Branko Marcetic on the Democratic Party’s civil war playing out in the Michigan Senate race. Three weeks after progressive Abdul El-Sayed won the primary, centrists turned a clipped Hasan Piker clip into a manufactured scandal — while the real story is their own faction openly helping the Republican.
- The “scandal”: Piker, in full context, warned that conflating all Jews with Israel makes Jews less safe — a point Ezra Klein, David Klion, Norman Solomon, and Hannah Arendt have all made
- The real scandal: Michigan Democrats and party bundlers backing Mike Rogers for “purely factional reasons,” and Third Way’s $15 million campaign to “discredit” the Left with El-Sayed name-checked
- Rogers’s team: students who joked about expelling Jews to North Korea, defenders of “love Hitler” young Republicans, and a faith coalition of homophobic and anti-Muslim extremists
- Rep. Hillary Scholten refused to back El-Sayed before he even won the primary
The centrists’ calculus: if El-Sayed loses, they can blame the Left, discredit socialism, and install a candidate who shares their politics — lockstep support for Israel and corporate-friendly economics.
For the party’s centrist wing, the most perilous outcome might be their own party winning in November.