As a Michigander, I have had an inside seat to the whole Abdul El-Sayed vs. Haley Stevens goat rodeo - as well as to the ways it connects to other progressive-versus-establishment-Democrat goat rodeos. And boy do I have some thoughts.
The big talking point among pundits right now is that El-Sayed can't beat Republican Mike Rogers (who ran unopposed in the primary) to win the November general.
Yes he bloody well can. Here's how I know.
El-Sayed is saying the same things I am hearing from my deep red rural Trump-voting relatives, in exactly the same words I am hearing them use. "Things shouldn't be this hard." "We need to get money out of politics."
There's a tendency among non-Trump voters to assume that everyone who voted Trump is a die hard MAGA superfan. A lot of them, at least the ones I know out farming rural Michigan, aren't. They voted for Trump because *literally nobody else was saying what they were saying,* which is that things cannot go on as they are. We cannot keep running this country into the ground to benefit a handful of billionaires.
Granted, Trump's solution for this problem was to win the Olympic gold medal in grifting. Which is something else the folks I know don't like. They just like the blatant-ness of that grifting, covering up for pedophiles, etc. more than they like the covert grifting, pedophile covering, etc. they're seeing from the other side.
As I said to my father in law the other day, "The Democrats are the party for rich people who feel guilt, and the Republicans are the party for rich people who don't. And the Dems do not see why all us non-rich people should have a party. They feel guilt and surely that should be enough for us peasants."
Trump at least did not offer the peasants guilt. He offered them a chance to feel like they pwned the establishment. Most people, if offered hollow pity or hollow triumph, will choose the latter. It sucks less. But offer them REAL triumph, and they'll go for it.
Republicans know how to run against candidates who splutter and flail and dance to the right when accused of being "communists" or "socialists." That's the Dem establishment they've been running against for years. Mike Rogers could have ground Haley Stevens into dust with the same old tactics.
They are NOT prepared to accuse a candidate of being a "socialist" only to have that candidate say, "yes, and?"
Republicans aren't prepared to be called on their bullshit. The two-parties-each-only-for-the-rich system has made both parties complacent. They're used to slap-fighting each other. Neither is prepared to take a proper left hook to the chin.
Like a kid whose older brothers always let him win, Mike Rogers has no idea what real competition is like. El-Sayed knows what he's up against. Rogers does not.
El-Sayed's is the most high-profile progressive win in the state this week, but it's not my personal favorite, actually. That award goes to Donavan McKinney, who defeated Shri Thanedar in a House race for a district that covers a chunk of Detroit.
That chunk happens to include the house Gremlin recently inherited from his mother. We've started calling it "the family home" or "the big house," only half in jest. It's in one of Detroit's historic Black neighborhoods, and it has Presence. It has (small) Family Mansion vibes.
Nobody we know in that neighborhood likes Shri Thanedar. Everyone is glad that their hometown pick edged him out.
Not all my favorite downballot races got won by my favorite downballot candidates. I had high hopes for Battle Creek's hometown candidate Diop Harris, even though I knew he was unlikely to beat established name and face Sean McCann. He did not. Still, Sean McCann is a solid choice. (Whether he can win the general, in a district that seems purposely drawn to let a handful of farmers tell two mid-size cities what to do, is another question.)
Yesterday, after voting, Gremlin and I saw Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Several times in the film, our heroes mention using NYC's grid of surveillance cameras to track people. I said to Gremlin, "and Americans think they aren't propagandized."
And then I started thinking about propaganda in film. Specifically, I started thinking about Kim Jong-Il's book on the subject. I cannot recommend anybody read it - bro may have *wanted* to be a film critic but that did not *make* him one - but it, in the context of The Only Marvel Sub-Franchise Left Whose Lead Is Strong Enough to Carry a Franchise, made me realize: The American commitment to the propaganda of the individual hero, to ourselves as individual heroes, is precisely the thing that makes us stubbornly resistant to too much being led by the nose. We'll tolerate some of it - the amount that humans will as a communally social species. But we'll buck that trend eventually.
Less than 24 hours later, the AP called the Michigan Senate race for El-Sayed, whose campaign spent in total a mere fraction of what AIPAC spent on Haley Stevens' ads alone. This state proved that we can beat corporate money in politics if we want to do it. We are still stronger than the propaganda machines.
I read the news from Hormuz and I still wouldn't bet on America. But I will bet on Americans any day of the week.
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