The “center-right” of the party has, over the last several years, presented the Democratic Party and voters on the left with a stark either/or choice: either the party move in “their” direction on economic issues and national security issues, or the party will continue to lose.

David Sirota highlighted one of the methods used by these “centrists” in his blog this past week:

I like Josh Marshall a lot, but some of the people he has posting on his new website really seem to be comfortable vomiting up the most hackneyed conventional wisdom without spending more than 5 seconds actually trying to offer something new or honest. Take this person named Rick Heller. He calls himself a “centrist” (I put it in quotes because the term has become a misnomer). Today, he says – without any evidence whatsoever – that “Liberals are those who are a little softer on national security and perhaps not as budget conscious as we’d like.” This is the same kind of garbage that self-serving self-promoters like Peter Beinart spew, while claiming to speak for Democrats. And that’s what it is – garbage.

I join Mr. Sirota in calling bullshit.
crossposted at Liberal Street Fight

Sirota does a fine job of answering Mr. Heller’s assertions, but that attack shows up frequently in print, in chat show interviews and in comment threads on blogs. The other attack commonly leveled by “centrists” is used by Mr. Heller in the comments: “your economic populism isn’t going to work if you are so demeaning to people who are more culturally conservative than you.”.

What exactly are writers and activists on the left doing when we try to assert our values, when we put forth assertions that the road to relevance for the Democratic Party is to actually FIGHT for our ideals, for the ideals that spring forth from the enlightenment roots of the very founding of our country? As I put it in an earlier piece:

Idealists set the horizon. Idealists point out the top of the mountain, giving a political movement, a political party a goal to aim for. Without them, all you’re left with is a bunch of maps without destinations.

To attack those of us advocating for a broad leftism as a winning formula for the party, many will reference iconic, and often unrepresentative, activists from the past. Advocating for feminism and women’s health? Why, you’re just like Andrea Dworkin and you must carry the S.C.U.M. Manifesto around in your bookbag! Peace activist? Oh, you must be a pacifist that has forgotten that we were attacked! Fighting for minority opportunity and full suffrage? You’re obviously so mired in “identity politics” that you’ve forgotten that we’re ALL Americans. An advocate of Universal Healthcare … you must be a socialist! Since we have so much in common with these charicatures, therefore we must hold the more “conservative” American culture in utter contempt! Time for us to shut up now, since we are plainly outside the mainstream. No notice is paid that many voters, writers and activist groups on the left work more closely together than they’ve EVER worked in the past. The powerful efforts put forth in support of John Kerry’s half-hearted campaign last year are forgotten, and the left is blamed for the loss, utilizing these distortions of the 21st Century left.

It’s becoming clear that the strategy outlined by Thomas Frank has actually been a two-pronged attack. While the right has used cultural issues, primarily through preachers in evangelical churches, to persuade working class and middle class voters to vote against their best interests, they’ve also funneled money through think tanks and corporate allies into the upper echelons of the Democratic Party itself. They’ve persuaded many in the party and supporters outside the main party machinery, through oganizations like the DLC and it’s spinoff the NDN, that the best hope for success is to move away from populism and from the various groups on the left who are too “single issue” driven or “shrill” or “outside the mainstream”.

The American Prospect outlined this effort back in the spring after Gore’s loss to GWB:

Simon Rosenberg, the former field director for the DLC who directs the New Democrat Network, a spin-off political action committee, says, “We’re trying to raise money to help them lessen their reliance on traditional interest groups in the Democratic Party. In that way,” he adds, “they are ideologically freed, frankly, from taking positions that make it difficult for Democrats to win.”

Of course, these positions make it hard for Democrats to win because so many of them DON’T believe them, and thanks to their reliance on corporate cash, the majority of them holding office now have NOTHING in common with the constituents feeling increasing pain from Republican policies, policies they helped usher into law. Who helped organize this movement?

While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee–and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC’s board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporations signed on as the DLC’s policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC’s executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC’s executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively–meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms–though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC’s retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat. “I sought them out, after talking to Michael Steinhardt,” says Schwartz. “I like them because the DLC gives resonance to positions on issues that perhaps candidates cannot commit to.”

This article dates from 2001, but we are suffering under the influence of this strategy’s success now. Utilizing this strategy has become a trap, since the Republicans have gone on to cement corporate support through the very-effective K Street Project. It seems from our current prospective that the DLC (and NDN) have served as a Trojan Horse, letting the right hollow out our party from within. Whether or not they are still operating as such, or if they’ve realized their error and trying to correct it, is a moot point. They’ve mortally wounded the party as an effective opposition. It is plain that we must move away from their counsel. We must reconnnect with our roots, our grassroots and core issues. Gore realized this too late in 2000, but he did try. From the American Prospect:

During the last months of the 2000 presidential election, however, it must have seemed to the DLC that Gore and Lieberman, ur–New Democrats both, had crossed back to the other shore. Abandoning the DLC’s message almost entirely, they scrambled to look like plain, old-fashioned Democrats in an awkward, faux-populist “people versus the powerful” campaign that sought to energize the party’s working-class and lower-middle-class base. The DLC’s elation at the selection of its chairman as the running mate for one of its founders turned to dismay during the Democratic convention last August, as Gore lurched left.

“I listened to Gore’s speech at the convention with incredulity,” says William Galston, a longtime DLCer who served as domestic policy adviser to President Clinton and who is currently a special consultant for Blueprint. Galston was the Gore campaign’s representative to the Democratic platform committee, working alongside From and Elaine Kamarck, another veteran DLC strategist, who chaired the committee. Galston had heard rumors on the eve of Gore’s speech that it would represent a shift but hadn’t been otherwise warned. “From the convention on, I had essentially no input into the campaign,” he says.

Also left with sharply reduced influence was From, who recalls with resignation his inability to bring the Gore-Lieberman ticket home to its New Democrat roots. “Once Joe [Lieberman] got on the ticket, I worked mostly through him,” says From, ticking off the names of campaign staffers through whom he tried to reach Gore. “I talked to [Bob] Shrum, [Stanley] Greenberg, [Carter] Eskew, and Tad Devine,” he says. “I did a memo to Gore. I actually gave him a game plan to try to contain the populism in a way that would do the least damage.”

After his populist turn, Gore surged in the polls in August and early September, and many analysts credited his fiery attacks on pharmaceutical companies, HMOs and health insurers, Big Oil, and George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. “When I came on in July, Gore was already beginning to move in a populist direction,” says Stan Greenberg, Gore’s pollster for the last few months of the campaign. Brought in to replace Mark Penn, the chief pollster for both Clinton and the DLC, Greenberg helped move Gore to the left, targeting the candidate’s message to recapture white working-class voters in the $30,000-to-$50,000 income range. On the ground, the AFL-CIO, the NAACP, and other components of the Old Democrats’ traditional voter base–organized labor, African Americans, Hispanics, abortion rights activists–conducted intensive voter education and the get-out-the-vote drives, and these groups now take credit for delivering Gore’s popular vote victory.

Two lost elections in a row, elections in which the party base rallied after being initially snubbed, yet still we hear that the “center” is where we should move. One must ask, is the party being deliberately sabotaged, or are these “centrist” movers-and-shakers well meaning but wrong? It’s hard to know, but the damage is obvious.

Thankfully, though the efforts of Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, John Conyers and others, progressive and liberal ideas are being forced back onto the table. Despite the withering attacks from Vichy Dems like Sen. Biden and Rep. Hoyer, the grassroots have offered powerful support to these more principled, more Democratic leaders, and slowly away from the corporate toadying of right-wing rhetoric. Interests groups on the left have continued to fight and coordinate fundraising, voter outreach and on getting the left’s perspective on issues out.

We on the left have some ways to go, but we can aim this party back to climbing the mountain toward a more inclusive United States of America. We’re going to win this battle, and take our party back, because there are more of us, because we have history and science on our side, and because we MUST. The war within the Democratic Party will be very nasty over the next two or three election cycles, but we will prevail.

crossposted also at dailyKos