By MICHAEL DAVIDOW, Radio Free New Hampshire
Abdul El-Sayed is a chatty guy. The Democrats’ newest savior has lived on the internet for so long that it’s easy to find and publicize his more incendiary comments. Fox News recently featured him speaking about his childhood trips to Egypt. He was contrasting the warmth and vitality he found in Cairo with the chill and loneliness he found in America. He gave a little lecture on what makes life worth living.
Fox seemed to consider this un-American of him. They’re wrong. After a primary in which he demonized his opponent for accepting the support of AIPAC while showcasing his own support from fans of Hamas and Hezbollah, his paean to hearth and home falls a little flat. But his thoughts are familiar ones. Many of our families immigrated here from older societies. They left behind tradition, they left behind the graves of their loved ones. We cherish those ties. But our forebears weren’t just moving across the oceans to reach America. They were moving forward in time as well. By coming here, they joined the modern world, and that joining came with a cost.
El-Sayed seems to think that modernity is news. But factories severed workers from the land centuries ago. Capitalism cut us loose from the seasons, from dirt, from sky; it also cut us loose from our hometowns, our fathers’ trades, our ancestors’ prejudices. Anyone with anything to sell could flourish– labor, intelligence, looks. Foreigners first, then females, then people of color, most recently gays. Only the capitalist west has liberated its minorities and habituated their members to self-actualization. In places like Egypt today, where the transition to modernity has not yet been consolidated, it is still hard to not belong to the dominant group. You don’t want to be Jewish in Cairo, or gay, or even non-Egyptian. El Sayed’s vaunted warmth gets icy fast for certain crowds.
But that’s only half the story. The liberalization of any society is an intoxicating, spiritually challenging, and heart-breaking process. So it has always been complicated by those who champion the old ways, not to hold individuals down, but rather to give structure and meaning to lives that would otherwise founder (and often do). Historically speaking, the conservative movement represents institutions rather than people. The army, the church, the professions, the small towns and those within them that do not seek change for change’s sake but rather take comfort from tradition and personal bonds.
Healthy democratic nations like our own embody both of these powerful social engines. So when Obama deprecated those who were “holding onto their guns and religion,” when Clinton scoffed at the “deplorables” who were voting for Trump, when AOC’s infamous “woke version one” called to abolish the police because the police make it hard for individuals to be themselves: they were all dismissing the fundamental premise of American political life, the accommodation made by both liberals and conservatives in favor of the public good, each granting that the other has a valuable role to play in both moving the rights of individuals forward, so that each one of us can lead as full a life as possible, and maintaining the still vibrant but age-old structures that fill so many of those lives with hope.
It’s sobering, then, to hear El-Sayed praising Egyptian culture for what every culture has, while simultaneously failing to appreciate America itself, a land not only imbued with the love of home and family and history and faith, but also with that love existing alongside the most efficient capitalist machinery in the world. This national balancing act is little short of a miracle. But his obliviousness to this strength can come as no surprise. Progressives have long raised their children to despise their own kind. They have taught them to find virtue abroad but nowhere on our own shores. They have made them into cynics when it comes to their own motives, but to see nothing but the beauty of humanity elsewhere.
By matching his self-regard against everyone else’s presumed moral bankruptcy, Michigan’s senate hopeful highlights how little he understands of not just modernity, but also America. Perhaps he grew up lonely or disaffected. Perhaps his family came up short in the hard work of building a home in this new and difficult place. Perhaps he will someday look around himself and realize that this country is more spiritual than he thinks. I don’t know if public office is the place to learn that lesson, though. Simplistic-minded conservatives like him should grow up first.
Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.