Last night was watershed in American politics: it marked the first time what the French call Islamogauchisme — Islamo-leftism — made a serious mark on our national politics.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan’s Democratic primary for US Senate. It is a major sign of the times that a man like that would have gotten so far in American politics. He is a Muslim, but so what; I’d happily vote for a Muslim candidate like Dr. Zuhdi Jasser. More than that, El-Sayed is at the very least Islamist-adjacent, standing for things so extreme they would never have been heard of from a serious candidate for the US Senate.
Here’s a brief glance, from an ad the GOP released last night that gives you an idea of how they’re going to come at El-Sayed in the general election this fall, if he is the one:
He also once advocated defunding the police, though he’s tried hard to walk that back. There’s more. But you know what we’ve got here. The times, they are a changin’.
This below is an important insight about the psychology of the Democratic Socialists of America. (𝕏Here’s a link to the tweet.) The DSA, doubtless unawares, are following the script of totalitarian movements in their beginning stage — that is, why they attract a socially atomized person in a society where many people have lost faith in institutions. It’s all in Arendt:
Last night on cable news, David Axelrod, Obama’s political director, played the Jew card in attacking AIPAC for spending $30 million to back El-Sayed’s Democratic opponent. Axelrod, who described himself on air as “the son of a Jewish refugee,” said it’s suspicious that AIPAC, characterized by him as an agent of a foreign government, spent so much in this race. 𝕏Watch it here. As Trisha Posner pointed out, it fell to Van Jones, a black Democrat, to point out that AIPAC is simply American Jews who care about Israel organizing politically to affect US policy towards Israel. In fact, said Jones, El-Sayed backs a total US military embargo on Israel — that is, not even allowing Israel to buy defensive weapons. It makes sense, said Jones, that Jews who support Israel would spend money to keep a guy like that out of Congress.
𝕏Here’s something very interesting that also appeared on cable last night. An interviewer asked Sen. Bernie Sanders (who is also Jewish) about the communist Hasan Piker campaigning for El-Sayed. Piker once said the US deserved 9/11, she pointed out. Sanders replied that that “was a dumb statement.
"On the other hand, he has a whole lot of followers, and a lot of things he’s saying make sense to a lot of people. We have to get above cancel culture. …We need a big tent. And I think people like Piker should be welcomed into that."
This, of course, is the rationale Vice President J.D. Vance has given for not denouncing right-wing extremists in the conservative movement. At AmFest last year, he said:
“President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeating purity tests. … We have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”
So, for practical reasons, significant gatekeepers in both parties are holding the door wide open to the radical fringe. We know, or should know, from history where this is bound to go. I’m going to tweak slightly Hannah Arendt’s line from The Origins of Totalitarianism, about how elites in pre-totalitarian Russia and Germany helped bring in catastrophe by “making a pact with the mob”:
They were prepared to welcome the destruction of civilization, for the
felt practical necessityof seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
It’s like somebody ought to write a book about the Weimarization of America. Oh, wait, I did! Too bad my Weimar America is not going to be out till May 2027. I’ve polled you all before on cover art ideas for my past books. The ultimate decision on the cover is not mine, but the publisher’s. And this is not necessarily going to be the subtitle; it’s one I proposed. Still, I’m sending them ideas. I used Grok to help me adapt the classic movie poster from Fritz Lang’s 1931 “M” for the book cover. What do you think?
I prefer the Koloss font (1923), which strike me as more evocative of the era, but Grok doesn’t know it. Still, what do you think of the concept? I think it not only conveys the Weimar era, but also captures the sense of alarm that’s in the book’s narrative.
I shared this idea with a smart friend, who didn’t get the “M” reference, or the Weimar connection. Well, the art department at Hachette has a long time to work on this. Maybe fiddling around with the image — adding small tattoos of a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle to the thumb, and making the 1930s German crowd in the background look more recognizably contemporary America — would help. It’s just an idea. Anyway, the art department, who are actual professionals, not a writer with a Grok account, are working on ideas. I’m sure they’ll be better than this one.
But it’s fun to think about this. Y’all have been really helpful in the past in crowdsourcing ideas. One thing the image should convey is that this book is not a “Republicans Are Proto-Hitlers” book at all, but one that focus on the instability of Weimar Germany, which included the appeal of both Communism and Nazism, until the Nazis won that struggle decisively. The thrust of the book is not that Hitler 2.0 is on the way, or Stalin 2.0, but rather that we have reproduced the psychosocial conditions of Weimar, such that political extremism of both Left and Right is fast-rising in an unstable culture. If you have any cover art images that you’d like to share with me, but can’t put in the comments, email at roddreher — at — substack — dot — com.
Sadly, indeed catastrophically, I don’t think any of the fundamentals driving the Weimar dynamic will change after this fall’s election. (“It’s brownshirts vs. commies,” a friend glumly texted me this morning.) Until then, stick with me, kids, and we’ll keep track of our alarming national trajectory. You know I’m the go-to guy for this.
