AOC and Bernie Sanders are Not the Same

On April 13th, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) took to the stage in Utah before a crowd of thousands. “Now I want to say a word about my daughter,” Sanders said, praising the lawmaker to roaring applause. The gesture was widely interpreted as a sign that the 84-year-old progressive standard-bearer had ordained Ocasio-Cortez as his heir apparent. Having sold out venues throughout the country during their “Fighting Oligarchy“ tour—including in rural red states like Utah—the question for many old-school “Bernie Bros” was straightforward:

“What on Earth is the old man thinking?”

Amid a historic backlash against Democratic elites, the Vermont independent remains one of the few national politicians with a net positive favorability—the same isn’t true of his younger and deeply unpopular counterpart. Since Trump’s reelection in 2024, progressives have flocked to a narrative, eerily similar to its MAGA equivalent, that toxic policy positions are irrelevant. Instead, the answer to progressive woes lies in candidate authenticity and rhetorical populism, with the elder Sanders and mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani being models for the movement. Progressives, however, misunderstand that much of the senator’s continued appeal speaks to a period predating the symbolic politics of “The Squad.”

Prior to and during his 2016 presidential campaign, Sanders was viewed as a fringe outsider with heterodox, left-wing views. Like other outsiders such as Ross Perot, the cantankerous independent went against members of both parties on issues like trade, healthcare, gun control, and immigration. In 1993, Sanders joined workers and labor Democrats like Rep. David Bonior (D-MI) to rally against NAFTA approval. “I think about dairy farmers in Vermont, and I think about auto workers in Michigan. These are people who made this country great, and we ought not be selling them down the river,” the pair said in Montpellier.

After decades of neoliberalism and the 2010s “Great Awokening,” in 2016, the senator harkened to an earlier generation of social democrats disgusted by establishment politicians such as Hillary Clinton. His dark horse campaign in the Democratic presidential primary blindsided Clinton, excoriating the notoriously elitist Secretary of State over her ties to Wall Street banks and support for outsourcing jobs. Remarkably, Clinton was forced to retract her support for the Obama-brokered Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) under popular pressure from Sanders and Donald Trump.

The senator likewise contrasted a class-conscious, pro-worker campaign with the more symbolic, identity-driven concerns of his primary opponent. At every turn, the Democratic favorite fetishized her identity and activist concerns, epitomized by the slogan “I’m With Her.” In a now notorious speech recorded in Fort Henderson, Nevada, Clinton asked the crowd a series of questions aimed at discrediting Sanders: “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” the secretary said in 2016.

Unsurprisingly, Sanders’ support in the primary was strongest in the post-industrial Midwest and skewed towards white, noncollege voters. Accordingly, the centrist Clinton handily secured the nomination with support from minority, machine voters in the South, affluent professionals, and not-so-subtle assists from DNC apparatchiks. Yet for all the talk of the unelectability of a self-described democratic socialist, Sanders maintained a considerably larger lead against Trump throughout the entirety of 2016, particularly in decisive Rust Belt states.

Throughout the primary and after Clinton’s loss, the secretary and her media allies popularized a narrative of Sanders’ purportedly sexist supporters—many of whom voted for Trump. The senator and much of his team subsequently internalized the prevailing woke critique, increasing outreach among activist minorities as well as adopting much of the language of systemic discrimination that Clinton had championed. By 2018, the Congressional Progressive Caucus grew to 96 out of 233 members, up from 68 in 2014. That year, a slew of minority progressives endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Sanders rode a wave of midterm discontent to Congress, AOC among them.

---

This freshman class of progressives—particularly the so-called “Squad”—differed from their older, labor peers in their dogmatic hostility towards fossil fuels, criminal justice, immigration enforcement, and colorblind universalism. In 2019, Ocasio-Cortez wrote the following in response to an article from The New York Times’ 1619 Project: “Systemic racism is a root ideology that propped up an extractive economic system that prioritizes profit over human and environmental considerations.”

Progressives had now thoroughly outdone the identity politics of their centrist peers, though both remained enamored with the cultural causes of the credentialed left. Come 2020, Sanders maintained his longstanding advocacy in favor of raising wages, Medicare for All, and reigning in billionaires, yet his prior attacks against free trade and outsourcing went largely by the wayside in favor of criminal justice reform and climate change commitments. In the ensuing primary, the Vermont independent was seen as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.

A series of behind-the-scenes machinations from party leaders, including Barack Obama, led multiple candidates to drop out and endorse former Vice President Joe Biden to block Sanders. Yet despite all the scorn and sabotage the senator has endured from Democratic elites, a curious if predictable transformation took hold between his 2016 and 2020 coalitions. Sanders’ previous strength in the Midwest and among noncollege voters collapsed, relying instead on diverse, young voters in addition to academic professionals.

I myself came to the painful conclusion that his campaign was deeply flawed. In February 2020, I attended a Sanders rally in Austin, Texas: the single item that most animated the disproportionately young and college-educated crowd was the candidate’s advocacy for legalizing marijuana. In contrast, working-class Democratic voters—increasingly an endangered species within the party—flocked to Biden; the former president likewise held a more commanding lead against Trump throughout the primary.

Contrary to their claims of impotence, moreover, progressives exercised significant, if not always positive, influence over Biden’s presidency. Biden failed to deliver on—or lied about—material promises for workers, such as raising the minimum wage and creating a public option. Yet progressives happily capitulated on both of these issues out of gratitude for incremental wins at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). They were also instrumental in the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a geopolitically thoughtful effort at green industrial policy that nonetheless catered to affluent professionals capable of buying electric vehicles and created mostly low-paying jobs.

But don’t take my word for it; ask progressives. In a 2021 interview with the DSA, AOC said the following of Biden’s leftist critics. “We really have to ask ourselves, what is the message that you are sending to your Black and brown and undocumented members of your community, to your friends, when you say nothing has changed?” For his part, Sanders hailed “the most effective president in modern history” as recently as July of last year—never mind Biden’s grim record abroad.

By far the senator’s greatest capitulation—and the area in which progressives most influenced the previous administration—was on immigration. Sanders is well known for his past opposition towards the import of low-skilled, illegal labor. In a now infamous 2015 interview, he slammed open borders as a “Koch brothers’ proposal.” Speaking with Vox’s Ezra Klein, he said:

[Open borders] is a right-wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States…It would make everybody in America poorer; you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or in a country called the United States or the UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation, in my view, to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour; that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.

I think we have to raise wages in this country. I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs. You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent; Hispanic, 36 percent; African American, 51 percent. Do you think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids? I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer.

Like Cesar Chavez, Barbara Jordan, Barack Obama, and countless labor Democrats before him, Sanders’ comments on immigration spoke to a previous era of social democracy, one in which concerns over sovereignty, exploitation, and domestic labor superseded corporate and cosmopolitan interests.

Sanders once championed overwhelming enforcement in tandem with the regularization of illegals that had long put down roots in the U.S.—a popular combination attuned with both the values and material interests of workers. Yet while the senator successfully pressured his 2016 opponent into denouncing the TPP, a less noted development was that Clinton and her media allies bullied Sanders into adopting her proposal of only deporting criminals. Four years later, all but one candidate pledged to decriminalize border crossings during the 2020 Democratic primary.

Once in office, Biden did a variant of exactly that; Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy was suspended, and the parameters for soliciting asylum were stretched beyond reasonable interpretation. Most shockingly, however, the former president more or less abrogated responsibility over interior enforcement. Between 2021 and 2024, the average number of removals from beyond the US-Mexico border fell below 50,000 a year compared to around 100,000 a year under Trump and 200,000 a year during Obama’s first term.

At least 8 million immigrants without legal permanent status entered the country under Biden—the most of any four-year period in history. And while progressives celebrated the ostensibly reparative justice of these policies, human trafficking, asylum fraud, and the mass exploitation of illegal labor metastasized to previously unseen proportions. The problem that progressives fail to understand is that mass illegal immigration necessarily entails comparable cruelty towards immigrants from organized crime as mass deportation.

More to the point, the brainless excesses of immigration fundamentalists inevitably lead to the sadistic excesses of Stephen Miller. Having been cowed into expressing otherwise, on some level, Sanders has always understood this and in recent months has timidly rekindled parts of his past immigration restrictionism. Last month, he credited Trump for reducing border crossings to near zero, recognizing the fact that previous administrations could easily have done so.

A further realignment within the Democratic Party has seen centrists increasingly willing to entertain mild dissent on immigration, climate change, and trans issues, while progressives prioritize economic populism and opposition to party elites and omit mentions of unpopular positions—immigration still being a notable exception. Sanders has taken hints from both camps. In July, the senator expressed his long-suspected distaste for identity politics and agreed with Andrew Schulz that Democrats’ unwillingness to hold competitive primaries was undemocratic.

For her part, Ocasio-Cortez, like Zohran Mamdani, has studiously adhered to the new progressive playbook. To be sure, the latter deserves credit for repudiating past statements on defunding the police, charming Donald Trump, and adopting parts of the “Abundance“ agenda, none of which AOC has done. Yet the fact that even Mamdani flopped among noncollege voters speaks to modern progressivism’s continued unviability outside of highly educated enclaves.

Despite her reprioritization of economic issues, Ocasio-Cortez embodies much of what the Vermont senator has stood against. Whether it’s promoting the feminist grift The Wing or sporting an “Tax the Rich“ dress to the applause of celebrities during the pandemic, AOC is a caricature of performative radicalism. Time and again, the congresswoman has shown that she is as beholden to social media as her MAGA peers. The only possible explanation for her recurring favor from Sanders is their shared obsession with climate change; during her unveiling of the Green New Deal, Ocasio-Cortez said that “the trampling of indigenous rights [and racial justice] is a cause of climate change.”

---

As of this writing, Democrats appear poised to do well in the midterms and possibly win the presidency in 2028. Should this occur, they, and especially progressives, are incredibly likely to overinterpret their mandate and double down on the same radicalism that enabled both of Trump’s presidencies. Progressives need to come to terms with the fact that Sanders’ enduring appeal stems from past moderation on issues of crucial importance to noncollege workers, not just his authenticity. More broadly, they should recognize that cultural issues like immigration, crime, and the energy transition have material consequences for workers.

For all of their talk of the working class, Sanders remains the only progressive to have won meaningful numbers of noncollege voters (in 2016). In the unlikely event that AOC aims to cohere progressive rhetoric and policy, she need only look at the “problematic” parts of her mentor’s record.

Juan David Rojas is South Florida-based writer specializing in U.S. and Latin American politics. He is a frequent contributor to Compact, UnHerd, and American Affairs.