How Centrist Democrats' War on Progressives Enables Trump

Third Way's multimillion-dollar offensive threatens Medicare for All, labor rights, climate action, and the progressive movement driving the party's energy…

Democratic strategist James Carville, who advised former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, speaking in New York City, on April 11, 2015. (Image: Eduardo Munoz for ICSS Livepic/via Reuters)

The Third Way has functionally declared their intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressive are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want:

— A national healthcare program that covers everybody
— Free or affordable college
— A clean environment and relief from climate wilding
— Reasonable taxation for billionaires and corporations
— Affordable housing and groceries
— Widespread unionization and an increased minimum wage
— An end to the brutality of ICE and the frantic construction of concentration camps.

These corporate Democrats just formally declared war on those candidates who eschew corporate money, and that has the potential to destroy our chances this fall. But to understand how this tear in the Democratic Party came about and why, a bit of history is vital:

In 1961, President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson had been pushing hard for expansion of the New Deal, with their centerpiece being a new program to provide healthcare for seniors that could eventually serve all Americans.

The program’s author, Robert Ball, was emphatic that his new “Medicare” program was designed so it could easily become a national healthcare system simply by reducing the eligibility age by a decade every year or two until everybody was covered.

This alarmed the crap out of Republicans and the insurance industry that backed them so much that actor Ronald Reagan — then working for General Electric doing a weekly GE Theater program beamed into millions of American homes nationwide — recorded a 33 RPM LP album called “A Time for Choosing” that argued that Medicare would cement the communist/socialist takeover of America.

My dad, a Republican activist, got a copy in the mail and I listened to it several times that year. I can still remember Reagan intoning with his so-smooth and authoritative radio announcer’s voice:

“One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. …

“Behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism.”

It was an all-out call-to-arms for Republicans to flood Congress with letters and calls opposing this new “socialist” program that the young Democratic president was advocating.

Reagan traveled over 250,000 miles across America that year, speaking to business groups from coast to coast, and his message was consistent with one of the last statements he made on that record:

“If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

Kennedy was assassinated before he could get the legislation passed, and, in the wake of that as the nation mourned, LBJ got both Medicare and Medicaid through Congress and into law.

Now convinced that America was on an irreversible path to tyranny, Republicans began looking for ways to finally, once and for all, destroy the Democratic Party that had so heartily embraced “socialism/communism.” Their target would be the single largest source of funding for Democratic candidates: labor unions, which had been legalized in 1935 by FDR.

That effort became real in 1981 when a newly elected President Reagan kneecapped PATCO, the air traffic controllers union, destroying it in a single week as he kicked off the Republican War on Labor™ that continues to this day.

Their explicit goal was to turn America into a single-party state with Democrats never again holding power in a meaningful way; this, the Brahmins of the Republican Party argued, would prevent the “creeping socialism” of FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society from ever expanding any farther.

By 1985, Reagan’s Republican War on Labor™ had reduced union membership in the private sector from a high of 34.8% to a mere 14.6% of American workers. Democratic politicians were panicking, so a group of them got together and basically decided that there was merit to be found in the old cliché, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”

That year they created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), with its leadership made up of Al From (the principal founder), Bill Clinton, Sam Nunn, Chuck Robb, and Joe Lieberman.

They called the DLC strategy a “third way” to do politics; its program included:

— welfare “reform” to push people back to work
— free trade (NAFTA)
— deficit reduction by cutting social programs
— financial deregulation for banks and real estate
— support for globalization and shipping factories overseas
— partnership with corporate America

That last part — the partnership with corporate America — became the cornerstone to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign; by that time the unions had been so badly gutted that corporate money authorized by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Bellotti decision became the key to funding his successful effort to become president. In the UK, Tony Blair was traveling down the same path.

Democratic politicians started choosing which industries to get into bed with. White collar industries were most favored, particularly banking, insurance, and pharma. The middle class was slipping away, but with the unions still largely dead there wasn’t a viable fundraising alternative to corporate support until the internet matured in the early 2000s.

Which came along during George W. Bush’s presidency, as social media grew and politicians took to the worldwide web in huge numbers.

Facing the possibility that Democrats might be able to fundraise directly from the public with this new internet thing, in 2005 a group of people including Jonathan Cowan, Matt Bennett, Jim Kessler, and Nancy Hale founded a new group associated with the Democratic Party called the Third Way.

Describing themselves as committed to “democratic capitalism,” they explicitly recommend Democratic politicians maintain relationships with wealthy donors, use capitalism as the framework for Democratic governance, create “partnerships” with business, and push “market-oriented solutions.”

And now they’re going to war with those Democrats who want to take the Party back to its FDR/LBJ New Deal/Great Society roots.

In an article titled “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left,” The New York Times reports:

“‘We are preparing for the next war that is coming,’ said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism.”

Third Way founder Cowen added, referencing Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan:

“It is deeply troubling to see radical, far-left candidates winning in places that are potentially presidential swing states.”

The simple reality that Third Way understands is that on-the-take Republicans on the Supreme Court have — in 5-4 all-Republican-appointee decisions — legalized a corrupt oligarchic system where massive corporations, foreign governments, and morbidly rich individuals can essentially buy elections for their favored candidates.

What they miss is that most Americans — and a majority of Democrats (as we can see by recent progressive wins) — are absolutely sick of and disgusted by this system.

Instead of joining progressives in working to tear it down, they’re choosing to work to keep the corporate-owned Democrats in power and keep those unwilling to take PAC money out.

The majority (56%) of Americans and 77% of Democrats would like, for example, for the “socialist” Medicare program that Reagan warned us about to be available to all Americans.

But a recent Third Way memo, titled “Read This Before Supporting Medicare for All,” argues that Medicare for All has repeatedly failed politically, cites unsuccessful state-level efforts in Vermont, Colorado, California, and Oregon, and concludes that instead we should build on the corporate-run status quo:

“The Affordable Care Act is popular and provides a strong foundation on which to build.”

Democratic candidates have enough of a struggle against the hundreds of billionaire families who’ve thrown in with the GOP without their corporate-funded “allies” stirring up more controversy and dissension.

I’ve written before about how Greens and the Working Families Party have helped Republicans win elections; in this critical year when the future of American democracy is hanging by a thread, Democrats shouldn’t also have to be looking over their shoulders from Clinton’s Third Way wing of the party.

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