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Abdul El-Sayed Diagnoses American Politics

A conversation with Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee about public health, outside money, and a new kind of politics.

Abdul El-Sayed’s bid for Michigan’s open US Senate seat could well decide which party controls the chamber after November’s midterm elections. Historically, a candidate in such a position might run cautiously. Not El-Sayed. A Rhodes scholar and epidemiologist who, at age 30, earned national attention for his transformative work as director of the Detroit Health Department, the progressive Democrat boldly advocates for Medicare for All, ending US support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, and adopting a fresh vision of capitalism that empowers people rather than corporations. After his primary win in August, Nation editors Katrina vanden Heuvel and John Nichols spoke with El-Sayed at a favorite haunt of his, the Alba coffeehouse in Detroit’s Corktown neighborhood. T

The Nation: You’ve spent much of your life working in public health. Can you diagnose what’s wrong with American politics?

Abdul El-Sayed: One of the things that you learn pretty quick in medical school is that heart failure is about the heart, but it’s also about the kidneys. They have this really important relationship where your kidneys often regulate for your heart—because if the heart is beating against too much pressure, it’s on the kidneys to push water out. But what tends to happen is, once you find yourself with insufficient heart [strength], the kidneys don’t get enough pressure to know to offload. So they stop doing what they do, and the thing runs in reverse, beating up your heart, in effect. And I think what we have right now is a level of corporate capture of our politics, in every single part of American society, that is loading more on and running the system in reverse.

Our political system was always supposed to be able to act as a check on the richest and most powerful…. And now, what’s happened is that [we] have a political system that acts as a handmaiden to the richest and most powerful, accelerating the inequality that we have in our society. Our political system has become part and parcel of that inequity. It shows up in every part of our lives: whether it’s the food system, which is controlled by a couple of very large corporations and agribusinesses. Or it’s our healthcare system, which is captured by a few very large pharmaceutical companies and health-insurance companies. Or it’s our foreign policy, which is captured by a few very, very large weapons manufacturers and special interests. All of it is operating in a way that tends to drive money away from us and toward the very top.

I think if we don’t address that system of capture, we will find ourselves paying more for less, being squeezed in our work, and watching as our systems operate more to make rich people a lot of money than to actually do the things they’re supposed to.

TN: How do you talk about this system of capture in the context of a campaign where you’re being massively outspent by the wealthy and powerful?

AES: If you know you’re going to be outspent in paid media, then you have to build really, really robust earned and [self-generated media] and a really, really robust movement on the ground. That’s what we did. We started out going everywhere, talking to everyone. I did 530 public events in the primary, across 110 different cities. We have been communicating and listening and showing up in people’s lives.

TN: You have argued that when candidates rely on lots of outside money, it’s a sign of weakness.

AES: If they’re getting huge amounts of outside spending, that’s a sign of weakness because it’s a crutch. It’s like, why do you need outside spending? That’s [my opponent, Michigan Republican US Senate nominee] Mike Rogers in a nutshell. That system of politics is the problem. And it’s based on this old idea that all that matters is how much money you raise to buy media. The money isn’t spent on town halls; it isn’t spent knocking on doors. It’s spent on 30-second attack ads.

TN: You’ve complained that candidates in both parties neglect the voters in order to chase after big donors and outside money.

AES: Yes. When you go out and........

© The Nation