First Listen, Then Organise, Before Beginning to Lecture: Michigan's Message to the Left

It is tempting to see Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary as another episode in the long struggle between the progressive and centrist wings of the Democratic Party. That reading is not wrong, but something more consequential may be taking shape. El-Sayed’s narrow defeat of Congresswoman Haley Stevens, despite the extraordinary financial advantage enjoyed by his opponent, offers an opportunity to reconsider a question that the American Left has evaded for too long: who speaks for the working class now?

For much of the 20th century, it was indeed the Left with its politics built around the factory, the union hall, the farm, the mine and the neighbourhood. It spoke about wages, working conditions, healthcare, housing, pensions, education and the dignity of labour. Its intellectual vocabulary might have been ardently theoretical, but its political practice was deeply concrete.

It understood that solidarity, more than anything else, was an organisation of people around the material conditions of their lives. That relationship gradually weakened over the years. And into the vacuum walked Donald Trump with a swagger.

Trump’s extraordinary political achievement was that he persuaded many that he was at least willing to speak about the things that had made them angry. He recognised that before people become ideological subjects, they are people trying to pay rent, buy groceries, find decent work, educate their children, afford healthcare and preserve some sense of security in an economy that blatantly rewarded everyone except them. This glaring grievance he cleverly appropriated.

The rise of Trumpism has been conveniently diagnosed by the Left through the language of manipulation, disinformation, racism, cultural resentment, right-wing media that the Right deftly set into motion. Undoubtedly, these have played a role. But the more uncomfortable question is what happened to the Left that the working class became available to the Right?

The answer cannot simply be that the working class became reactionary. Across much of the democratic world, working people have been living through a prolonged erosion of economic security. Stable industrial employment has declined. Housing has become prohibitively expensive. Healthcare and education have become increasingly commodified. Technological change threatens to displace labour while the gains from that change accrue disproportionately to capital.

Also read: The Trump Policy Tsunami: More Shock than Therapy?

The Left abdicated its historical position at the core of this crisis. Instead, it drifted  toward a new social and cultural locus that was urban, professional and defined by institutional credentials rather than by material struggle. Its language shifted towards representation, identity and cultural recognition, while economic questions sometimes became abstractions rather than organising principles. Undoubtedly, race, gender, sexuality, migration and cultural exclusion are serious political questions. But a movement that wishes to represent a majority cannot allow questions of cultural recognition to displace the more elementary question of how people live.

A progressive politics of material life

El-Sayed’s campaign offered something that conventional Democratic politics has too often struggled to provide, His was a progressive politics of material life that made healthcare central. He opposed the growing influence of corporate money. He talked about workers and union jobs. The United Auto Workers endorsed him. The Working Families Party likewise backed him as part of its effort to organise a multiracial coalition of working people.

This, therefore, is potentially the beginning of a new open-minded vocabulary that is pro-worker and pro-public interest with a manifesto that is not anti-capitalist rhetoric for its own sake, but a demand that economic power be accountable to the society from which it draws its resources.

Abdul El-Sayed greets a supporter at the base of the Spirit of Detroit monument in Detroit, August 19, 2026. Photo: AP /Paul Sancya

This is the only way of countering the genius of Trumpism that had skillfully combined economic populism with cultural conservatism by telling a worker whose wages had stagnated that the real enemy is the immigrant, the bureaucrat, the university, the progressive, the foreigner or the cultural elite. Transforming economic anger into cultural resentment had indeed been a clever move by the Right.

The answer to this is to offer a better diagnosis and a credible alternative through the reinvention of the Left that would begin with the proposition that class is not an obsolete category. It would understand that a Black worker in Detroit, a white warehouse worker in Pennsylvania, a Hispanic construction worker in Arizona and a young service employee in California may possess very different cultural identities while sharing remarkably similar economic vulnerabilities. It must therefore seek not to erase differences but to build solidarity across race and class.

This is how the concept of solidarity needs to be recovered from abstraction.

Solidarity, put simply, means that the healthcare of another person is not someone else’s problem, and that the collapse of the factory town is not merely a regional tragedy. Housing certainly cannot be treated simply as a market commodity when an entire generation cannot afford to live where it works. Thus, technological progress cannot be called progress if its costs are socialised and its benefits privatised.

The Left must therefore recover the language of economic citizenship.

Healthcare, housing, education are political questions because a society cannot remain democratic when ordinary citizens cannot afford to inhabit it. Trade unions too matter because democracy cannot stop at the factory gate. And above all, work matters as a source of dignity, identity and belonging.

Rediscovering class

This is where the American Left can learn from its own history that democracy requires institutions capable of converting private grievances into collective power. Today, too much progressive politics operates through organisations that are accountable upward to donors, foundations, professional networks and institutional gatekeepers, instead of downward to the communities they claim to represent.

Also read: Trump’s Red Scaremongering is Likely to Be Counterproductive

The result is a politics that can be morally eloquent while remaining organisationally weak. And organisational weakness is dangerous in an age of authoritarian politics.

The Left must remember that the more it becomes detached from a broad popular constituency, the easier it becomes for the Right to portray it as a marginal collection of activists, academics and cultural radicals, rather than as a movement representing millions of ordinary citizens. This is why the revival of grassroots politics matters so profoundly.

The Left cannot reinvent itself on social media alone. It cannot be reconstructed through think tanks, television appearances, academic conferences or donor-funded advocacy organisations. It has to return to the places where politics becomes a lived experience as on the factory floor, the union hall, the school, the hospital, the farm and the workplace.

Therefore, it is imperative to first listen, then organise, before beginning to lecture. Michigan may be significant because this is beginning to happen again. But a single victory does not prove that America has turned left. The temptation to declare the death of Trumpism on the basis of one primary would be naive. However,  Michigan does offer a political possibility of treating the working class as the social foundation of progressive politics. Denouncing authoritarianism is not enough. It is essential to remove the conditions that make authoritarian populism attractive.

This will be possible when the Left begins to believe that people who feel economically secure are less susceptible to the politics of fear. To achieve this, you need public institutions that can give the people an opening to use collective power and not solely depend on the strongman or his charisma. The antidote to Trumpism, therefore, is not merely anti-Trumpism, but democratic solidarity.

This is why El-Sayed’s victory deserves to be read beyond his Muslim identity.  Reducing his candidacy to that identity would miss the larger political attempt to unite questions of healthcare, wages, technology and democratic accountability into a single defining feature of the American government.

Michigan may be the first indication that this has begun. It may come to be remembered not as an isolated primary upset, but as the point at which the Left began to reclaim the constituency it had mistakenly surrendered. That would mark the beginning of a new Left, and, hopefully, the resurgence of left forces across the world.

Shelley Walia is formerly Professor of Cultural and Literary Theory and UGC Emeritus Fellow at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He has been Senior Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford. He writes on education, culture, war and international relations.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.