The Democratic Party’s Kamikaze Caucus Discovers a New Paladin of Progressivism

If you squint, you can see them. They are signs that the Democratic Party understands historian Robert Conquest’s rule, which is: The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.In the August 4 primary, Michigan’s Democratic Party will select its Senate candidate. Three stalwarts of the national party’s kamikaze caucus, two of them fresh from telling Maine’s Democrats whom to nominate for Senate, are now instructing Michiganders. They are Senator Elizabeth Warren, who called Maine’s Graham Platner “my kind of man,” and Senator Bernie Sanders, another Platner enthusiast. These two, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who flinched from Mr. Platner, have discovered a new paladin of progressivism.Dr. Abdul El-Sayed is 41. In 2018, he lost the Democratic gubernatorial primary by 21 points to a centrist Democrat, Gretchen Whitmer, who is now completing her second term. Today, Dr. El-Sayed campaigns with a “Twitch streamer” (yes, that is a job description in today’s America) sympathetic to Hamas, Hasan Piker. Mr. Piker has apologized for having said “America deserved 9/11.” Today, Dr. El-Sayed says Israel is a “rogue state” guilty of “genocide.” He says, opaquely, that there should be “certain kinds” of law enforcement at America’s borders, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement should be “abolished.”He favors Medicare-for-all, a single-payer health care system. One hundred eighty million Americans are covered by employer-provided health insurance that Dr. El-Sayed would terminate. He would erase much that organized labor has achieved by negotiating the untaxed benefits of generous employer-provided health care plans. For more on a particular, and increasingly peculiar, labor union, see below.A moderate Democrat who had been seeking the Senate nomination recently withdrew. This should help Dr. El-Sayed’s remaining opponent, Haley Stevens, who was trailing in polls taken before the withdrawal. She is a four-term congresswoman from Oakland County, much of it suburban Detroit. Forty-six years ago, this county was the canary in the national Democratic Party’s coal mine: Oakland was an early habitat of a new political species, “Reagan Democrats.” They are now called “Republicans.”Times change. Ms. Stevens’s district voted solidly for Secretary Hillary Clinton in 2016, President Biden in 2020, and Vice President Harris in 2024. Ms. Stevens is a centrist liberal, supportive of Michigan’s auto industry, not Hamas.She is something that purple Michigan might like. President Trump’s 2024 victory in Michigan was wafer-thin (1.4 percent), but Michigan Democrats should remember: He carried it.The American Enterprise Institute’s Ruy Teixeira, a center-left Democrat, describes a perverse dialectic of “Trumpian overreach”: The more Mr. Trump is flamboyantly provocative, the more Democrats lurch into “histrionic, radical, ineffective responses.” Mr. Trump controls the shrillest Democrats by triggering them, and they propel their party toward self-indulgent, self-destructive choices, such as Dr. El-Sayed.The United Auto Workers has endorsed Dr. El-Sayed. It might, however, someday be the United Graduate Students.Michigan, historically hospitable to strong unions, experienced history-making labor conflicts in the 1930s. “The strike heard round the world” was the sit-down strike at a General Motors plant at Flint. In the “Battle of the Overpass,” Ford employees bloodied UAW organizers near the main gate of the River Rouge plant.Yet American automaking is no longer so concentrated in Michigan. It has dispersed, often to right-to-work states, partly to avoid the increasingly radical UAW. More than 100,000 of its roughly 400,000 active members (down from a late-1970s peak of 1.5 million) are what the union calls “academic workers” — graduate student teaching assistants, postdoctoral researchers, etc.No wonder the UAW likes Dr. El-Sayed, who vibrates like a tuning fork to academic radicalism. And he is fluent in the online snark and condescension that clogs social media. For example, he hopes Ms. Stevens’s supporters “find some way to teach her how to string together two coherent sentences.” She “is a suit with a large AIPAC” — American Israel Public Affairs Committee — “bank account, that’s it.”Of course: Beware of the Jews. Dr. El-Sayed has impeccable credentials for representing today’s left.Yet he is not running to be the senator from Ann Arbor. And Representative James E. Clyburn, the South Carolina Democrat, who is black and the closest thing to a power broker remaining in today’s politics, supports Ms. Stevens.If Dr. El-Sayed is nominated to replace the retiring Democrat, Senator Gary Peters, his Republican opponent will be a former seven-term congressman, Mike Rogers, who in 2024 lost a Michigan Senate race by just 0.34 percent.In that case, Mr. Rogers almost certainly will win. Republicans almost certainly will retain control of the Senate. And Robert Conquest’s rule certainly will be validated.The Washington Post

The Democratic Party’s Kamikaze Caucus Discovers a New Paladin of Progressivism

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