Politicos opposing Michigan Senator candidate Abdul El-Sayed have focused their contempt for El-Sayed on his view of patriarchal power. That is not a part of his Democratic-Socialist philosophy, but to a Christian Nationalist, it sounds a lot like Marxism. Their reductionist thinking misses the point.
There is a deceptively simple question at the center of the American argument over patriarchy: What happens when a society becomes accustomed to the idea that one person is entitled to rule because he occupies a particular place in a hierarchy?
The question can be asked about a father and his family. It can be asked about an employer and his workers. It can be asked about a billionaire and the company whose political influence extends far beyond its payroll. And, eventually, it can be asked about a government.
This is where the contemporary argument made by progressives such as Abdul El-Sayed intersects with the much older intellectual tradition of socialism. The subject is not, at bottom, whether men are good or bad, nor whether fathers should exercise legitimate authority over their children. It is whether authority becomes more legitimate merely because it has been inherited from tradition, property, gender, or social position.
That question is older than Marx. But Marx and Engels gave it an economic vocabulary that has proved extraordinarily durable.
The father as the first hierarchy
El-Sayed has not presented himself as a theorist of the patriarchal family in the manner of Engels or the later socialist feminists. His public political argument is more immediate. In discussing masculinity, he has argued that men do not lose anything when women gain education, economic independence, or social influence. He has described his preferred alternative as a form of “benevolent masculinity,” in which strength is associated with empowering others rather than dominating them.
That is revealing because it moves the argument away from the familiar culture-war proposition that feminism is somehow an attack on men.
El-Sayed’s formulation is closer to this: a man can retain strength without requiring submission from the people around him.
That distinction matters. Patriarchy, in the political and sociological sense, does not simply mean that a man happens to be a father, or that a father makes decisions. It refers to a social order in which authority and privilege are systematically organized around male status. Contemporary feminist philosophers have therefore treated the family as politically significant rather than as a completely private realm. The family teaches habits of authority, dependence, obligation, and obedience, while laws concerning marriage, inheritance, custody, employment, and reproduction inevitably give the state a role in shaping it.
The most provocative question, then, is not “Should children obey their parents?” It is “Why should adulthood, maleness, wealth, or social position automatically confer superior claims to power?”
That question can travel surprisingly far.
Marx’s insight: power has a material foundation
Karl Marx himself did not construct a systematic theory of patriarchy. That distinction is important. His principal concern was class: the way ownership of the means of production permits one class to exercise enormous power over another.
But Marx and Friedrich Engels eventually developed an account of the family that connected gender hierarchy with economic organization. Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State argued that the patriarchal family became historically intertwined with private property, inheritance, and men’s control of wealth. In his account, the monogamous family became an economic institution as well as a domestic one, with male authority connected to the transmission of property across generations.
Engels’s historical anthropology is now regarded as much too schematic to serve as a literal history of every human society. But one portion of the argument remained influential: power within the family cannot always be separated from power over property and economic resources.
That idea became central to Marxist feminism.
If one person controls the family’s income, owns the house, controls the inheritance, has greater access to education and employment, and possesses the culturally recognized authority to make the important decisions, then the family’s hierarchy is not merely psychological. It is material.
The same reasoning can be applied outside the household.
An employer who controls the workplace possesses power because he or she controls resources on which others depend. A wealthy investor possesses influence because capital creates opportunities to determine what gets built, financed, or bought. A political donor may acquire disproportionate influence because wealth can be converted into political access.
This is the broader socialist suspicion of concentrated power: political equality can become rather thin when economic inequality becomes enormous.
From Marx to social democracy
This is where El-Sayed’s politics appear considerably closer to contemporary social democracy than to classical revolutionary Marxism.
Social democrats generally do not argue that private property must disappear or that capitalist institutions must simply be abolished. Instead, they have historically sought to constrain concentrations of economic power through labor rights, public services, progressive taxation, social insurance, universal health care, and democratic regulation.
The philosophical premise is strikingly similar to the feminist critique of patriarchy: freedom requires more than formal equality if people remain radically unequal in their practical power.
A woman may formally possess the same legal rights as her husband yet have little meaningful freedom if she is economically dependent upon him.
A worker may formally possess the right to quit a job yet have little bargaining power if losing the job means losing health insurance, housing, or the ability to feed his family.
A citizen may formally possess one vote yet still live in a political system where enormous concentrations of wealth permit a tiny number of people to exercise vastly greater influence over public debate.
The analogy should not be pushed too far. A corporation is not a family, and a father is not a capitalist. But the underlying political question is similar: How much inequality of power can coexist with genuine equality of citizenship?
This is also where feminism enters Marxism
The Marxist tradition eventually encountered a problem it could not easily solve.
Class was not the only hierarchy operating inside a working-class household.
A male factory worker could be economically exploited by his employer while possessing considerable authority over a wife who performed unpaid domestic labor. The household could therefore reproduce one hierarchy while simultaneously being victimized by another.
Feminist Marxists and socialist feminists developed this insight into a larger theory. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy summarizes the tradition by noting that Marxist and feminist thinkers increasingly examined the relationship between women’s unpaid domestic labor, economic dependency, capitalism, and the sexual division of labor.
This generated one of the enduring questions of the left:
Who benefits from work that society desperately needs but does not adequately recognize or compensate?
Cooking, cleaning, caring for children, caring for elderly relatives, and maintaining the household are economically indispensable, yet much of this labor historically disappeared into the category of “women’s work.”
The socialist-feminist response was not simply that men should become nicer husbands. It was that economic institutions themselves could be organized differently—through child care, health care, paid leave, labor protections, and other forms of social provision.
This is one reason the contemporary progressive movement often treats economic policy and gender equality as related rather than separate issues.
And then there is Christian nationalism
Here the philosophical contrast becomes sharper.
It is essential to avoid a caricature. Christianity is not synonymous with patriarchy, and Christian nationalism is not synonymous with Christianity. Christians have argued over family authority for centuries, and many Christian traditions explicitly emphasize mutual obligation, service, compassion, and the moral equality of men and women.
Christian nationalism is a political ideology, not simply a theological belief. Scholars Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found a strong association between Christian nationalism and a conception of American social order centered on traditional family hierarchy, heterosexual marriage, and traditional gender roles. Their research describes the idealized family structure within Christian nationalism as explicitly concerned with patriarchy and hierarchical order.
That creates a genuine philosophical tension with anti-patriarchal politics.
The traditionalist argument begins from the proposition that hierarchy can be legitimate and socially productive. Families require parents. Children need guidance. Institutions require leaders. Authority can create stability. A society without recognized authority can become fragmented.
The progressive argument begins somewhere else: hierarchy may sometimes be necessary, but hierarchy must continually justify itself.
A parent may legitimately exercise authority over a child because the child is still developing the capacity for independent judgment. But that does not necessarily imply that a husband possesses political or moral authority over his wife simply because he is the husband.
This distinction—between authority that is functional and authority that is inherited as status—is one of the most important fault lines between traditionalist and egalitarian political philosophies.
The question of “order”
This helps explain why the argument sometimes feels much larger than a dispute about gender.
Traditional conservatism has often regarded hierarchy as part of the architecture of social stability. Progressive politics tends to regard concentrated hierarchy as a potential source of domination.
The disagreement therefore becomes:
Is social order something we achieve by preserving established hierarchies, or something we achieve by making power accountable?
Christian nationalist thinkers tend to place considerable emphasis on the first proposition: family, community, nation, and religion are conceived as overlapping structures of inherited obligation and authority.
The progressive tradition places greater emphasis on the second: institutions are legitimate insofar as those subject to their power have meaningful rights, voice, and protection against domination.
Neither position necessarily implies chaos on one side or authoritarianism on the other. But they begin with different intuitions about hierarchy.
El-Sayed’s larger argument about concentrated power
This is where his economic politics become relevant.
El-Sayed has explicitly described his Muslim faith as an inspiration for his progressive political commitments, particularly his concern with economic inequality and human dignity. At an interfaith gathering in Detroit, he framed the obligation in remarkably straightforward moral terms: if someone lacks something essential and you have the ability to help, you have a responsibility to act.
That is not Marxist language.
It is closer to the language of moral obligation.
Yet the resulting political conclusion can overlap with Marxism and social democracy: extreme concentrations of wealth and power are dangerous because they permit people with enormous resources to shape institutions that affect everyone else.
This is why El-Sayed’s worldview can appear to contain several intellectual traditions at once.
There is Marx’s suspicion of concentrated economic power.
There is social democracy’s belief that democratic government can redistribute power and security through public institutions.
There is feminism’s insistence that power inside the family is still power, even when exercised in the supposedly private sphere.
And there is religious ethics, in El-Sayed’s case Islamic, which asks what obligations the fortunate have toward people who possess less.
These traditions do not have identical theories. But they can arrive at similar political conclusions.
The deepest disagreement is about domination
Perhaps the clearest way to understand El-Sayed’s position is therefore not as an argument against fathers, masculinity, Christianity, or the family.
It is an argument against domination as a definition of strength.
That is why his discussion of masculinity is significant. He is not saying that men should become weak. He is arguing that strength can be understood as the capacity to protect, provide, cooperate, and empower rather than the capacity to command.
That idea has a surprisingly long pedigree.
John Stuart Mill, writing before the modern socialist-feminist tradition had fully developed, argued that domination inside the household could undermine the moral development of citizens outside it. Feminist philosophers subsequently made the stronger claim that the family itself is one of the institutions through which citizens learn what authority and equality mean.
Marx and Engels, from another direction, asked what happens when economic power becomes concentrated in the hands of a class.
The modern progressive synthesis asks whether these are really separate questions.
Perhaps, it suggests, they are versions of one question:
What happens to a democracy when people become accustomed to living inside hierarchies they are not permitted to question?
That is the fundamental concern behind much anti-patriarchal thinking on the contemporary left. The objection is not necessarily to authority. It is to unaccountable authority. It is not necessarily to hierarchy. It is to hierarchy that disguises itself as nature, tradition, or inevitability.
And that is precisely why the argument reaches beyond feminism.
It becomes an argument about democracy itself.
A democracy assumes that no citizen is born with an unquestionable right to rule another. The socialist tradition extends that intuition into economics. Feminism extends it into the household. Social democracy extends it into public institutions. And El-Sayed, drawing simultaneously on progressive politics and his religious moral framework, appears to be articulating a version of the same broad principle:
Human dignity is threatened when power becomes so concentrated that the people subject to it lose the practical ability to say no.
That proposition is compatible with a great deal of the modern left. But it also represents a profound challenge to any political philosophy—religious or secular—that regards inherited hierarchy itself as a source of legitimacy.
