Like many Americans, I’ve been following the election. Tuesday, Nov. 3, is the final day to cast a ballot.
Here in Chicago, I’ve watched the contest next door in Michigan with real concern. Voters there will decide whether Abdul El-Sayed should represent them in the U.S. Senate. He supports Medicare for All and wants to abolish ICE, and he has backing from figures including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What concerns me is that he seems part of a broader left-wing movement that treats America’s founding principles as the problem.
El-Sayed says he isn’t a socialist and describes himself as a capitalist. The Democratic Socialists of America haven’t endorsed him. Still, I wonder whether the distance is partly strategic. From 2017 to 2020, he spoke at six DSA chapter events, including a 2019 fundraiser where he delivered the keynote. Socialist organizers have called him a longtime friend of Detroit DSA, and about 50 DSA members reportedly traveled from New York to canvass for him before the primary. Michigan voters can decide which political label fits best.
El-Sayed has made a deliberate effort to connect with Black voters in Detroit. He lost the city in the August primary, then began visiting Black churches, appearing with pastors and outlining proposals for Black communities. His agenda includes housing deadlines, loans for minority-owned businesses and repairs to schools.
Speaking to women faith leaders in Detroit in September, he said Black communities had long been owed debts that people were unwilling even to acknowledge, much less repay.
I pay attention to that framing. It speaks to us as though we are owed something and our future depends on someone else settling the account. He presents Black Americans as an oppressed class and tries to meet us on those terms. It reminds me of the way white liberals have often approached the community.
After listening to El-Sayed, I still don’t hear what I want from a candidate: a defense of America without apology. To me, being American means refusing to make excuses, accepting responsibility and being accountable. I don’t hear that from him. For six decades, the left has spoken to Black Americans in this way, and I’ve seen the harm it can do in the communities I serve.
I’ve said before that the socialism candidates like El-Sayed embrace is a bad answer. Black Americans were among the first in this country to experience the kind of government dependence socialists now propose for everyone. Programs presented as a way to overcome oppression—including Great Society initiatives, public housing and welfare rules that discouraged marriage and work—helped lock people into a cycle of dependency.
In 1963, 23.6% of Black children were born to unmarried mothers. By 2023, the figure had risen to 69%.
As fathers left, government checks took the place of men in the home. Marriage, faith and work began to seem less essential. Many Black Americans found a way out through the American principles of self-improvement. Others became part of what is now called the permanent Black underclass.
I see the effects every day. I founded Project H.O.O.D. to help address the damage through job training and character-building, and by telling young people that dependence on government does not have to define their future.
The people who have rallied behind El-Sayed have also made clear what they want. The DSA’s 2026 program, “Workers Deserve More,” calls for abolishing the Senate and Electoral College, and replacing the presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.
They want to dismantle what I believe is the best system of government ever devised. The group has also called for a new constitution and a democratic socialist republic. A 2021 DSA convention resolution declared that the United States has never been, and never will be, a force for liberation. One member of its National Political Committee said socialists should help bring about the defeat of their own country.
El-Sayed has not endorsed that program. His own proposal is to end the filibuster. But the people who canvassed for him are part of this movement, and I suspect they will expect something in return.
White guilt is one reason El-Sayed has gotten as far as he has. For some white progressives, supporting a candidate like him is a way to show they are on the right side of racial issues. His language about debts owed to Black communities makes them feel good about their commitment to social justice, while Detroit’s Black residents are left with policies that foster dependence. The decline is visible, yet too few people ask whether more of the same socialist approach is working. In my view, this is less about genuine Black uplift than easing white people’s sense of guilt—and El-Sayed knows how to appeal to that.
He has also, I think, used that guilt to deflect scrutiny. Questions have been raised about possible ties between his family and the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2012, his half-sister wrote online about a conversation with their mother concerning her activism with the group in the early 1970s, when she was in college. Asked about the post, El-Sayed said his family had no ties to the Brotherhood and dismissed it as hearsay based on a tweet.
Fact-checkers have found no evidence that El-Sayed himself has ties to the Brotherhood, and he has disavowed the group. But during an appearance on “Meet the Press,” he asked why the issue was even being debated. At a town hall, when a voter asked him to condemn the group, he agreed, then challenged the questioner for assuming that his being Muslim meant he might be loyal to something other than the Constitution.
Journalists don’t want to be accused of Islamophobia, just as nobody wants to be called racist. That fear is part of what allows white guilt to work, and I believe El-Sayed relies on it to make the question disappear.
To me, none of this makes El-Sayed a new kind of politician. Like the white liberals who came before him, he speaks to Black Americans as people who are owed something and embraces socialist ideas that have already failed our communities.
I work every day to help lift up my community through American principles. Michigan voters who choose Abdul El-Sayed, I believe, will be choosing the opposite path.
