The End of the Beginning: Takeaways From the August 4th Primaries

Tuesday night provided a ton of information that we must sort through as we move forward

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Well, that’s that.

After months of ugly and shameless operations, the Democratic Primary in Michigan is over. Dr. Abdul El-Sayed will stand as the party’s nominee in the senate race in November. The votes were close, but barring some unforeseen underhanded maneuver, that will be the case.

Tuesday’s elections brought a whole host of telling results that we should pause and take stock of, because, regardless of what some may want or some may say, things are changing and they’re changing fast.

With the World Against Him

Roughly $62 million dollars was spent by outside groups to secure Haley Stevens the nomination. Michigan was flooded with ads and campaigns by AIPAC and other possibly related operations. It was a mix of traditional and relatively new tactics. Radio and TV attack ads, sure, but also a shadowy and coordinated rollout of social media support for Stevens for the low, low cost of $1,500 a post. And, rather than forwarding an agenda, Stevens and surrogates and supporters relied on a scattershot strategy of charging El-Sayed with being antisemitic or a misogynist, of highlighting commentator Hasan Piker, of repulsive Islamaphobia, dogwhistling“the coastal elite,” and a relentless dodging of any question as to the dark money or support of genocide.

When that wasn’t enough, the establishment Democrats did what they do best: rollout the endorsements. Jim Clyburn, himself a coastal elite, flew in and threw his weight behind Stevens. Gretchen Whitmer took some time off from selling her soul to data centers and Big Tech to do her part. And, when former president Barack Obama failed to lend his name to the campaign, Stevens did whatever she could to insinuate he had.

El-Sayed didn’t get the landslide some thought was possible, but he secured the nomination. For any critics who questioned his electability, it would be a good idea to recognize that his campaign, in the same mold as other leftists around the country unseating establishment candidates, actually got out and did the work despite facing the full weight and power of the Democratic Party and its precious shareholders. And that’s what’s necessary if you are to actually challenge for a position of power as opposed to continue this shadowboxing arrangement between the two parties while serving the interests of the wealth and oligarchical classes.

A Cornered Establishment

In the last few days of the campaign a new chorus emerged. The same voices that had been working tirelessly to try and drag Stevens over the finish line began openly flirting with the possibility of sitting out the Midterm election in November. Despite loudly proclaiming control of the Senate was “too important and too existential” as fascism took hold, they now talked about how an El-Sayed loss against Mike Rogers would teach the Left “a lesson.” Of course, for years now these voices have screamed “vote blue no matter who,” even as people just discussed their discomfort with voting for candidates who enabled or even denied a genocide. To do so, we were told, to even be uncomfortable or conflicted, was tantamount to being a fascist yourself.

El-Sayed winning the nomination will not make this stop. In fact, things are about to get a whole lot uglier.

Attacks against leftist candidates like Francesca Hong, who in a recent poll in the governor primary in Wisconsin holds a 30 point lead, have gained incredible traction in the past few days. What happened in Michigan will repeat and possibly amplify with every loss. Corporate media will intensify their characterization of left or center-left politicians as dangerous communists. We’ll hear more about how the Democratic Party, which is a conservative party, has “lost its mind.” If you thought the dark money spent in the Michigan Primary was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. It’ll continue through the primary season and into the general.

Entrenched party machines don’t simply give up. There’s too much money and too much power on the line. And that’s why it’s so ugly. The Left is fucking with their wallets and fucking with billions upon billions of dollars.

The wealth class will not simply pull its foot off the gas. There are trillions of dollars on the line, particularly as we hurtle toward a new economy that will be built on the wreckage of the present one.

The Spiral

In a recent article detailing the changing political alignment, I made the argument that all this dark money is supplementing the Democratic Party’s loss of support from its base, which is growing increasingly more detached from the party itself. We have entered in a terminal spiral phase of our politics, and the El-Sayed nomination will be seen as one of the landmark moments in the beginning of that spiral. Whether he wins or loses in November, it doesn’t matter in this regard. The base is now in political rebellion and there is no amount of money you can spend to change that.

In fact, the more money you spend and the more desperate you become, the more obvious the attempts at regaining control are. Democratic voters feel like their own party is at war with them because it is. Some Democratic politicians understand this and others will figure it out. Perennial weathervanes like Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris are already wrapping their heads around it and will offer, as they kickoff their own campaigns and agendas, a facsimile of a leftist appeal. We’ve seen this with both, most notably with Harris’s 2020 presidential run that was heavily influenced by the BLM protests and changing tides. Other Democrats will double and triple down and continue lashing out at the base, thereby further alienating them and increasing their support for the left.

We have already seen the party deal with historic changes in support of Israel by blaming social media manipulation, brainwashing, and a younger generation they stop just short of calling stupid and naive. It’s worth remembering that it was under the Biden Administration that a bipartisan push against TikTok, the platform most associated with support of the Palestinian cause, led to its sell…to a buying group spearheaded by Larry Ellison.

Historic trends tell us that the rise of fascism is almost inevitably met with the rise of leftist opposition, and when this happens the interests of capital will lead to some moderates, centrists, liberals, and components of the middle class to find common cause with the fascists. We’ve already seen inklings of this, including the embrace of former Republicans by “resistance” supporters, the right-driving Harris Campaign in 2024, bipartisan genocide enabling, the betrayal of women, bipoc voters, immigrants, unions, gay and trans people, and the culture of casual racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamaphobia, nationalism, and conspiracism.

It’s likely that many of these people will learn to either tolerate authoritarianism or embrace wholeheartedly. All you have to do to understand this is pay attention to what they’re already saying, the way they’re lashing out in the face of this loss, the tactics they’re accepting and engaging in. Doubtlessly, we’ll see support for censorship, surveillance, and god knows what else. And, every step along the way, these desperate attacks will only serve to motivate the base even further.

A General Outrage

The picture is pretty clear this Wednesday morning. El-Sayed’s victory was a rebuke of establishment Democrats and their benefactors. But we also saw some results that have been largely overlooked, including in the state of Missouri, where Amendments 4 and 5 were voted down by shocking supermajorities.

Amendment 4, designed by the Republicans to make it almost impossible to amend the state constitution, was destroyed by a margin of 80% to 19%.

Amendment 5, which would have eliminated income taxes, was even more lopsided: 83% to 16%.

Missouri is, by all accounting, a strongly red state, and yet Republicans turned out in droves to bury these GOP-led amendments. This was after a series of dark money ads that tried to hide the true nature of Amendment 5 by lying to voters saying it was actually about making data centers “pay up.”

This is as telling as what we saw in Michigan with El-Sayed. The wealth and oligarchical classes and their representation in the political class understand that their candidates and agendas are wildly unpopular. They’re going to rely on more and more misleading tactics, including attacks, outright lies, and covert manipulation.

There’s hope in the fact that we’re seeing signs that these kinds of disgusting tactics are being rejected.