This isn’t just a Democratic landslide. It represents one of the biggest breakthroughs for the U.S. left in the history of the republic.
An array of progressive politicians have been elected at federal and state level, variously committed to hiking taxes on booming plutocrats, Medicare for All, workers’ rights and ending U.S. facilitation of Israel’s apartheid, occupation and genocide. Some call themselves socialists – but others who don’t are committed to redistribution of wealth and power and an end to slaughter in foreign lands.
Indeed, one of the great victories was Abdul El-Sayed’s triumph in Michigan’s Senate race. A profoundly progressive politician who doesn’t identify as a socialist, El-Sayed is committed at home to a wealth tax, Medicare for All, the public manufacture of essential medicines, public investment in infrastructure and services and universal publicly funded childcare. Abroad, he advocates an immediate and comprehensive arms embargo on Israel and an end to catastrophic militarism.
Yet El-Sayed had to overcome seemingly impossible odds: not just an unrelentingly racist campaign by the Republicans and their media allies, but the hostility of the Democratic establishment, too.