“Abdul wants to let criminals out of jail early,” says my TV every time I turn it on. You’d think that such a policy might endear Abdul El-Sayed—who won a bitter primary to become this year’s Michigan Democratic Senate candidate and the target of millions of dollars’ worth of reactionary ad spending—to MAGA Republicans. After all, Trump’s is the most lawless and corrupt administration in memory. Perhaps they don’t find El-Sayed soft enough on crime. He has said that he’d like to release prisoners who are unlikely to reoffend. The Republican Party’s revealed institutional preference is to give violent men six-figure jobs with ICE and an effective license to kill whomever they want.
Constant lying ads, fear and disgust, dread that the Democrats will fumble a sure thing, a sense that yet more precious taboos will fall. Is there anything new to say about election season in my purple Midwestern state? I’m two years closer to death than I was last time—I suppose that’s new.
Perhaps this not the most nuanced take, but the temperature of things out here isn’t conducive to nuance. Is it where you are? I doubt it, but I hope so. We have congressional midterms to fight about, and they really are, as the inevitable phrase has it, the most important midterms anyone can remember. If Republicans can keep a congressional majority after any one of at least six things that President Trump has done—the intentional sentencing of millions of poor Africans to death through the destruction of USAID and PEPFAR; the reduction of American state capacity through DOGE; the attempt to purge the military of officers who might allow loyalty to the Constitution to outstrip loyalty to Trump personally; the military-style assaults on several American cities; the deportation, or imprisonment in substandard private prisons, of harmless thousands, including children and mothers, by an agency given extra-constitutional immunity by a statement from the vice president; the war with Iran; the economy-wrecking tariffs—then it will be very difficult to ever again make anything mean anything ever again, politically speaking. We really need to win back Congress, and this Michigan Senate seat in particular.
“We really need to win this seat” was also the argument deployed on behalf of all three Democratic primary contenders for the nomination that El-Sayed now enjoys (if he is enjoying it, that is; the man must have an iron constitution if so). That a pivotal Senate seat could not be risked on a socialist with an Arab name was the main claim made on behalf of Haley Stevens, a woman who gives the weird impression, not of being a bog-standard Obama-era Democrat but of having somehow read about such a character and formed the idea of playing her, but absent a basic spark of conviction that would make such an imitation convincing. Mallory McMorrow’s case, on the other hand, amounted to little more than the sentiment that “we need a fresh face who’s still willing to work within the system.” She suspended her candidacy in July. For those of us who supported El-Sayed—I have supported him since his unsuccessful gubernatorial run in 2018—the defense was identical. Yes, it’s a pivotal seat, which is why we can’t let a boring moderate without any substance flub it.
Both moderates and progressives can point to Michigan political history to back up their claims. At least some Michiganders do really love moderates. We foisted George Romney on the world, which makes Mitt at least somewhat our fault too. One of our current senators is Democrat Gary Peters, who has the charisma and memorability of one of those keychains emblazoned with the names of a local car dealership that a mindlessly grinning man hands you at the annual festival—named for either a white ethnicity, a flower, or a vegetable—that accounts for two-thirds of your Michigan rural county’s annual revenue. The other one is Elissa Slotkin, who brags about her time working for the CIA—you know, the guys who killed Salvador Allende—and who seems to enjoy life only when she’s talking down to her party’s left flank.
On the other hand, we went for Jesse Jackson in the 1988 Democratic caucus and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary. I don’t think any of this says anything metaphysical about the Soul of Michigan, about Pragmatic Midwesterners or Egalitarian Midwesterners, or the solidarity formed by shoveling out each other’s cars eight months out of the year or anything like that. Places have histories and people have souls, but Michigan is too diverse to give you some coherent and predictable set of Types whose natures, carefully tabulated, will in turn tell you who’s electable and who isn’t. Michigan has soul, but it doesn’t have a soul. Not a single, unitary one.
El-Sayed strikes me and many others as a natural political talent. He clearly won a recent debate against Rogers, an actual former G-man who looks like the actor you’d cast to play the G-man who talks tougher than everybody else but secretly sells out Eliot Ness to the bad guys. El-Sayed landed punch after punch while Rogers threw the same weak jab over and over (El-Sayed is funded by Al-Qaeda—you know, because he’s brown). And yet, in an election that looks like an oncoming wipeout for the incumbent party, El-Sayed has lagged behind Republican nominee Mike Rogers in at least some polls. Were the Haley Stevens faithful correct all along? Is it the money that the national Republican Party has poured into the race? Is it… something else?
If you’re reading an article about this, you likely already know what many in the media think that something else could be. El-Sayed, like many progressives, has not acted like he’s too good to accept an endorsement from Hasan Piker, a “politics streamer” who has said a bunch of crazy shit over the years and is widely considered either an antisemite or someone who is willing to play one on TV.
I’m too old (forty-seven) to find out exactly what a “politics streamer” does all day. Nor does it befit the dignity of a magazine in which Hannah Arendt once published for a writer to explain at length what “Twitch” is (even if he knows, which I don’t really). So, I’ve looked into the reporting on Piker in various outlets. They all credited him with “extreme” remarks. I hate this kind of evasive phrasing. Lots of remarks are “extreme” that should absolutely be said. In the American context, to say “profit isn’t the only value” or “God doesn’t want you to be rich” or “Palestinians, like all people, bear the image of God” or “edtech companies are bad for education” is to say something “extreme,” yet these are all common-sense statements that everyone should be able to make.
Piker’s remarks include statements like “Orthodox Jews are inbred” and, the more famous case, “America deserved 9/11.” The problem with these statements isn’t that they’re “extreme.” It’s that they’re stupid and wicked. If Hasan Piker actually thinks this stuff, then he’s a moral idiot. If Abdul El-Sayed thought them, then he’d be running on a perverse platform. You don’t advocate universal health care for people who you think “deserve 9/11.” You might flood their streets with ICE officers, though, or get them tied up in a stupid war with Iran.
Does Hasan Piker actually think these things? I would have to figure out how Twitch works, and then watch dozens of hours of video, to really find out. But I’m going to take a guess: Probably not. I have a vague sense of Piker’s personality, because I used to listen to the podcast Chapo Trap House, where he would show up occasionally. I started to listen to them, actually, around the time Bernie won Michigan in 2016. It was a politics show that wasn’t trying to sheepdog me toward a more conservative Democrat by pretending that my affection for Sanders came from a fear of women, rather than an aversion to a politician who supported the Iraq War and was compromised by Wall Street. Shows like that were thin on the ground then and now. I would listen to Chapo for a while, grow disenchanted, come back. Rinse, repeat. I last subscribed to their Patreon after hearing that host and co-founder Matt Christman had had a stroke. (I felt strongly that large-framed men named Christman from the Midwest who overcame conservative childhoods to write books recommending socialism—I think his reached a lot more people than mine—should stick together.)
After re-subscribing, I listened to one episode. Will Menaker said some unparliamentary things about people who vote for Democrats. Then Chris Wade, the show’s designated nice guy, said that if you lived in a swing state and were worried about, say, immigrants or gay people, the hosts of the show might have “compassion” for you if you voted Democrat. Oh, wow, you’ll have compassion because I vote for the least-bad outcome from a set of unavoidable binary options? Thanks so much, guys! That’s so big of you.
I sound angrier than I am. I wish them well, the Chapo boys. They were inspiring to me at one time. It’s just that they have a brand to maintain, and it’s “intransigence.” We all have brands to maintain, at least insofar as we participate in the attention economy.
The media environment of a streamer—who, as I understand it, is constantly hosting their own personal all-day TV show—is possibly even more ruinous to one’s ability to think and argue coherently than the podcaster’s. So, Hasan probably doesn’t think that Orthodox Jews are inbred or that America deserved 9/11. He’s probably the type to say something like that in a fit of pique. Saying things in fits of pique is probably what makes you good at Twitch. It’s fun to look at and hard to look away from, and that, right there, is the ballgame. Streaming, TikTok, front-facing video: it rewards, and encourages, rhetorical escalation. The other guys say something irritatingly stupid and cruel, so you say something stupid and cruel back. They talk about helicopters, so you joke about reeducation camps. They talk about gas chambers, so you joke about the Terror—Stalin’s or Robespierre’s, it doesn’t matter which. They praise the genocidal government of Israel, so you start talking about the Houthis, or the military wing of Hamas, like it’s a slightly too caffeinated YDSA chapter. The reason to resist these pressures is not that it makes you “just like them.” Very few tankies, on their worst day, are as stupid or as evil as the average groyper on his best. The reason to resist these pressures is only that it makes you less like you, less like the principled and decent person you’d like there to be more of.
The left can’t cede new information environments, and yet so many of our new media are biased toward creating worlds leftists don’t want. Sometimes I wonder whether I’m abdicating my duty as a citizen by not going on, say, TikTok just to tell people, every few hours or days, “Hey, you should get off of TikTok.” What else that is worth saying can you say through the conditions that TikTok imposes? But that’s not much of a brand.
The alternative to building brands would be to rebuild our society. But right now, it feels like there’s no future in that. The best it seems you can do is to find some way to cash in on the sell-off, and then hope to gamble your nest egg intelligently—and keep gambling it. But the likelihood of winning those games is quite low too, about equal to the chances of the Democrats winning every major election for the rest of at least my life, which might be what it takes to rebuild the state capacity to take the actions that would allow us to escape this death spiral into fascism. So, one chooses between two very unlikely events.
In the meantime, I like Abdul El-Sayed. I think he’s right about healthcare. His hatred of ICE is clear and it long predates Donald Trump’s second term—it probably predates his first. He can say nuanced things in snappy sentences, like Obama used to do. I’m cautiously optimistic that he’ll win. These are boring things to say—bad for the brand, but good for the society, I think. And I think they’re true. That will have to be enough for now.
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