By Alliance Communications Coordinator Amy Durr
The news is tough right now, and there’s so much of it. We are all reeling from the barrage. Knowing that the onslaught is a playbook for authoritarianism, we’re all seeking ways to cope and confront while somehow remaining informed without giving up hope.
A surprising, evolved approach is being acted out by Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is currently sharing his ideas as he runs for the US Senate in Michigan. His ideas for how “America can be done with Trumpism” are reflected in this powerful conversation he recently had with provocative author, prolific journalist and astute political observer Anand Giridharadas.
As Giridharadas points out, it’s a vision that may alienate both progressive and moderate Democrats and it’s definitely shaking things up.
Following are some of the key excerpts from the discussion they had about El-Sayed’s playbook for healing a fractured nation, as presented in Giridharadas’ Substack post A cure for Trumpism: Radical empathy and radical change:
1. The bully and the posse
Giridharadas begins by explaining Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s beliefs about how to tackle Trump and his posse:
What he sees in Trump is a bully par excellence. But bullies are often secretly weak, El-Sayed observed. What props them up is their posse. Trump’s posse is millions of voters. Without their allegiance, he is a childhood-scarred, semi-literate, narcissistic bully halfwit. With their allegiance, he has a path to making himself Caesar.
The pro-democracy movement must obsessively seek to separate the posse from the bully. Which means adopting a posture that some fellow Democrats may not like: showing what he calls “radical empathy” for Trump voters, and viewing the choice millions made as an expression of desperation in an unresponsive system, a shout into the void.
As El-Sayed told Giridharadas, “Confront the bully. But woo the posse.”
2. Don’t prove them wrong. Get them to right.
Giridharadas: Open any social media site, and what do you see these days? Gleeful Democrats sharing stories of MAGA types now being hurt by the policies they voted for.
Understandable psychologically? Yes. Smart politically? No. Not even a little bit.
Dr. El-Sayed framed the approach he favors instead succinctly: “We’ve got to get folks to being right, not prove them wrong.”
What’s the difference? It’s about creating, El-Sayed says, “A space within which you felt safe enough…to say, you know what?, I made a mistake.”
3. America is good, actually
Giridharadas, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1970s, says:
And many of us who, like El-Sayed, would grow up to have criticisms of how America functions would also, like El-Sayed, never forget that America has real and profound gifts, that it offers many, many people — not enough, but more than most places — life chances and an opportunity to flourish and create and speak and become the fullest version of yourself.
That this is a great country, which is, sadly, language many progressives would find way too cringe.
4. Fighting Trump isn’t enough – Win the peace
Giridharadas: El-Sayed argues Democrats need to be more interested in winning the peace than the war: “Nobody fights the war to just win the war. You fight the war to win the peace.”
What he means is remaining focused on healing the causes of the pain that made Trump possible, instead of over-fixating on Trump as the sum total of the ill.
5. The age of insecurity
Giridharadas: El-Sayed’s point is that insecurity in general has been roiling our hearts and politics, and has achieved what he, a public health doctor, calls “epidemic” status.
“The thing about insecurity is that you may have what you need right now, but you’re constantly at risk of losing it,” said El-Sayed.
So part of winning the peace beyond Trumpism, rather than just making war with Trump, is addressing the roots of insecurity.
6. Abolish vanilla
Giridharadas: Some of El-Sayed’s arguments above — the radical empathy part of his solution — might strike some Democrats as too solicitous of Trump voters, too eager to make accommodations. But El-Sayed is not a mushy moderate.
Rather, I think of him as being in the mold of many of the organizers I wrote about in my book The Persuaders: advocating more flexibility on how you reach out to and court moderates and MAGA voters, but more stridency in policymaking.
A lot of what you see from Democrats right now is the opposite: Snideness and condescension toward MAGA types, but mushy moderate policies. El-Sayed wants to flip that script: Gentle, openhearted outreach and aggressive, even radical, policy.
7. Reclaim common sense
Giridharadas: [El-Sayed] seemed determined to frame ideas like clean air and water, healthcare for all, ending wasteful wars, and such as basic common sense, not radical or out of the mainstream.
But he also has a bracing message for those moderates so singularly fixated on Trump that they think the goal of political struggle should be to return America to the day before the golden escalator ride in 2015. “That’s our own version of Make America Great Again. It just happens to be 2015 instead of 1930-something,” [El-Sayed] told me.
America wasn’t working for most people in 2015. The way to move past Trumpism is to champion drastically, boldly upending what wasn’t working, and to do so with an openhearted posture toward converts who will have many reasons to seek a new political home in the days that are coming.
Editor: We’d love to hear your thoughts.