What made Haley Stevens turn on el-Sayed? | Judith Levine

“Did you talk to anyone? Did you have a long night of the soul? Were you up all night? ... Did you have a dream?”Interviewing the Michigan US representative Haley Stevens on CNN on Sunday, Anderson Cooper was casting about for explanations. What caused the Democrat’s radical change of heart between a Saturday night promise to her House colleague Debbie Dingell that she would stand with the Democratic Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed and a public endorsement Sunday morning of his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers?All Cooper could get from Stevens was her bruised feelings at el-Sayed’s “anger and lack of kindness”. El-Sayed disinvited her from a campaign event at a Black church with the South Carolina representative Jim Clyburn. She went to another Black church and sat with Rogers.Stevens told Cooper she has “a whole heck of a lot of love for the Democratic party”, and that she “was just trying to help this campaign and stand up for people who felt hurt”. Democrats from the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer to the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders lambasted her. Half of her own staff resigned in disgust.It’s hard not to psychoanalyze Stevens. She evinces equal measures of titanic self-absorption and midwestern self-abnegation, masculine arrogance and feminine people-pleasing. While imperiling what might be the last chance Congress has to contain a rampaging Donald Trump, she insists that she’s just one voter, who is “not trying to upset anyone”. In televised interviews about this very serious matter, she smiles a lot. Is she being deceitful, or just deluded?Maybe Stevens inherited this confusion from her mother, who declared herself proud of her daughter for “standing up for her values … [and] for the Democratic Party”. Dingell, who has condemned Stevens’ betrayal, allowed that she is nevertheless “worried” about her friend as “a human being”. Others have raised questions about the influence of her fiance, who backed Rogers before she did.Stevens now joins the quisling caucus with Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who made a video appearance at Trump’s Republican convention in September, in which he denounced socialism and praised his fellow Pennsylvania senator, Republican David McCormick.As with Fetterman, there is one issue that triggers Stevens to act in ways that are destructive both to herself and her allies: Israel. Fresh from endorsing El-Sayed after her primary loss, she told the Jerusalem Post that “anti-Zionism” is a “hate movement” so powerful it can “break down civil society”.Fetterman has said that official Democratic opposition to Israel’s policies would be the “red line” whose crossing would force him to leave the party.Unlike Fetterman, who has received nothing from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Stevens has debts to Aipac, which spent at least $30m in attack ads against El-Sayed during the primary and added $9m to support Rogers in October. Maybe she was counting on more of Aipac’s largesse in her political future, imagining she had one.Stevens cannot stop obsessing about El-Sayed’s various anti-Israel and antisemitic supporters, who act independently from him and his campaign. But she expresses no discomfort with her new guy’s unpalatable champions, including the Trump-loving gang leader-turned-preacher Lorenzo Sewell, who calls Islam a “death cult” and El-Sayed an “Islamist jihadist”, and the Texas oil billionaire Tim Dunn, who once told the Jewish Republican Texas speaker of the House that only Christians should hold leadership positions. Of a $23m campaign war chest, Dunn donated $5m.At some point in history, Zionists and anti-Zionists had reasonable political differences. But in 2026, when the world, including the UN, confirms that Israel is committing genocide and when a win for the US president’s party augurs a plummet into full-on fascism, Stevens’ betrayal of the Democrats suggests a kind of political madness, Israel derangement syndrome. Judith Levine is a frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her Substack is Today in Fascism