Stevens And Fetterman Are Not Motivated By Mental Illness

They’re motivated by Zionism.

This weekend, Michigan Democratic representative and losing Senate primary candidate Haley Stevens reversed her endorsement of Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed and instead endorsed election denier, Iran war supporter, and Trump goon Mike Rogers.

The backlash was satisfyingly brutal and swift.

—Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Stevens in the primary, described her actions as “a despicable betrayal.”

—Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley said, “Haley Stevens is a liar and her word means nothing” and said she had chosen white supremacy.

—New York House candidate Brad Lander said, “I didn’t think it was possible to combine primary-loser-sour-grapes & Islamophobia into a more toxic cocktail than Andrew Cuomo. But Haley Stevens has managed to do it.”

—State Senator Mallory McMorrow, who also ran in the Senate primary, described Stevens’ actions as “a blatant attempt at relevancy and trying to make an election about herself.”

—House Democrats have called for Stevens to be kicked out of the caucus. They have already removed her from group chats.

—Stevens’ chief-of-staff of eight years resigned. So did Stevens’ communications director and many other members of her staff.

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Many of those denouncing Stevens have suggested that she is an egotist and a sore loser—“a backstabber, a traitor, and a bitter white woman” as commentator Roland Martin put it. Stevens’ campaign spokesperson Caitlin Legacki blamed in part Stevens’ fiancé, wealthy political donor Jason Turkish who Legacki says, “was an extraordinarily toxic presence” and often “verbally abusive to staff.”

Inevitably, some people also suggested that Stevens was having a mental health event or breakdown, explaining her vacillation and nonsensical decisions.

It’s certainly possible that Stevens is either experiencing a mental health crisis and/or is in a toxic and abusive relationship. We do know for sure that notoriously MAGA-friendly Democratic Senator John Fetterman had a stroke before turning hard right. Mental health can affect beliefs and actions in complicated ways—Fetterman’s refusal to show up to work or do constituent services could very well be related to stroke-related depression or apathy, for example.

But both Stevens and Fetterman do not describe their shift right as psychological. They both claim that they are motivated by ideology—and specifically by Zionism. And there is reason to give that explanation credence. Zionism is, in fact, incompatible with the Democrats’ multi-racial coalition; Zionism does, in fact, undermine antifascist solidarity. It makes sense, therefore, that politicians committed first and foremost to Zionism would find themselves drawn to the politics of authoritarian ethnonationalism, aka MAGA fascism.

Zionism takes you bad places

Neither Fetterman nor Stevens has been shy about attributing their lurch MAGA-wards to Zionism. Fetterman—who regularly accuses other Democrats of overstating the evils of Trump and who often goes on Fox to bash other Democrats, including El-Sayed—has said that the brutal October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel led him to double down on his Zionism. He adds that he was alienated when progressive Democrats criticized Israel’s genocidal response. “I really decided early on that I believed that was going to be the right side with Israel throughout all of that, and I knew Democrats would continue to peel away and kind of walk away from standing with Israel on that,” he said.

Haley Stevens has similarly made it very clear that her objection to El-Sayed is based first, last, and most of the way through the middle on his opposition to continued military aid to Israel. AIPAC, the megadonor superpac committed to advancing Zionism, spent more than $30 million on Stevens’ losing primary campaign.

Stevens’ fiancée Jason Turkish, a Zionist megadonor who influenced her to endorse Rogers, said that, he dislikes El-Sayed because he “is so unwelcoming to people who have reasonable anxieties about Jews being scapegoated once again, as they have been for thousands of years, that the idea that he will steer not just U.S. policy, but foreign policy globally, it makes me extremely, extremely anxious.”

Turkish was attempting to link El-Sayed to a crappy ad commissioned by ratfucking asshole Cenk Uygur which claimed that US high prices are caused by too much US aid to Israel. This is nonsense, and El-Sayed said he did not agree with it. But that was not enough for Turkish, because Turkish’s real complaint (and Stevens’) is that El-Sayed has opposed military aid to Israel.

Neither Fetterman nor Stevens are Jewish (though Stevens’ fiancée is and Stevens says she is thinking about converting.) Yet they both feel comfortable speaking in sweeping terms about what Jewish people want and what ensures Jewish people’s safety. That’s because Zionism connects Jewish essence to a particular belief, rather than to the complicated range of religion, ethnicity, heritage, and persecution that defines Jewish identity. For Zionists, those who embrace an ethnonationalist Israel are real Jews—whether they’re Jewish or not—while those who oppose a violent ethnonationalist Israel are not real Jews.

This is the logic of Donald Trump, who often says that Jewish people who don’t vote for him are disloyal to Israel and to its champion, Donald Trump. Trump feels comfortable attacking Chuck Schumer, a Zionist Jew, as a “Palestinian”—a word Trump sees as a slur. Jews, for Zionists (Jewish and non-Jewish), become subordinate to a particular ethnonationalist political program. Our safety is a rhetorical device; our identity is a talking point. That’s dehumanizing, and (not coincidentally) makes Jewish people less safe.

This instrumental approach to Jewish identity inevitably bleeds into interactions with other people. Stevens announced her endorsement of Mike Rogers at a Black church, where she suggested that Rogers would be better for Black businesses than El-Sayed. Rogers is, of course, an enthusiastic supporter of Donald Trump’s gerrymandering bullshit, which is designed to strip Black people of voting power and return them to the days of Jim Crow. Stevens had the caucasity to present herself as a voice for Black voters as she endorsed a candidate of a blatantly white supremacist party.

DNC Black caucus chair Virgie Rollins, in response, said that “Haley Stevens has revealed herself to be a sellout who used Black Michiganders for a political stunt.” She is correct. And Stevens learned to use marginalized people for political stunts by marinating in Zionism.

Even more racism

Disrespecting and instrumentalizing marginalized identities is one half of Zionism. The other half is violent racism. Israel is currently committing a genocide against Palestinian people, and Zionist supporters of Israel often embrace Islamophobic and racist rhetoric.

During the primary campaign, Stevens’ supporters made a number of bigoted comments targeting El-Sayed. One said that El-Sayed “has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue”—a lie based on the racist trope that Muslims and Arabs are anti-American. Another supporter claimed that El-Sayed was “speaking Arabic” on the campaign trail—which, first of all, was not true, and, second of all, is not a problem unless you are a racist who thinks “speaking Arabic” is somehow wrong or un-American.

Stevens distanced herself from those comments. But she herself claimed that El-Sayed wanted “to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans”, embracing Islamophobic stereotypes that Muslims hate or endanger Jewish people. She also suggested he was part of the “complainer class”—an example of know-your-place aggression which implied that El-Sayed was presumptuous to run for office.

And finally, she endorsed Mike Rogers, whose campaign has been relentlessly, viciously Islamophobic. Rogers has claimed (falsely) that El-Sayed is linked to the terrorist organization the Muslim Brotherhood and called him an extremist who hates America. Stevens is obviously comfortable with that ugly rhetoric—rhetoric, again, that her campaign echoed. If she thought it was wrong, she wouldn’t have endorsed Rogers.

The dynamic here is straightforward. Zionism is an ethnonationalist colonial ideology which insists that certain identities should rule and that others should be erased and subjugated. It is fundamentally incompatible with multi-racial liberal democracy, which insists that all people are equal and should have an equal voice in governance. As a result, Democrats who embrace Zionism as the central plank of their political identity end up drifting, and then rushing, to join the ethnonationalist and (not coincidentally) most Islamophobic, racist, and antisemitic party, which is the GOP.

Ideology not psychology

Psychological explanations for moral failings feel compelling because moral intuitions often feel—well, like intuitions. If you are not racist, it seems obvious that Arab Muslim people are just people, who can be good or bad like any of us. The conspiratorial claims of racists seem laughably deranged and ridiculous. El-Sayed was not running an Arabic campaign. Jewish people do not control the weather. Haitians are not eating dogs and cats. This is all nonsense. If you can’t immediately see it’s nonsense, either you must be a liar, or there must be something organic wrong with your brain, or both.

But the fact is that ideology makes people see signs and dream dreams. As philosopher Charles W. Mills writes, white supremacy is “an agreement to misinterpret the world.” Racist ideologies, like white supremacy or Zionism, demand that you group people into arbitrary categories based on nonsense and then treat the world as if those arbitrary categories are the most important thing in it. This is not mental illness, caused by some organic cognitive deficit. It is a deliberate moral choice to pickle your brain in evil so that you can no longer see the path to good.

Again, and of course, Haley Stevens may have mental health problems. John Fetterman definitely had a serious stroke. But lots of people have strokes and mental health problems who do not choose to be disgusting bigots and do not choose to cape for fascists. Mental illness affects people in a range of ways. But often when people make ideological choices, they do so on the basis of ideology.

And while liberal Zionists argue otherwise, Zionism is a bad ideology incompatible with the values of liberal multi-racial democracy and the Democratic party. In 2028, Democratic primary voters should look closely at how Stevens and Fetterman ended up betraying the party. If they don’t want that to happen again, they should avoid choosing candidates who see the world through Zionism’s distorted lens.