Immediately after the election, moderate and progressive Democrats began trading recriminations. In the eyes of the moderates, Democrats’ rhetoric about “defunding” the police and “Green New Deal”-style massive government programs cost them many winnable races. But, progressives responded, there is little concrete evidence of this, and Clintonian-style centrism is, at this point, an outmoded dinosaur of a previous era. Who is right?
This week, Batya Ungar-Sargon, opinion editor of The Forward, debates Issac Bailey of Davidson College on whether the far Left exerts a positive or negative influence upon the Democratic Party. We hope you enjoy the exchange.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek opinion editor, a syndicated columnist and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. Twitter: @josh_hammer.
The Talmud tells us that God always preempts a blow with what heals it, in this case seeding a new, bipartisan populism into the fertile grounds of the Senate’s bipartisan abandonment of the working class. As such, it was a snapshot of American politics today: Many on both sides of the aisle have abandoned labor, while a precious few, also on both sides, seem to have recognized this fact and wish to remedy it. In other words, as is more often than not the case in America, more unites us than divides us.
It wasn’t CIDP that nearly killed me. It was the initial treatment. It was aggressive. Day after day, I would visit a hospital, where medical officials would pump something called IVIG into my veins in a room where cancer patients were also being treated. The result: A 104-degree fever that wouldn’t break, multiple blood clots and a suspicion that my heart would be forever damaged even if I survived. Fortunately, we found a different aggressive treatment—steroids through an IV—that worked.
