This is precisely why I can consider myself a "Social" Democrat and a Progressive.
I'm kicking a little to support Abdul El-Sayed's campaign. And wish like hell that Pete Buttigieg could get back into the political arena, in whatever position.
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When I first met and spent time with Pete Buttigieg a decade ago, he gave me a vocabulary lesson.
He was then 34, in the first year of his second term as mayor of South Bend, Ind., and a flyspeck on the national political scene. But he was going places — I was sure of it. I was even surer when he explained his frustration with the word “freedom.”
He hated how Republicans had claimed it. He hated how Democrats had let them. That contrast perpetuated the fiction that government regulations, social spending and anti-discrimination laws were enemies of freedom when they were often its guarantor.
“You’re not free if you have crushing medical debt,” he told me. “You’re not free if you’re being treated differently because of who you are.” Buttigieg was then dating the man to whom he’s now married, and he added: “What has really affected my personal freedom more: the fact that I don’t have the freedom to pollute a certain river, or the fact that for part of my adult life, I didn’t have the freedom to marry somebody I was in love with? We’re talking about deep, personal freedom.”
Buttigieg was on to something bigger than “freedom.” He was recognizing how readily and foolishly Democrats ceded many tradition-tinged, conservative-coded concepts — freedom, patriotism, family values, law and order — to their opponents and how routinely they played defense rather than offense. A Democrat was more likely to question the genuineness of a Republican’s commitment to those ideals than to step forward as their true, unabashed, exuberant champion.
But I’m seeing the inklings of something different among some Democrats at center stage right now, and it’s a shrewd, fitting response to a president and a political movement whose perversion or abandonment of longtime Republican rallying points creates an opening for Democrats to redefine terms and reframe discourse.
Take “capitalism.” While there has been enormous fuss over leftists, including some recent Democratic primary winners, who deride it and identify as socialist or socialist-adjacent, there has been inadequate attention to Democrats who insist that they’re real capitalists in a way that President Trump and his MAGA supporters aren’t. Abdul El-Sayed, who won the Democratic primary for the Senate in Michigan early this month, does precisely that.
“Let’s talk about capitalism,” he told Tim Balk of The Times shortly after that primary. “Are you recording?” He went on to assert — as he had in a previous interview with Anand Giridharadas that was published in The Ink — that he was a committed, rapt student of capitalism and that America was betraying it by allowing too much wealth in too few hands and failing to ensure adequate competition and access to markets. “If you believe in capitalism,” he told Balk, “you have to believe in government regulation.” He added: “You don’t have to be a socialist to believe that you should be taxing billionaires their wealth. In fact, if you are a capitalist, you should believe in that. So, I’m capitalist who just knows about capitalism.”
You can read El-Sayed’s remarks as a canny rebuttal of Republicans’ caricatures of him and other progressive Democrats as unhinged communists. But his argument is also born of opportunity: What kind of capitalist, after all, is Trump, who insisted that the U.S. government get a 15 percent cut of A.I. chips that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices sell to China, who leverages his presidency for his and his cronies’ enrichment and who lets slights and grievances drive the erratic and irrational imposition and alteration of tariffs?
For that matter, what kind of America-first patriot is he? At no point since he went to war with Iran nearly six months ago has he been able to convince a majority of Americans that their economic pain and sacrifices are worth it. Many of them clearly regard his alarming depletion of our country’s arsenal as an ego-driven folly, and many Democrats are calling that out by turning his “America First” blather against him.
El-Sayed, for example, cited his own opposition to the war in proclaiming: “I’m the most America First candidate in the country, proudly.” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who is clearly weighing a 2028 presidential run, produced his own answer to “America First” in an opinion piece last week on Fox News website of all places. It was a 14-point plan — measures related to economic growth, income inequality and social mobility — for what he called “Team America.”
I’ve spoken at length with Khanna over recent years, and like Buttigieg, he insists that Democrats be more proudly assertive with certain themes that Republicans toss around. He has told me that Democrats need to be explicit about their patriotism and incorporate more praise for the country into their remarks, coupling critiques of its shortcomings with gratitude for its achievements.
That celebratory tone came to mind as I read about a ritual being practiced by Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee for governor of Iowa, on the campaign trail. He begins town halls by asking everyone to sing the first verse of “America the Beautiful.” That’s not necessarily what you’d expect at a Democratic rally, but Sand has said that it’s a gesture of unity among the partisan mix of voters that his events draw, and it’s an important counterpoint to all the coverage of anti-Thanksgiving, anti-flag outliers running as Democrats. Sand’s singalongs provide a fuller and truer portrait of the party.
They’re music to Buttigieg’s ears. In a Zoom conversation on Friday morning, he told me that Democrats are even better positioned than 10 years ago to own the “freedom” mantle, because they’re now arguing not only for “freedom to live a life of your choosing” but also for freedom from the police-state tactics of an administration whose agents have fatally shot protesters and sometimes indiscriminately round people up.
While Republicans profess to espouse “family values,” Buttigieg said that Democrats can and do make the case that “it’s harder and harder to have a family right now because of the economy — the Trump economy.” Democrats also have at least as much to say about faith as Republicans do.
“God does not belong to a political party,” Buttigieg said. He noted that Republicans frequently use religion as “a cudgel to hit people over the head” but that there’s “a more deeply Christian way of coming at it that suits our times, especially in response to how the Trump administration behaves, from the corruption to the cruelty.”
He reminded me that Mary Peltola, the Democratic nominee in the potentially crucial Senate race in Alaska, has adopted the slogan “Fish, Family, Freedom.” He and I weren’t sure whether the party needed to reclaim salmon and halibut from its opponents. But we liked the direction in which she was swimming.
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