DON’T BE FOOLED BY CENTRISTS’
CLAIMS TO BE ‘RADICAL’ AND ‘PROGRESSIVE’
How Third Way Democrats Could
Get Trump Re-elected
The New Democracy PAC and
other centrist groups want you to learn all the wrong lessons from 2016.
In 1992, Bill Clinton was
elected president with the help of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the
powerhouse of centrist Democrats of which he had been president. The DLC shut down in 2011, but this creature of the Third Way did
not slither into the sunset. Rather, it shed its skin and emerged in 2017
as New Democracy,a political action committee.
New Democracy is coiled to
strike in 2020. Its advisory board includes declared presidential candidate
John Delaney, a former Maryland congressman and millionaire businessman, along with two other possible
presidential contenders: Former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who said in
January that he is “probably” in the race, and former New Orleans mayor, Mitch
Landrieu, a self-proclaimed “radical centrist.”
Third Way Democrats love the
word “radical.” The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the DLC-affiliated
think tank, brags that it deploys “its trademark philosophy of radical
pragmatism” as part of “the vanguard” working “to design a distinctly American
hybrid of publicprivate action”—in other
words, privatization of government services.
New Democracy founder Will
Marshall expands on this point in a recent article for The Daily Beast, “Hey, Democratic
Socialists: More Big Government Won’t Fix What Ails Us.” He writes that,
“rather than emulate European-style statism” as advocated by “Bernie Sanders
and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the new socialist idol,” progressives should
“offer voters an indigenous and decentralized vision for effecting radical
change.”
Marshall is also a founder of
both the late DLC and the PPI, which shares an office with New Democracy. PPI
funders have included the weapons manufacturer Raytheon, Dow Chemical and
General Electric, along with the right-wing Bradley Foundation, which funds the
American Legislative Exchange Council.
Just as there is nothing
“progressive” about PPI, there is nothing “new” about the ideas advanced by New
Democracy. Like the Republican Party, New Democracy is death on single-payer
healthcare, which the group’s website explains “would force working Americans
to give up their doctors, and raise the threat of rationing care.” Back in
2010, PPI wonks ensured that the White House not push for a “public option”—a government-run nonprofit
insurance option—in Obamacare.
New Democracy’s stated goal in
2020 is to expand “the party’s appeal across Middle America and make Democrats
competitive.” Pragmatic radicals like Marshall advocate doing so not by
“tear[ing] up existing trade agreements” but by building a “knowledge economy”
that is “shaped largely by American ingenuity and technological prowess”—a
vision crafted for corporate America under the guise of aiding downwardly
mobile white working people who, according to the New Democracy fairy tale,
were abandoned by Democrats in 2016. Not so.
The abandonment dates to the
1990s, when the DLC, PPI and Bill Clinton championed free trade policies that
destroyed the livelihoods of working people of all races, including many of
Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.”
Hillary’s speechifying may
have opened the purses of Goldman Sachs bankers, but
she failed to woo white non-college-educated voters who
supported Barack Obama in 2012, and she lost the critical states of Wisconsin,
Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. According to the calculations of Ruy Teixeira
at the Center for American Progress, Clinton would be president had she had won
over just 25 percent of these former Obama voters.
Indeed, if Clinton had
campaigned, as Bernie Sanders did, against trade agreements like NAFTA
that benefit the rich and the powerful, it is a good bet that Donald Trump
would not be president. If New Democracy steers Democratic strategy in 2020, it
is a good bet he will remain president.
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