Like most Americans, I’ve been following the election, and Tuesday, Nov. 3, is the last day we can vote.
I have to admit that from the South Side of Chicago, I’ve been watching the state near me, Michigan, with a heavy heart. On Tuesday, voters there will decide whether or not to send Abdul El-Sayed to the United States Senate. He is a progressive who wants to implement Medicare for All, and he wants to abolish ICE. He has Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his corner (Britannica). What interests me about him is that he is part of a broader push on the left that sees American principles as the problem.
El-Sayed says that he is not a socialist. He calls himself a capitalist, and the Democratic Socialists of America have never endorsed him. But one has to wonder if keeping that distance is part of his campaign strategy. Between 2017 and 2020, he spoke at six DSA chapter events and even gave the keynote speech at a 2019 fundraiser. The socialist organizers have called him “a longtime friend of Detroit DSA” (Fox News). In addition to this, 50 DSA members flew in from New York to knock on doors for him before the primary (Washington Examiner). I’ll let Michigan decide what the most apt political label is for him.
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He has made a concerted effort to show Black voters in the Detroit area that he is with them. He lost the city in the August primary, and since then he has visited Black churches, stood with Black pastors and put out an agenda for Black communities with housing timelines, minority business loans and school repairs.
In September, he told a room full of female faith leaders in Detroit, “When it comes to Black communities in Michigan, when it comes to Black communities in America, there are unpaid debts that have long since come due that we are unwilling to acknowledge, let alone pay down.”
It is important to notice the language here. He’s talking to us as if we are people who are owed, as if our future depends on somebody else paying up. He sees us as members of the oppressed class, and he’s trying to chill with us on that level, just like the good old White liberal used to do.
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I’ve listened to him long enough to know that I can’t find any of the things that I’d want to hear him say. He says nothing about embracing America without apology. Being an American means not relying on excuses, being responsible and taking accountability. But he says none of this. For 60 years, the left has talked to Black Americans this way, and I’ve seen the profound damage that kind of talk does in the communities that I serve.
I have said this elsewhere. This socialism that candidates like El-Sayed lean heavily into is not a good thing. After all, we Black Americans were the first in America to truly live under the kind of government dependency that socialists now want for everyone. Though they were sold politically as programs that would lift us out of our history of oppression, the Great Society, the housing projects and welfare rules that punished marriage and work all trapped us in a vicious culture of dependency.
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In 1963, 23.6% of Black children were born to unmarried mothers. By 2023, the number had increased to 69%.
Fathers were leaving, a check took the place of the man in the house, and marriage, faith and work started to look optional. Many Black Americans fled this life by using the American principles of uplift, and too many others found themselves in what has become known as the permanent Black underclass.
That’s what I see every day. I created Project H.O.O.D. to undo all of this damage with job training and character building, and by telling young people the truth, which is that government dependency doesn’t have to be their destiny.
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The people who rallied around El-Sayed have told us what they want. The DSA’s 2026 program, “Workers Deserve More,” has made the call for abolishing the Senate and the Electoral College and replacing the president and Supreme Court “with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
They literally want to take down the greatest form of government ever devised. They have also talked about the need to “draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” In 2021, a DSA convention resolution said that the United States “has never been and will never be a force for liberation.” Amy Wilhelm, who sits on the DSA’s National Political Committee, said, “The role of socialists … is really to facilitate the defeat of our own nation.”
El-Sayed hasn’t signed on to that program, and his own proposal is to end the filibuster. But these are the folks who walked his precincts, drumming up votes, and I’m pretty certain they’ll want something for it.
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A big part of why El-Sayed has advanced so far is White guilt. For a lot of White progressives, voting for a man like El-Sayed is a way to prove they’re on the right side of race. They feel good backing a candidate who talks about debts owed to Black communities. It validates their social justice bona fides, and Black Detroit is left with the dependency. You can see the decay everywhere, and nobody stops to ask if more of the same socialist policies are working. The point here is not true Black uplift, but the innocence of White people, and El-Sayed is playing to that.
El-Sayed has also used White guilt to protect himself. He has faced recent allegations that his family may have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2012, his half-sister wrote online about “an amazing talk with my mom about her activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.” When he was asked about it, he said his family has no ties to the group and called the post “hearsay evidence from a tweet.”
Fact-checkers haven’t found evidence that he himself has ties to the Brotherhood, and he has disavowed it. But when he went on “Meet the Press,” he asked, “Why is this even a subject of debate?” When a voter at a town hall asked him to disavow the group, he said, “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” and then went after the man: “You assume … that because I am Muslim, that somehow I would have some allegiance to something that is not our Constitution.”
No reporter wants to be called an Islamophobe, just as nobody wants to be called a racist. It is the same fear that White guilt runs on, and he counts on that fear to make the question go away.
What all of this reveals is that there is nothing new about El-Sayed. Like the White liberal before him, he speaks to Black Americans as people who are owed, and he leans on the same socialist ideas that have already failed us.
Every day I work to lift up members of my community with American principles, and those in Michigan who vote for Abdul El-Sayed are voting in the opposite direction.