Democrats Need Their Y Combinators | Timeless Toni Morrison

“I have no diagnosis, no prognosis and no pain medication,” says Kathy Panas Zabel. For more than 30 years, she’s been trying to figure out why she experiences pain throughout her body. Doctors couldn’t help her or didn’t want to take her on as a patient because of her complex medical background, so she started compiling research and medical records on her own, trying to find some answers.

Some hope came in 2009 when she found out she had been accepted to Dr. William Gahl’s Undiagnosed Diseases Program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Applicants to the program have to submit medical records and undergo testing including genome sequencing, but less than half of patients actually receive a diagnosis. In the world of rare diseases, Zabel is truly rare. She might be the only one with her condition.

However, not all rare diseases are that rare. And as a class, they’re barely rare at all. The NIH’s definition of a “rare disease” is just one that affects less than 200,000 Americans. Only a few people may be affected by each, but there are estimated to be thousands of these conditions, meaning that: An estimated one in 12 Americans lives with a rare disease.

What pulled Toni Morrison’s pen to paper was silence. She could see all the stories that were untold and unexamined, and spent her literary life writing experiences that demanded existence. By doing so, she created a framework for Black writers for ages to come.

Morrison died Monday at 88 years old. The pioneering novelist authored seminal works that bore witness to the Black experience. A giant of American literature, Morrison was a writer ahead of her time who examined the legacy of slavery and intergenerational trauma. Her prose, circular and meandering, often appeared to extend beyond the construct of time itself.

The model is familiar in the venture capital world. A fund releases a call for pitches. The bids arrive in droves, each promising some revolutionary contribution: a software that conducts surveys over text, filling a gap between expensive phone polls and slanted online ones. A recruitment platform that can shift volunteers where they are most needed at a moment’s notice. An artificial intelligence-powered search tool that promises to let you know “your target better than they know themselves.”

The difference? These aren’t companies trying to drive change merely through business. Their focus is on politics. And they are being shepherded by a new vanguard of startup accelerators seeking to fundamentally change the way Democrats reach and mobilize voters, after a 2016 presidential election that saw liberals cede the digital-tech advantage they held during the early Barack Obama years to conservative power players. It’s a competition to catch up with Republicans that could shape how effectively different campaigns connect with potential voters in the 2020 elections.