Debate: Has the far Left led the Democratic Party astray?

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In the 2020 presidential election, the ever-divisive President Donald Trump over-performed, relative to his 2016 baseline, with both Black and Hispanic voters. While Joe Biden won the presidency in a closer-than-expected contest, Democrats under-performed in both the Senate and House relative to what most prognosticators had predicted prior to the election.

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.

Something rather telling happened in early December, after the bipartisan “Problem Solvers Caucus” initially unveiled its new COVID-19 relief stimulus package. This new package, unlike its March predecessor, did not include any direct stimulus checks, nor did it include the crucial federal unemployment benefits that millions of out-of-work Americans have been relying on to feed their families through the COVID recession. In protest, two senators took to the Senate floor to introduce their own legislation that would dispense direct payments of $1,200 to working-class American families. And just as the coalition that had omitted the checks had been bipartisan, so, too, was the pushback; the two senators were Democrat Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Republican Josh Hawley of Missouri.

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.

In early 2014, I almost died. Weeks earlier, I had been diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease, CIDP. My white blood cells, for reasons that remain a mystery, began attacking the linings of my nerves. Over the course of months, my large muscle groups had been eaten away. I got so weak that I had trouble folding large towels. The worst days were when my wife had to push me around in a wheelchair as my nine-year-old daughter cried because “daddy can’t even walk.”

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.