The Incision

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No, Joe Biden has not gone too far to the left.

abdulelsayed.substack.com

No, Joe Biden has not gone too far to the left.

Centrists keep telling us that the party is too far left... in an attempt to move it to the right.

Abdul El-Sayed
Jan 29, 2022
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No, Joe Biden has not gone too far to the left.

abdulelsayed.substack.com

Hey Friend — This weekend I wanted to send along a recent post I wrote for The New Republic. For the last few months I’ve been writing in their opinion pages, covering pandemic school closures, climate change, and, of course, Joe Manchin.

You can find an excerpt from my most recent piece below. Or read the whole thing at their website: newrepublic.com

Read Abdul's piece at The New Republic

There’s a new conventional wisdom emerging to explain the Biden administration’s bumpy first year: He’s “too far left.” Centrist lawmakers, Democratic strategists turned talking heads, and Never Trump conservatives are all jumping on the bandwagon.

It’s curious, considering President Biden’s highest-profile legislative failures didn’t break on his ability to achieve broad consensus among the party. They failed over the obstinance of just two centrist extremists. The cognitive dissonance between the reality and the spin suggests a broader strategy: fear-mongering over the left to shift the party to the right.

Consider the aftermath of the disastrous Virginia elections, in which Terry McAuliffe, a white middle-aged centrist former governor who made his name in the party fundraising for the Clintons, was defeated by Glenn Youngkin, a political neophyte. Any objective assessment would suggest that throwback Clinton-era “New Democrats” don’t have a future in the party. But instead, James Carville, the cantankerous former architect of Clinton’s “third way” chalked it up to “stupid wokeness.” Wait, what? No one has ever accused McAuliffe of being woke. Wokeness didn’t lose him the campaign; the fact that he (a) repeatedly mistook his opponent for Donald Trump without articulating a vision for the future and (b) said that one dumb sentence in a debate, about giving parents no say, did…. Read the rest of the piece at newrepublic.com

Read Abdul's piece in The New Republic

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No, Joe Biden has not gone too far to the left.

abdulelsayed.substack.com
4 Comments
Terence Collins
Jan 30, 2022Liked by Abdul El-Sayed

He is and always has been too far to the right for me. His reappointment of Republican super finance supporter as Chair of the Fed. And maintaining an illegal embargo on Cuba for example.

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Susan Steigerwalt
Jan 29, 2022Liked by Abdul El-Sayed

No criticism whatsoever of your article. You are saying what needs to be said. I am so frustrated with the establishment Dems.

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