A diagnosis is not a destiny

By Zuhdi Jasser 
Real Clear Wire

Defeatism is the disease eating at American politics. A physician’s diagnosis – and prescription – with two weeks to go.

Nearly every day in my practice, a patient sits across from me and hears words no one wants to hear. Cancer. Heart failure. A diagnosis with a long name and a short prognosis. 

The first thing I tell them matters most: You are not your diagnosis. You are a person who happens to have an illness. Then we go to work – every option weighed, every rock turned over. Some of my bravest patients fought all the way into hospice, still smiling, still refusing to surrender their lives to a statistic.

That is hope, and it isn’t naïve. It is the most practical, moral, American medicine I know.

I am in the final weeks of my second campaign for Congress. I’ve spent all of my adult life immersed in ideological battles – against Islamist ideology and for free markets, health care freedom, national security and the Constitution – but never before as a candidate for the greatest legislative body on earth. 

What has struck me most on the trail isn’t disagreement over ideas; passionate disagreement is healthy. It’s the defeatism, on both sides of the aisle, that passes itself off as sophistication. We call it conventional wisdom. I’ve come to see it in the depths of my soul as a disease, and like any disease, it presents with cardinal symptoms.

First, polling has become prophecy. Polling is not voting. It cannot be said enough. The only singular poll that counts began when ballots went out in early October and closes Nov. 3. Yet races are handicapped like horse races, weeks out, on pathological samples that can’t accurately capture what moves an individual voter at her kitchen table. 

The forecast then fulfills itself: Donors hold back, volunteers stay home, turnout softens, and the prediction “comes true.” The American Dream has always been about living beyond predictions. A free people shouldn’t outsource its hope to a crosstab. Free speech and our democracy deserve better.

Second, the expert class mistakes its models for the people. I learned this as a physician during COVID. As an ethicist, I had long believed my profession’s establishment respected patient autonomy. Then, in a crisis, it helped impose prolonged lockdowns that ran for months on end, sorted Americans into “essential” and expendable, and treated risk-aversion as virtue. We traded one disease for many others – cancers caught late, heart attacks and strokes that never reached an emergency room. 

I kept my primary care practice open every day and challenged my own profession for it. Too many political consultants practice the same medicine, deciding from a distance which races are “winnable,” as if Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Ahwatukee, Phoenix, and Scottsdale were simply data points rather than communities.

Third, we are told how to feel. Never mind rising registrations, independents on the move, strong candidates or better ideas – you are destined to lose, so sit down. One of my closest advisers calls this the “unilateral disarmament of the American center.” When the reasonable 80% in the middle is told it’s hopeless, the 10% on each fringe inherits the country. Notice that the fringes never catch this disease. Movements I consider deeply corrosive, from the Democratic Socialists of America to the global political Islamists, win seats precisely because they ignore everyone’s forecast.

Fourth, we’ve forgotten why two parties work. Americans weary of polarization dream of a third choice. But as the son of immigrants whose family escaped socialism and fascism in Syria, I’ll always defend the two-party system as an irreplaceable part of American exceptionalism. Two poles pulling toward a center is how nature holds things together – in a cell, in a magnet, and in a Congress with two chambers. Fragment the poles and coalitions collapse; just ask France or Israel how easily they govern. Polarity isn’t the problem. Extremism, defeatism is.

Fifth, we’ve misplaced our moral compass. Populism is democracy’s engine, but without leadership grounded in character it curdles into demagoguery, and “by any means necessary” drives corruption. Character means saying the same thing at your kitchen table that you say on television. Lose the compass and we drift to the extremes – confiscation of property, authoritarianism, assaults on free speech. Today’s spiking antisemitism, rising at both ends of the horseshoe, is the canary: a minority without a populist megaphone, exploited by both fringes.

Sixth, and most fundamental: Do we still love our country – and one another? In 1993 I was the only Navy doctor aboard the USS El Paso deployed in Operation Restore Hope: 650 sailors and no chaplain. On Friday evenings in the wardroom, our Catholic commanding officer, a Protestant executive officer, a Mormon, a Jew, a Buddhist, and I, a Muslim, would often talk scripture. We disagreed about theology. We agreed about what we would die for – America. Unity doesn’t come from shared backgrounds. It comes from shared values.

Benjamin Rush – a physician, like me, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence – wrote in 1773 that “patriotism is as much a virtue, and is as necessary for the support of societies, as natural affection is for the support of families.” Rush understood that love of country is love of the neighbor down the street and of generations not yet born.

Put all these symptoms together, and the diagnosis is clear. Defeatism isn’t the disease; it is what a nation looks like when social cohesion and patriotism break down. I’ve long said you cannot treat a disease you refuse to name. Here is its name.

The prescription is within reach of every citizen. Believe the voter over the compromised forecaster. Invest in the race in front of you, not the spreadsheet. Encourage normal people, good candidates to run, and show up for them when they do. Speak with one voice in every room. And love your opponents enough to defeat their ideas without denying their humanity.

Whatever happens on Nov. 3 – and I intend to win – this is the legacy I want to leave my patients, my children, my community, Arizona, and the country that welcomed my family. My grandfather, Zuhdi Jasser, a journalist and businessman who faced frequent arrest under Syria’s regime, encouraged his son, my father, to escape for America in 1967 because he refused to accept that a dictator’s verdict was our destiny. America proved him right. There was no greater blessing for me in life than being born in the freest nation in the world. A diagnosis is not a destiny. Neither is conventional wisdom.

The consultants like to say hope is not a strategy. In America, it is the only one that has ever worked. Vote as if the forecast doesn’t exist – because until you cast your ballot, it doesn’t.

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser is a primary care physician in private practice over 27 years, president of the Jasser Center for Comprehensive Care, and a former U.S. Navy lieutenant commander. He is the Republican nominee for Congress in Arizona’s 4th District. He is also a past U.S. Senate appointee to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and is author of “A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot’s Fight to Save His Faith.” Find him on X: @DrZuhdiJasser.