Who’s afraid of the Abdul bros? Centrist Dems use woke tropes against the Left — again

A populist insurgent is rising in a Democratic primary, outperforming the expectations of pundits and political elites. But the party establishment warns that the insurgent — a straight man — and his political movement carry unsettling sexist overtones. And he even has the nerve to disagree with the Obamas, as close to party royalty as it gets.

This would be a fair description of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, which saw Hillary Clinton and the party establishment successfully deploy woke 1.0 tropes against Bernie Sanders and his supporters. But I’m speaking of the party’s current Senate primary in Michigan, where the party establishment is … trying to do the exact same thing. And likewise in several other contests nationwide.

A decade ago, Clinton’s allies smeared Bernie Sanders’s movement as “Bernie Bros” — supposedly hyper-aggressive masculine activists bent on preventing the election of the first female president. The Clintonites also implied that Sanders was dismissive of black voters and their concerns. At one point, the lawmaker (and Clinton ally) John Lewis excoriated Bernie Sanders’s 1960s integration activism, stating: “I never saw him. I never met him.” (It would have been difficult to see him, as Sanders protested segregation in Chicago, not the American South, where Lewis took his historic stand.)

Clinton’s success in that primary — followed by her humiliating defeat by Donald Trump later that year — created a handbook of sorts for the Democratic establishment. If you’re facing a revolt within your party, don’t bother discussing the big ideas. Don’t compare policy plans or debate your vision. Just find ways to subtly or not so subtly insinuate that your opponent is racist and sexist, and then rely on the party’s core constituencies of women and minorities to put the rebels in their place.

The party establishment has dusted off just the handbook in Michigan, where Rep. Haley Stevens faces a Left uprising from former Detroit public-health officer Abdul El-Sayed. Stevens is backed by the party establishment, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. But the bulk of her campaign spending is coming from outside groups, most generously the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

AIPAC’s ad spending in the state is as notable for what it says as what it doesn’t. None of the group’s ads even mention the Jewish state (El-Sayed is a critic of the US-Israel relationship, and Stevens a defender of it). Instead, AIPAC is running ads suggesting that El-Sayed has disrespected women, a misleading claim that’s already been torn apart by the local press.

Even judged against the rock-bottom standards of political advertising, the anti-Abdul campaign is astonishingly — and repellently — dishonest. It points to a December 2010 op-ed by El-Sayed, in which he addressed Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign as “commendable, if ineffectual.” AIPAC twists this to suggest that El-Sayed denigrated “Obama’s work with children” as “uninspired and ineffectual.”

Is it supposed to be disrespectful to women to merely disagree on the effectiveness of the then-first lady’s public-health campaign? Of course not, but implying that El-Sayed is sexist is key to polarizing Democratic and African-American women against him.

Meanwhile, other outside ads backing Stevens feature Barack Obama praising Stevens’s work on the Detroit auto bailout and suggesting that he has endorsed her — but the former president has made no endorsement in the race.

The takeaway from these ads is clear: El-Sayed has a problem with women, especially black women like Michelle Obama; and some voters have already been convinced that Stevens is actually Barack Obama’s pick for the race.

Michigan isn’t the only place where the woke 1.0 handbook is being redeployed. In New York City, the upstart Mayor Zohran Mamdani has found popularity and policy success. And his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America are picking up seats in the New York state legislature and winning congressional primaries (which effectively means they’re sweeping the seats).

The response from the local party establishment isn’t to engage in a dialogue with these rebels — who clearly represent the future of the Democrats in Gotham — but to attack them for not winning the votes of some older black and Latino voters. Self-appointed “black and Latino leaders” have attacked the DSA as a group of outsiders, lacking roots in the community. This disregards the fact that they’re winning over solid majorities in highly diverse districts.

Farther north, in Maine, the exit of Graham Platner has brought with it the ascension of Troy Jackson, a logger, former Maine Senate president, and ally of Sanders. Jackson is all but certain to be nominated by the party thanks to his strong organizing. But the liberal media are already feasting on stories about his temper (he once threw a water bottle in the presence of a female lawmaker — gasp!).

Although there is no indication that Jackson has engaged in discrimination, sexual assault, or any kind of gendered abuse, a CNN piece on the incident uses the word “female” six times, clearly implying that Jackson has some kind of problem with women. 

Neera Tanden — a long-time Hillary Clinton aide and the head of the Center for American Progress (where, full disclosure, I used to work) — is perhaps the most ritualistic abuser of these gendered attacks. Tanden recently implied that El-Sayed may have some kind of Platner-like scandal in his background. She had no evidence, but since when does dirty politics demand that?

The Democratic establishment has made clear that it is incapable of arguing ideas or electability. After all, these people lost to Trump — twice. Who in the world is looking to them for advice on how to persuade the American people?

But the Democratic primary process does not include the masses of American voters. These primaries are typically decided by relatively small coteries of Democratic activists, largely women and minorities. The presidential primary, for instance, has served as a sort of graveyard for populists after they were smeared as sexist and anti-black. The Democratic establishment knows that fear tactics can work on these groups.

Yet the strategy may be reaching its limits of effectiveness. In a number of different states, Left-populists and socialists have managed to break through in primaries in which the Democratic establishment deployed all the usual sectarian attacks.

Darializa Avila Chevalier, an upstart socialist candidate, won her congressional primary in New York City against longtime incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat. In the run-up to the vote, one of Espaillat’s senior advisers accused her ally Mamdani of trying to change the demography of Washington Heights by overrunning it with Muslims and Haitians. Voters rejected that race card. He narrowly lost his race.

Yet it should be said that Chevalier has an advantage that many Democratic populists don’t: she’s a Hispanic woman. This makes it more difficult for the Democratic establishment to use gendered and racial attacks against her. Other candidates may not be so lucky.

El-Sayed, for instance, seemed to concede the validity of charges of sexism against his movement recently when he tweeted that “it’s become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics. It’s unkind and unhelpful. If you support me, please stop.”

Can you imagine Trump or JD Vance ever tweeting anything like this? There’s a reason Left-wing populism hasn’t enjoyed the same success as the Right-wing variety. Right-wing populists are simply willing to fight much harder against negative attacks, whether they’re smears or the truth.

Left-wing populists can’t win without changing their approach to the party establishment. Rather than conceding bad-faith racial and gender attacks, they should turn them to their advantage. When Sanders was endlessly attacked for the behavior of his supporters online, he validated those attacks. “I don’t want that support,” he said of his supposedly sexist backers online.

But a better approach would have been for the Vermont senator to say something like this: “Yes, some people online say rude things. That’s true for my supporters, that’s true for Secretary Clinton’s supporters. But if you go to my rally, you see thousands of women who are volunteering for me, donating for me, and working towards an America where everyone has a shot at the American dream. Smearing those people as sexist is not just wrong, it is offensive. And I think the reason they’re doing it is because they want to smear a movement that is capable of taking them on and transforming this country.”

Think of it as the Left-wing version of Trump’s “they’re not after me, they’re after you, and I just happen to be standing in the way.”

As the nation approaches another presidential election where these attacks are likely to once again be deployed, Left-wing populists have to understand that the stakes are much higher than simply winning a Democratic primary.

For years, the party has badly alienated white men, the majority of whom now vote Republican. Imagine what these people are thinking when they watch progressive populists crumble before false accusations of racism and sexism. If even Sanders and El-Sayed can be defamed as sexists, what room is there for a conservative or even moderate white male in the Democratic Party? Defeating these bad-faith tactics, then, is essential to the health of populism, the Democratic Party, and American politics.

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