Today Michigan answers the biggest question facing the Democratic Party.
Does it want a progressive firebrand – or an establishment “centrist”?
Abdul El-Sayed – physician, former Michigan gubernatorial candidate, backed by Bernie Sanders, AOC, the UAW and 200+ endorsements – is facing Rep. Haley Stevens, backed by Chuck Schumer, Gretchen Whitmer and nearly $50 million in AIPAC spending.
This is the most consequential Democratic primary of the 2026 cycle.
Here’s why it matters beyond Michigan:
This seat is genuinely winnable in November. Michigan is a battleground state Trump won by less than a point in 2024. The Republican nominee is Mike Rogers – endorsed by Trump.
If El-Sayed wins: the progressive movement will have proven it can compete in a state Trump won – against $50 million in establishment money.
If Stevens wins: the establishment will claim the center holds – and the progressive movement’s winning streak ends here.
I’m going to write something here that we all know is true but few are willing to just say out loud: There is a non-zero chance that the national Democratic Party, its donors and its media will decide to abandon/sabotage populist anti-establishment Democratic nominees in the upcoming general election.
Many in this corporate faction would rather such nominees lose – even if that means Democrats losing the Senate and governorships – than see these candidates win.
Why? Because if these candidates win, they threaten to change the Democratic Party and make the corporate faction irrelevant.
The outcome of Michigan’s Senate race will have major implications for the balance of power in Washington, DC, and for the future of the Democratic Party. With primaries taking place tomorrow, August 4, many are paying close attention to the contest between progressive candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and establishment candidate (and AIPAC darling) Haley Stephens to see who will represent Democrats in November’s general election.
The Michagan race is at the heart of what’s being described as a “civil war” within the Democratic Party. Here’s how Astead Herndon of Vox outlines this longstanding intra-party conflict and explains why Abdul El-Sayed is the current central figure in it.
I’m supporting Abdul, as he’s the type of “threatening” politician we need. He threatens the corporate capture of our politics, and of the Democratic Party in particular. It’s a capture that has had a corrosive, corrupting influence on our politics for the past 40+ years.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson once said we need to “disrupt the corrupt” in order to return the U.S. to the democratic and humanitarian ideals of its founding.
At a rally in Grand Rapids, The Lever’s David Sirota put that question to progressive Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed argues that party leaders aren’t worried he’s unelectable – they’re worried he’ll win and challenge a political system fueled by corporate money.
El-Sayed says AIPAC, Big Tech, Big Pharma, DTE, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and other powerful interests have helped drive nearly $70 million in spending against him.
“I’m not going there to make friends,” El-Sayed told Sirota. “I’m going there to get stuff done.”
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is illusionary and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
Notice as human beings eliminate the need for illusions within themselves, forces of illusion are neutralized throughout the world. This occurs as consciousness expands. Our personal renunciation of fear, doubt, negative thoughts, words and harmful acts is reflected in the perception and experience of greater harmony everywhere.
My exploration of – and walking on – the mystical path known as the Sufi Way continues this evening with my sharing of Living from the Heart: Universalist Sufism in America (2020), a 46-minute documentary film by Chuck Davis and Netanel Miles-Yépez.
In introducing this film on its YouTube page, the Inayati-Maimuni Order notes the following.
Living from the Heart offers an introduction to the mystical path of Sufism as expressed in the universalist Sufi teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan by contemporary Sufi teachers in America. [Note: “Hazrat” is an Arabic and Turkish honorific title used to show respect to a righteous person, prophet, and/or teacher. It is commonly used in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. The word literally translates to “presence, appearance.”]
The film contextualizes Sufism as a spiritual path of the heart, addressing the distinction between Islamic Sufism and Universalist Sufism, and introduces viewers to Sufi teachings on Love, Beauty, Music, God, and the Sufi practices of Zikr (remembrance) and Pilgrimage.
[Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives] Mike Johnson made a scary graphic so let me translate it for you, because fear only works when you don’t know what you’re looking at.
❌ ABOLISH THE SENATE – What people are actually talking about is reforming a body where a senator from Wyoming represents about 295,000 people with the same vote as one from California representing 19.5 million. Equal state representation was a compromise between large and small states at the founding. It made sense when the biggest state was 12 times the smallest. Today California is 68 times the size of Wyoming and they still get the same number of senators.
❌ REPLACE THE PRESIDENCY AND SUPREME COURT – Johnson’s graphic says “replace” but most of the actual proposals on the table are term limits and court expansion. Germany’s constitutional court judges serve 12-year terms. France’s serve 9. In the U.S. a president who wins by slim margins appoints judges who shape law for 40+ years with zero accountability. Clarence Thomas has been on the bench since 1991. The country has changed entirely. His seat hasn’t. Most functioning democracies put limits on this kind of power. The U.S. doesn’t.
❌ DEFUND THE POLICE – One of the most deliberately misrepresented phrases in modern politics. For most people using it, it means redirect some funding to mental health response and crisis intervention. Some activists did push for more sweeping cuts – but the mainstream policy conversation is about why armed police respond to mental health crises, homeless calls, and noise complaints. Finland requires police to train for three years and pairs them with social workers. Norway does the same. The U.S. had over 1,200 fatal police shootings in 2023. There’s room to ask whether the current model is the only option.
❌ OPEN BORDERS – There is no bill proposing this. There is no candidate running on this. The E.U. has open internal borders between 27 countries – a French citizen can drive to Germany without a passport and civilization holds. What people are actually proposing is a functional immigration system instead of one that costs billions, separates families, and still doesn’t work.
❌ AMNESTY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS – Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. Gave legal status to roughly three million undocumented immigrants. Republican president. Republican policy. The word “amnesty” only became a political weapon when it stopped being useful to the party that created it.
❌ DEFUND THE PENTAGON – The U.S. military budget for 2024 was $886 billion. More than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, and Australia combined. The Pentagon has failed to pass a full audit every single year since audits became mandatory in 2018. That doesn’t mean the money disappeared – it means the largest military in the world cannot fully account for how it spends almost a trillion dollars a year. Asking questions about that isn’t anti-military. It’s basic oversight.
❌ ABOLISH ICE – ICE was created in 2003 under the Homeland Security Act after 9/11. Before that, immigration enforcement existed under the INS since 1933. America handled immigration for 227 years without ICE. Since its creation the agency has been at the center of family separations, child detention controversies, and documented abuses in detention facilities – sometimes in coordination with other agencies. Questioning a 23-year-old agency is not the same as wanting to eliminate borders.
❌ MEDICARE FOR ALL – Canada has universal healthcare. So do the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Taiwan. The U.S. spends roughly $12,500 per person per year on healthcare – the highest in the world – and consistently ranks behind peer nations on outcomes like life expectancy and infant mortality. Americans die rationing insulin. They set up GoFundMes for chemo. They avoid ambulances because a ride costs over a thousand dollars. Every other developed nation figured this out.
❌ GREEN NEW DEAL – Climate infrastructure and jobs. The E.U. launched its Green Deal in 2019 targeting climate neutrality by 2050 with hundreds of billions in investment. China produces more solar panels than the rest of the world combined and leads in EV manufacturing. Germany gets roughly half its electricity from renewables. The U.S. is still debating whether climate change is real while its own cities flood, burn, and run out of water.
❌ GOVERNMENT OWNERSHIP OF CORPORATIONS – We bailed out the banks in 2008 with $700 billion in taxpayer money. Bailed out GM and Chrysler. Bailed out the airlines during COVID. Government picks up the tab every time a corporation fails but when anyone suggests the public should see a return on that investment, suddenly it’s communism. Meanwhile countries like Norway built a $1.7 trillion sovereign wealth fund from their natural resources and their citizens get world-class public services. Different model, same question: who benefits when public money is on the table?
Mike Johnson is counting on you not knowing any of this. Now you do.
One of my all-time favorite female vocalists has been in the news recently due to the 50th anniversary of her most well-known recording. The following explains what I mean.
On July 24, 1976, Elton John finally scored his first overseas No. 1 single with “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” alongside Kiki Dee. It was his sixth chart-topping hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and the first to reach No. 1 in the United Kingdom.
Although John had already cemented himself as an international rock legend by this point in his career, for some reason, his singles struggled to find as much success in his home country as they did in the United States. Records such as Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Caribou had managed to top the albums chart, but his singles always suffered from a lack of momentum.
John’s best-performing single in the U.K. before “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” was “Rocket Man”, which shot to No. 2 and helped push its corresponding album, Honky Chateau, to No. 2 as well.
Ultimately, the combined star power of Elton John and Kiki Dee was too much for the charts to ignore, and “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” overcame whatever hurdles had previously held the artist back from commercial domination. The song was a massive radio hit in both the United States and the United Kingdom.
And the song’s success couldn’t have come a moment too soon. John co-wrote the track alongside his long-time writing partner Bernie Taupin with the intention of getting a huge international star to perform the female part, hoping it would speak to fans of classic Motown duets between artists like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
Although the single wasn’t originally released on an album (where John had typically found most success), it quickly became his most popular song and broke records for physical sales in the United States. Even today, it’s still fondly remembered as one of John’s greatest early hits, and among the most iconic duets ever recorded.
For all the massive fame he had achieved by 1976, Elton John had yet to place a song at the top of the charts in his native Great Britain. That changed when he teamed up with Kiki Dee for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.”
Although Dee, born Pauline Matthews in 1947, had broken through a few years earlier, she already had more than a decade of recording experience under her belt. She’d began working with Fontana Records in 1963 when she was in her mid-teens, signing with the same label that gave John’s early band Bluesology a shot. Her five-year tenure resulted in a handful of singles and a 1968 album, I’m Kiki Dee, none of which charted. But she gained a name for herself as a backup singer (appearing on Dusty Springfield’s “Some of Your Lovin’” and “Little by Little”) and a featured performer on radio and television.
That led to Dee becoming the first white British artist signed to Motown and while 1970’s Great Expectations didn’t match that lofty title, it proved fortuitous in another way.
The music manager for Motown in the U.K. was John Reid, who was also managing Elton John. He convinced Dee to sign with the label they were forming, Rocket Records, and Loving and Free arrived in 1973 with her first U.K. Top 20, “Amoureuse.” A year later, Dee had a hit on both sides of the Atlantic with “I’ve Got the Music in Me.”
. . . Released as a stand-alone single in June 1976, “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” went to No. 1 in both the U.S. (four weeks) and the U.K. (six weeks). That ranked as his sixth song to top the Billboard Hot 100 in four years, it was also Elton John’s last until 1986, when he sang on Dionne Warwick’s charity single “That’s What Friends Are For.” One of John’s own compositions wouldn’t reach No. 1 until another duet, George Michael’s live remake of “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” did so in February 1992.
In honor of their success on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” John gave Dee a gold heart necklace with the song’s title engraved on it; as of 2011, she said she still had it. And even though he’s revisited “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” on several occasions, including singing it in high-profile situations with Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show, the Spice Girls, Minnie Mouse, RuPaul and actor/comedian Steve Coogan, John has never forgotten his original duet partner. They recorded a cover of the Four Tops’ “Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever” for her 1981 album Perfect Timing, she joined him onstage at Live Aid for “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” and they interpreted Cole Porter’s “True Love” for his 1993 Duets album.
“I love working with him because as well as being hugely talented he’s such a hoot,” Dee said in 2013. “He’s a fascinating person, incredibly loyal and one of the funniest, most quick-witted people I’ve ever met. As we were born just three weeks apart; we always do birthdays. He sends me an orchid and two bottles of champagne every year.”
A rare concert performance of Elton John and Kiki Dee singing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart” has been released online. The archival footage captures the pair performing the hit at London’s Empire Pool, Wembley, in November 1977.
The release marks the song’s 50th anniversary as a major chart success. In July 1976, the upbeat duet became John’s first number-one single in the United Kingdom and remained at the top for six weeks. It also reached number one in the United States, becoming one of the most recognizable pop collaborations of the decade.
Written by John and Bernie Taupin under the names Ann Orson and Carte Blanche, the song drew inspiration from classic Motown duets. Its playful exchange between the two singers helped it stand apart from John’s solo recordings.
Over the years, John has performed the track with several guest vocalists, but his original recording and live appearances with Dee remain closely associated with the song. The newly shared footage offers fans another look at the chemistry that helped turn the duet into a lasting favorite.
Above: Earlier this month Kiki Dee (along no doubt with Elton John) recieved a special award from Spotify for one billion streams of “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” When this achievement was first announced in February, Kiki was interviewed about it by BBC Breakfast. It’s a great (though short) interview, and one that can be viewed in its entirety below.
It’s a compilation, says Figueredo, that “showcases the [Blue-Brown] class solidarity between wealthy liberals [the ‘vote (corporatist) Blue no matter who’ crowd] and wealthy fascists [the ‘Brown’ in the Blue-Brown coalition, a reference to the Brownshirts of Nazi Germany] who both feel threatened by the rise of socialism.”
Contines Figueredo:
If it feels like they’re more hysterical than ever before, that’s because they are. They’re trying to whip people into a frenzy before Tuesday’s primaries where multiple socialists and socialist adjacent candidates are going to face-off against their establishment opponents.
. . . Our country right now is at a crossroads. Our political establishment has thoroughly failed us. And they’ve failed so badly that the only viable form of politics right now is populism. . . . The question is: Given the choice between psuedo populism in the form of fascist demagoguery and left-wing economic populism in the form of class warfare and socialism, which side are we going to choose?
Figueredo’s timely and insightful 25-minute video commentary can be viewed in its entirety below.
The real question is Why did turnout decline? The real question is Why did so many lifelong Democratic voters became disillusioned with the party in the first place?
For months before the election, voters warned Democratic leaders that U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza had become a moral issue. Thousands of Black clergy, students, human rights advocates, and millions of ordinary people repeatedly called for an end to U.S. military support. Those warnings weren’t whispered behind closed doors. They were public. They were persistent. They were impossible to ignore.
Yet when Clyburn explains the election in a recent interview, he doesn’t acknowledge what I believe became the defining moral issue dividing the Democratic coalition and now the Republican MAGA coalition. The American Israeli genocide still being perpetrated against Gaza residents.
Instead, James blames Black voters.
As a student of Black history, I find that remarkable. Black political thought has a long tradition of standing with oppressed people, not simply because they are Black, but because oppression anywhere demands moral scrutiny everywhere. Malcolm X condemned Zionism as a form of colonialism. James Baldwin challenged the dispossession of Palestinians. The Black Panther Party expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. That tradition didn’t end in the 1970s.
It resurfaced during the Democratic primaries.
In Michigan, one of the clearest dividing lines between establishment Democrats and progressive challengers wasn’t just healthcare, wages, or affordability. It was Gaza. Voters – including Black voters – said so themselves. Video after video showed Democratic voters explaining that they could no longer support candidates who continued backing U.S. military assistance to Israel. That wasn’t Republican messaging. That came from Democratic voters. Today there is a growing bipartisan coalition in Congress to end economic and military support of Israel.
James Clyburn’s analysis ignores that reality because he stands with those who stand on the wrong side of the moral line of this time.
Instead of asking why many voters felt morally betrayed, he ignorantly asks why they didn’t vote.
In my Proxy Racism framework, every elected official serves as a proxy. The only question is: a proxy for whom? Some serve primarily as proxies for their communities. Others become proxies for party leadership, wealthy donors, corporate interests, or foreign governments.
When I hear James Clyburn blame Black voters while refusing to seriously confront the moral concerns many of them expressed over Gaza, I don’t hear the activist who emerged from the civil rights movement. I hear a defender of the political establishment and its policies of oppression revealing extreme moral depravity.
The Democratic Party cannot rebuild trust by blaming the very people who warned it, months in advance, that it was losing them on this issue alone.
If anything, Black voters deserve credit for doing what Black voters have often done throughout history: refusing to sacrifice their moral convictions for political expediency.
If Democrats truly want to understand what happened, they should spend less time blaming Black voters and more time listening to what a significant number of Black voters have been saying all along. Stop supporting genocide.
I established The Wild Reed in 2006 as a sign of solidarity with all who are dedicated to living lives of integrity – though, in particular, with gay people seeking to be true to both the gift of their sexuality and their Catholic faith. The Wild Reed's original by-line read, “Thoughts and reflections from a progressive, gay, Catholic perspective.” As you can see, it reads differently now. This is because my journey has, in many ways, taken me beyond, or perhaps better still, deeper into the realities that the words “progressive,” “gay,” and “Catholic” seek to describe.
Even though reeds can symbolize frailty, they may also represent the strength found in flexibility. Popular wisdom says that the green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm. Tall green reeds are associated with water, fertility, abundance, wealth, and rebirth. The sound of a reed pipe is often considered the voice of a soul pining for God or a lost love.
On September 24, 2012,Michael BaylyofCatholics for Marriage Equality MNwas interviewed by Suzanne Linton of Our World Today about same-sex relationships and why Catholics can vote 'no' on the proposed Minnesota anti-marriage equality amendment.
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