And there you have it. It is outrageously racist to imply a Muslim political candidate has ‘jihadist’ sympathies. But it’s fine – more than fine, it will get you column inches in Vanity Fair – to say a candidate who supports the Jewish homeland embodies ‘violent, chauvinist power’. It is ‘Islamophobic’ to wonder if a Muslim candidate sympathises with jihadi movements. But it’s all good to say a pro-Israel candidate engaged to a Jew is pursuing an ‘odious culture war’ that is ‘tied to a very real war’ that started in the ‘concentration camp’ of Gaza.

This is the takeaway from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s unhinged intervention into the Michigan Senate race, one of the most acrimonious contests in yesterday’s midterms. He guns for Haley Stevens. She’s the Democrat who, at the last minute, switched her allegiance to the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, over the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed. She said she was worried about the ‘hate’ and ‘anti-Semitism’ sloshing around in sections of the El-Sayed camp. Coates doesn’t only accuse her of betrayal, as has every silver-spoon keffiyeh-head on the internet – he accuses her of violence.

This is a story about ‘Stevens waking up and choosing violence’, he says. In aligning herself with Rogers, she allied herself with an ‘odious culture war’ that has ‘a simple goal’ – ‘to render Muslims and Arabs more killable’. The silly damsel thought she was just putting an X next to Rogers’s name when in fact she was signing the death warrant of Muslims everywhere. This ‘long war on the Muslim and Arab world’ has ‘reached its apogee in the concentration camp of Gaza’, says Coates. Isn’t it striking that it’s a ‘culture war’ when Republicans have a pop at a Muslim but ‘commentary’ when a writer plunders the historic suffering of Jews and borrows one of their most painful experiences (the camps) to use as a rhetorical cudgel against them today.

Coates’s depiction of El-Sayed as some kind of holy victim and Stevens as a demon culture warrior helping to mark Muslims for death is clearly insane. But it is also wholly in keeping with the infantile, binary moralism of the identity politics that stinks up both the radical and bourgeois left today. The Muslim is infantilised as the wide-eyed victim of a global ‘campaign of hate’. The woman who has the temerity to question a Muslim is damned as odious, chauvinistic, even murderous. This is the toxic psychic space of the identitarian warrior – a rigid neo-caste system of saints and oppressors, where nuance gasps for breath.

The combative clash in Michigan is proof that ‘wokeness’ is going nowhere. The Democratic left’s drift into the post-class hell of designated martyrs and violent haters seems unstoppable now. This isn’t about why Michiganders voted for El-Sayed. He won with 52.4 per cent to Mike Rogers’ 45.6 per cent. Many will have been drawn to his positions on healthcare for all and affordable housing. Yet the left debate around the contest, the transformation of it into an apocalyptic showdown between the put-upon Muslim and a stooge of the Jewish nation, was ugly, and telling; it was indicative of where the Dems are being dragged.

The vitriol heaped on Stevens was wild, even by the standards of a digital left that long ago swapped discussion for insult. Every sacred tenet of liberal etiquette went up in smoke. Stevens was said to be under the coercive control of her partner, who’s Jewish. People wondered if she was having a ‘mental breakdown’. Quick – reopen the asylums for hysterical women! One columnist said Stevens’s voice ‘more often than not… is now her fiancé’. It fell to Stevens’ mother to beg people to stop being such sexist pricks. She slammed the ‘misogynistic trolls’ and said, ‘We’re not the kind of women to be brainwashed’.

The depiction of Stevens as the sad, manic cat lady of the globe-straddling Israel machine was a naked ruse to write off her criticisms of El-Sayed as ‘crazy’. But they weren’t. There is something off about El-Sayed and his Israelophobic clingers-on. Stevens is right that their focus on the Jewish State is ‘obsessive, obsessive, obsessive’. She’s right that El-Sayed mingled with iffy people. Like rich-boy Twitcher Hasan Piker, who once called Zionism a ‘mental illness’ and said ‘it doesn’t matter if rapes fucking happened on 7 October’. Do you think a Dem candidate would survive if he hung out with people who called African nationalism a ‘mental illness’ and said ‘Who gives a fuck if the KKK raped black women’? Not a chance. But Jews don’t matter.

Earlier this year, after a Lebanese-born man attacked a Michigan synagogue that was packed with children, reportedly out of anger with Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah, El-Sayed said: ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ Oof. He later apologised. The pro-El-Sayed TV ad produced by middle-aged motormouth Cenk Uygur summed up the modern left’s anti-Jew-State mania. It featured a couple struggling to pay for their weekly shop and then it dawns on them why they’re so broke – because their tax dollars are being spent on ‘killing Palestinians’. Those Jews. Life would be great if only they didn’t have their long fingers in our pockets. The ad was even too much for the El-Sayed team, who disavowed it. Though as Batya Ungar-Sargon pointed out, it was merely a ‘dramatised’ version of El-Sayed’s own belief that US support for Israel is worsening the ‘affordability’ crisis for everyday Americans.

It isn’t ‘racist’ to worry about these things. What really has the whiff of racism is the left’s depiction of the Jewish State as the source of economic downturn and working-class suffering. Jews as the cause of global misery? How original. El-Sayed’s rise unquestionably speaks to the creep of the Islamo-left – to a new radicalism that maniacally hates the Jewish State and which sacralises Muslims as blameless martyrs of the right, the West, capitalism, structural racism and that ‘odious’ Jewish nation with its murderous dream of making Muslims more ‘killable’.

These are the moral contours of identity politics now. This is the depthless pit of victimology into which the left has tumbled following its abandonment of the working class. ‘The Muslim’ is treated as a pure avatar of vulnerability under late-stage capitalism, while the Jewish State and its supporters (which includes the vast majority of Jews) are cast as the incarnation of wickedness, now even desiring to export their ‘genocide’ to the wider world. Having traded economic questions for a crude tableau of saints and demons, the left no longer offers a vision for justice, only a psychosis of righteousness. It was the kingly arrogance of the El-Sayed camp, their smarminess, that really struck me. These people clearly know the machinery of bourgeois opinion is behind them, always happy to flatter their self-pitying vision of themselves as ‘the oppressed’ now storming to power. The childish, divisive melodrama of Islamo-leftism. I’ll echo Haley Stevens: it’s not good.