s trust the government, a new low. In my reporting, I have spoken to many young people who view all politics as toxic, a form of entertainment that didn’t change the world, but ruined a lot of personal relationships. Why doom-march in public when you can doomscroll from the comfort of your home or, better yet, soothe your crippling anxiety with ASMR videos.
When the youth did vote, they leaned Republican. According to data whiz kid David Shor, Trump won a majority of those under the age of 26 except women of colour — a massive change from both 2016 and 2020. They voted for a political revolution over the status quo but from the Right, much like the children of Sixties hippies who became Reaganite yuppies. As it turns out, Gen-Z loves Eighties nostalgia of all kinds, whether it’s bubblegum synth-pop, Stranger Things, or the market-friendly politics of Michael J. Fox’s Alex Keaton character from the sitcom Family Ties.
But there has been a reluctance to demonstrate even among young Leftists. Some of that is undoubtedly a result of the chilling effect of the campus crackdowns on those protesting America’s role in the Israel-Gaza war and the Trump administration’s disturbing persecution of demonstrators accused of “un-American activity”, such as Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian student activist student detained by ICE and facing a revocation of his green card.
Yet there has also been an ideological drift among activists who now reject the Sanders coalition as sellouts who supported “Genocide Joe”. Many under-30s Leftists are delusional anarchists who barely mention Medicare for All, minimum-wage hikes, or the universal programmes popular in Bernie World. They view Gaza as the Mother of All Causes, the most important battleground in the intifada against Western “colonisers”. All other causes are somehow related, from trans justice to Long Covid to fat shaming. Are you autistic? “Learn how police abolition and neurodivergence advocacy are connected”, reads a flyer from a recent Stop Cop City event. No wonder most normies aren’t grabbing their keffiyehs and joining up.
But if there’s someone that can relate to dropping out of politics — it’s Democrats writ large. Outside of Sanders and a handful of others, party leaders have been MIA during the first wave of the Trump administration’s decimation of the federal government, perhaps to some undisclosed White Lotus hotel to mourn the false promise that they could slowly coast to permanent victory against conservatives by simply letting them die off. Since the George W. Bush years, liberals clung to the arguments made by John Judis and Roy Teixeira in their polemic The Emerging Democratic Majority, that America’s changing demographics — more college-educated professionals and young single women and minorities — would lead to Dem dominance.
Judis and Teixeira have now recanted — and so should the Democrats. The next generation of voters has arrived, and they aren’t content to mindlessly cast ballots for a timid party that suddenly everyone hates more than the horrid Millie Bobbie Brown robot movie. Short of sending Bernie Sanders through a time machine to a decade when his brand of righteous fury felt less like a nostalgia act, it’s unclear whether Democrats can attract anyone under 30 to the resistance cause. Last year, Democratic-aligned groups shelled millions to young influencers to make pro-Kamala TikToks. But who has the coconuts to pay up now?
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SubscribeSanders has been decrying the evils of oligarchy for decades, and now, with Elon Musk all but co-presidenting with Trump, he looks like a prophet.”
Um, all but ONE of the oligarchs are on the Dem side. This is past delusion to madness.
All the oligarchs dutifully lined up behind Trump the moment it became apparent he was winning. He gladly accepted their money and backing snd in exchange has started pushing through numerous changes that would benefit them over his original working class base
“All”? Google Hollywood political views.
It’s more nuanced than either of these views. Musk, Bezos, and other tech oligarchs embracing Trump does represent a significant shift of the moneyed elite, who almost universally opposed Trump in 2016. Further, Trump has shifted his agenda and made some alterations which seem to be directly related to this support, such as regulatory cuts, remaining silent on Amazon’s anti-union activities, the H1B visas, and so on. This is significant and a legitimate cause for concern for anyone who was hoping for a populist revolution from the Trump administration.
However, the fact remains that much of Trump’s economic agenda from 2016 remains in place, such as tariffs, reshoring, immigration control, and retreating from full globalization. No one can seriously deny what the Trump administration is doing is a major change from what the elites of either party have been doing for decades. It certainly isn’t what Sanders would do, but it’s not what the Clintons or Bushes would do either. There have been numerous articles here and elsewhere about the potential chaos and damage to international commerce Trump could do through policies whose stated aim is to change incentives and lead private firms to make different choices about global trade that are less economically favorable to them but more politically favorable to the US, Trump, and his political constituents.
It’s also a fact that Harris spent nearly triple what Trump did and had far greater support from the media and Wall Street in the form of SuperPACs. The fact that the support Trump did get from one oligarch, Elon Musk, probably outweighed much if not all of what Harris got from the majority reflects superior political strategy and greater awareness on the part of the Trump campaign, or just dumb luck if you prefer. Politicians and pundits can say whatever they want, and what they say often has little if any correlation to what’s really going on. Evidence doesn’t lie, and the overwhelming majority of the evidence suggests that Trump was overwhelmingly opposed by the international oligarchs political and economic, with a few notable and strategically important defectors changing sides.
For my part, I see the populist cause as difficult for several reasons, but the primary reason is that it will be difficult to reverse decades of bad policy, bad trends, and bad incentives without generating considerable backlash from moneyed elites and firms that profited so tremendously from the old system. Laying aside the personal animus that we’ve witnessed between Trump and the elite class over the last decade, there’s the economic reality that firms may react to the prospect of lowered profits triggered by anti-globalization reforms by downsizing, reducing output, etc. In other words, how does one start on the path of deglobalization without sparking a recession/depression? This is the tightrope Trump and his team are trying to walk, creating enough change to shift trends without triggering a political and economic meltdown.
To say that this will be a difficult task is an exercise in understatement. What I believe Bessent and the rest of Trump’s team is attempting is to make targeted, limited changes, such as tariffs with specific nations and send powerful public signals that affect the way firms view the future. The behavior of markets acts like a self fulfilling prophecy because businesses anticipate what will happen in the future and take measures to prepare for that future. Trump talks loudly about tariffs, about the end of the old order, and about America first, and firms begin to plan for these eventualities, retreating somewhat from globalization in their own way in anticipation of potentially more severe reforms and a more direct public backlash. Many astute commentators and populist agitators have already noted that Trump has said and threatened far more than he has actually done. Such threats serve to catalyze global oligarchs to make changes on their own in anticipation of political reprisals and plan for worst case scenarios.
A Bernie Sanders administration or some younger, more fiery equivalent like his current understudy, AOC, is indeed one such worst case scenario. An economic depression coupled with a population already riled up by Trumpism and already with a high level of anti-elite, anti-oligarch sentiment is far more dangerous than Trump is. A declared socialist elected in such a scenario won’t bother tinkering with tariffs or trying to game the financial system. They’ll lay blame directly on the oligarch class and seek to punish them directly for a situation that much of the public already blames them for causing. Much of the apparent acquiescence of the corporate world to Trump’s presidency is a recognition that he won the election, despite Jan 6th, despite his own mistakes, despite all their attempts to destroy and discredit him. They threw all that they had at him, and thus against the deglobalization narrative, and they lost. They’re not stupid. They know what that means. They know, as I have long said, that if Trump fails, people won’t come running back to globalism with open arms, they’ll get angrier and more apt to try more revolutionary solutions. They’ll start thinking in terms of separating the oligarchs from their power and enacting their own solutions, French Revolution style. I think the second Trump victory showed how much closer to the guillotine the aristocrats really are, and I give them credit for finally showing some awareness of their predicament. At this point, all we can do is see how things shake out. The Sanders movement, or some darker, more vicious successor, may yet have its day.
And Sanders is a multi-millionaire and ruler with several homes and who has never worked in a value-creating job in his life. Oligarch?
You don’t view the role of a senator as a value-creating job?
Not when you make yourself rich in the process
His wife is a bit dodgy too
right, none that I’ve ever heard of….she does nothing except show boat around as at the Met Museum affair.
The narrative that Sanders is a rich wolf in a poor sheepskin has been debunked long ago.
The Democrats certainly have a soft spot for old Soros.
Oh my! The evil wizard rears his ugly head again. Elon makes Soros look like a pauper.
Perhaps the youth are skipping the democrat Party because they are not brain damaged. I have five children in their 20s. Four boys who are more conservative than I and one daughter who dutifully hates Donald Trump and also would rather eat her own waste than spend time understanding politics. Luckily, the girl is here for the weekend.
I asked her to read the article and then tell me what she thinks about the questions posed: why is she AWOL from politics? She said a couple of things that were interesting (mostly I paraphrase):
First, young people haven’t gulped the Kool Aid. She sees the state of things and understands that government is already failing. Expanding services such as “medicare for all” doesn’t make sense. Health care (she grew up with Obamacare) already is in shambles; how can expanding the scope of incompetent government help? The believers are my age, 40s and older. The propaganda has institutionalized them.
Second, the Democrats are not a viable option. She was told by most of her teachers, instructors, and friends to hate Trump and “conservatives.” Dutifully, she hates. But, she says, the Democrats are like the “theater kids.” Mostly pretending and posing and insisting on making things up to get along. Their imagination is their reality. Harsh words from Clementine.
At some point, she will realize the connection between her two points. The govt IS failing, which is exactly why an outsider like Trump was elected. In 2016 and 2020, voters in either camp had ample opportunity to vote for one more standard-issue politician, and none of those candidates inspired anyone.
Clementine probably also got forced into Dr. Fauci’s patented mRNA cult, yet still caught Covid like everyone else. Experiencing government lies personal and up close might be opening young peoples’ eyes.
Sizeable crowds…of curated hobbyist protestors. By all means, guys, keep up the crazy.
Hobby protesters combined with professional paid Rent-a-Riot types. Read Mike Benz on X this week about how the Democrats have become pros at fundraising ‘instant riots’. Commentator Scott Adams has also discussed the new phone statistics which have traced who rioters are and how often they have shown up at Democrat rallies (lots!). Folk, this is paid ‘agitation’ brought to you by The Left, the Democrats Party and their oligarchic billionaire enablers ( Soros, Gates, Meta-Guy, etc).
Yup. https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/gps-data-reveals-bernie-sanders-aoc-rally-was-artificial-full-antifablm-pro-hamas-pro
Over time, Zero Hedge expanded into non-financial political content,[b] including conspiracy theories and fringe rhetoric,[3][24] and has advanced radical right,[15][25] alt-right,[26][27][28] and pro-Russia positions.[1][29][30][31] Zero Hedge’s non-financial commentary has led to multiple site bans by global social media platforms, although a 2019 Facebook ban[32][33] and a 2020 Twitter ban were later reversed.[15][34]
Zero Hedge’s in-house content is authored by one “Tyler Durden”, the pen name of site owner Daniel Ivandjiiski.
Scott Adams the cartoonist? Mr. Adams created Dilbert, the cartoon about a butt hurt corporatist. He has been screaming into the void for a decade. Add a “do” to his Dil, and you have a fair description of his mein.
Ah, the man with 4 homes. Moving on …
And Obama with at least 4 multi-million dollar residences (Hawaii, Chicago, Washington DC & Martha’s Vineyard). Politics has been very good to him…but Michelle remains a malcontent.
Big, burly Mike and skinny weakling Barrack are not a match made in heaven.
I knew about the three. So he’s added a fourth?
there is very little that Sanders (even with AOC by his side) can accomplish.
They have become people without principles. Who wants to be lectured to by a millionaire with three homes who has never worked a real job in his life about the alleged evils of billionaires? And who wants to hear the nails on a chalkboard that is AOC carrying on about anything?
Then there is the larger point that the left and parts of the right insist on ignoring – the conditions that made Donald Trump possible. Perpetual resistance is not just futile, it is pointless. What are these people who just last year had the White House and Senate resisting other than the usual back-and-forth swings in power.
When Obama was elected, James Carville wrote a book fantasizing about another 40 years of Dem dominance. Then, Dems lost the House. And the Senate. And about a thousand legislative seats nationwide. To rational people, this would be a clarion call that something is amiss and some rethinking of ideology is necessary. But not to Dems. All they know is to double down on more of what got them where they are.
“The youth have been missing for so long, it’s a wonder that progressives don’t print their faces on milk cartons.”
Didn’t agree with everything in the essay but it was worth it for that line.
“and now, with Elon Musk all but co-presidenting with Trump”
Deranged.
It’s the only narrative the left has so watch the legacy media get on it big time with made-up stories about friction between the two giants.
Just look at the US Senate, Congress and Supreme Courts + Trump and Biden Presidencies. Nancy Pelosi, Sanders, the recently shuffled Ruth Ginsburg, Mitch McConnell etc and etc.
The USA is governed by very old people who have grown very rich and very entrenched. And the Democrats look worse than than Republicans on this. They are an old, rich, corrupt and self engorged Party, who have corrupted every institution of Government, Quangos, NGOs, ‘charities’ and educational institutions to mis direct and mis spend public money on ‘liberal progressive’ fascism and allowing tens of millions of migrants into the USA.
All paid for by the super rich of California, the IT and Finance industries.
It should be no surprise that the younger generations are rejecting these people.
Sanders the man who received the most contributions from big Pharma, he’s so punk, so rebellious
Sanders like Corbyn have always been grifters, fake. They play up their guilble base while hoping they never have power and be called upon it
the irony is that Hilary Clinton is probaly more genuine (well by a smidgen), you know she’s a warmonger, in the pockets of Wall Street, a liar, a crook, but there is some honesty with that. Clinton is not a nice person, not there for your interests, but everyone knows that
Re: the illustration – Old man shakes fist at cloud.
I don’t think the author controls that, and given the editors penchant for making; I’ll be generous and call them ‘strategic’ choices about photos and headlines, I am almost certain this is intentional.
Medicare for all. Save Social Security. Who do we think is going to pay for all this? Today’s young people.
Unfortunately, the writer was unaware that the big crowds for Birney are the same people who always show up for BLM, climate or Palestine hysteria and other such OCD causes of the far left.
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/gps-data-reveals-bernie-sanders-aoc-rally-was-artificial-full-antifablm-pro-hamas-pro
Over time, Zero Hedge expanded into non-financial political content,[b] including conspiracy theories and fringe rhetoric,[3][24] and has advanced radical right,[15][25] alt-right,[26][27][28] and pro-Russia positions.[1][29][30][31] Zero Hedge’s non-financial commentary has led to multiple site bans by global social media platforms, although a 2019 Facebook ban[32][33] and a 2020 Twitter ban were later reversed.[15][34]
Zero Hedge’s in-house content is authored by one “Tyler Durden”, the pen name of site owner Daniel Ivandjiiski.
Good points. Long term political predictions are very difficult. No one knows how people will vote in 10, 20 years.
Ah that old sell out.
“campus crackdowns” LOL
Perhaps the young recognise that ‘Resistance’, with a capital R of course, is an attempt, like the Democrats’ anti-Trump lawfare, to subvert the democratic process. And that ‘Progressive’, with a capital P, only means progressive in the sense that war is peace.
Zoomers will show up and be active in the resistance and accompanying protests when someone develops an app that allows them to do it without looking up.
“disturbing persecution of demonstrators” where and how is that happening? there was persecution of anyone who trespassed Jan. 6th, even as I believe there was criminal behavior among some…..what I agree is the hollow vapidity of these kids cosplaying hamas and persecuting anyone that doesn’t share their brand of revolutionary politics …as they define “revolution.” reminds me of the maoists of my generation. all other issues …NOthing…. speaking of ocasio cortez …not my rep…who was elected where I reside for longer than she’s been alive….and she does nothing….or BS who moved to all white Vermont to practice racial justice. what a bunch of nothing. good luck democratic now democratic hamas ranting socialist party.
Great news for realists