Bernie Sanders’s nationally televised MSNBC town hall in Kenosha, Wisconsin earlier this week was a vivid reminder that political argument is strange, hard, and absolutely necessary to the Left. It was also a reminder of what political argument looks like when it is not pious or tribal, but instead entirely serious about both power and principles.

The network put Sanders in a United Auto Workers hall in a place that voted narrowly for Donald Trump on November 8, the first time Kenosha had supported a Republican since Richard Nixon in 1972. Sanders sat on stage with host Chris Hayes and a panel of Trump voters. There were two blue-collar guys, one a union member and longtime Republican, the other an Obama voter who had backed Sanders in the Democratic primary. There was a pair of women whose backstories were less developed, one with a middle-class affect of slightly strained businesslike niceness, the other working class and blunt to the point of pugnacity.

It was with the second woman, Gail Sparks, that Sanders had his most memorable exchange of the evening. Reema Ahmad, a Muslim audience member and community organizer had just spoken about Trump’s “campaign of hate.” Jamie Selena, the other woman Trump voter, quickly insisted, “I would never want to see anyone thrown out [of the country] just because of their beliefs. It’s awful.”