The Guardian reports:

Bernie Sanders is not running for president. But he is drawing larger crowds now than he did when he was campaigning for the White House.

The message has hardly changed. Nor has the messenger, with his shock of white hair and booming delivery. What’s different now, the senator says, is that his fears – a government captured by billionaires who exploit working people – have become an undeniable reality and people are angry.

“For years, I’ve talked about the concept of oligarchy as an abstraction,” Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats and twice sought the party’s presidential nomination, said in an interview after a joint rally in Tempe, Arizona, with the New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The Vermont senator recalled Donald Trump’s inauguration, when the three wealthiest people on the planet – Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – were seated in front of his cabinet nominees in what many viewed as a shocking display of power and influence.

“You gotta be kind of blind not to understand that you have a government of the billionaire class, for the billionaire class, by the billionaire class,” he said. “And then, on top of all that, you’ve got Trump moving very rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society.”

Two months after Trump was sworn in for a second term, Democratic activists and an increasingly vocal chorus of voters say they are terrified, angry and desperate for leadership. In something of a third act, the 83-year-old democratic socialist is stepping in to fill the void.

But his aim is not only to revive the anti-Trump resistance movement – he wants a bottom-up overhaul of the American political system.

“It’s not just oligarchy that we are going to fight. It’s not just authoritarianism that we’re going to fight,” Sanders told an arena full of supporters at Arizona State University on Thursday night. “We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequality, where the very rich have never done better while working families are struggling to put food on the table.”

For weeks, voters have been showing up at town halls to vent their alarm and rage over the president’s aggressive power grabs and the Musk-led mass firings of federal workers. But they are also furious at the Democratic leadership, charging that their party spent an entire election season warning of the threat Trump posed to US democracy, and yet now appeared either unable or unwilling to stand up to him. [Continue reading…]