Here's what the DLC has to say about its foreign policy arm, "The Third Way". (Please keep in mind, this little ditty is from 1998... or, Pre-9/11, but it is still available at the link given below to dlc.org):
Overview | June 1,
1998About The Third WayAmerica and the world have changed dramatically in the closing decades of the 20th century. The industrial order of the 20th century is rapidly yielding to the networked "New Economy" of the 21st century. Our political and governing systems, however, have lagged behind the rest of society in adapting to these seismic shifts. They remain stuck in the left-right debates and the top-down bureaucracies of the industrial past.
The Democratic Leadership Council, and its affiliated think tank the Progressive Policy Institute, have been catalysts for modernizing politics and government. From their political analysis and policy innovations has emerged a progressive alternative to the worn-out dogmas of traditional liberalism and conservatism. The core principles and ideas of this "Third Way" movement are set forth in The New Progressive Declaration: A Political Philosophy for the Information Age.
Starting with Bill Clinton's Presidential campaign in 1992, Third Way thinking is reshaping progressive politics throughout the world. Inspired by the example of Clinton and the New Democrats, Tony Blair in Britain led a revitalized New Labour party back to power in 1997. The victory of Gerhard Shroeder and the Social Democrats in Germany the next year confirmed the revival of center-left parties which either control or are part of the governing coalition forming throughout the European Union. From Latin America to Australia and New Zealand, Third Way ideas also are taking hold.
On Sunday, April 25, 1999, the President Clinton and the DLC hosted a historic roundtable discussion, The Third Way: Progressive Governance for the 21st Century, with five world leaders including British PM Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Dutch PM Wim Kok, and Italian PM Massimo D'Alema, the First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and DLC President Al From.
The Third Way philosophy seeks to adapt enduring progressive values to the new challenges of he information age. It rests on three cornerstones: the idea that government should promote equal opportunity for all while granting special privilege for none; an ethic of mutual responsibility that equally rejects the politics of entitlement and the politics of social abandonment; and, a new approach to governing that empowers citizens to act for themselves.
The Third Way approach to economic opportunity and security stresses technological innovation, competitive enterprise, and education rather than top- down redistribution or laissez faire. On questions of values, it embraces "tolerant traditionalism," honoring traditional moral and family values while resisting attempts to impose them on others. It favors an enabling rather than a bureaucratic government, expanding choices for citizens, using market means to achieve public ends and encouraging civic and community institutions to play a larger role in public life. The Third Way works to build inclusive, multiethnic societies based on common allegiance to democratic values.
http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=128&subid=187&contentid=895I know... phrases like
"tolerant traditionalism", "equally rejects the politics of entitlement and the politics of social abandonment", "using market means to achieve public ends", "Third Way thinking is reshaping progressive politics throughout the world", and
"From their political analysis and policy innovations has emerged a progressive alternative to the worn-out dogmas of traditional liberalism and conservatism" make my skin crawl, too. Reading dlc.org explanation of who and what The Third Way, The DLC, and The Progressive Policy Institute are is reading the verbal equivalent of the Cirque de Soleil... incomprehensible, stunning, and in the end, just a bunch of of people who are really good at twisting things around so that you're never quite sure what you've just seen.
They go on to crow, "From Latin America to Australia and New Zealand, Third Way ideas also are taking hold." Really? Latin America? Seems like the only country in Latin America that hasn't gone or is on the way to being Leftist is Mexico... and, as in this country, the Conservatives had to steal the election to win. I dunno... doesn't sound like much of a trend to me.
In 2001, The following article was written about The Third Way:
A Better Third Wayby RICHARD D. KAHLENBERG & RUY TEIXEIRA
The stalemate in the 2000 election is the latest evidence that the New Democrat "Third Way" vision for American politics is fundamentally flawed. It doesn't galvanize voters, it doesn't effectively unite the Democratic Party and it's easily co-opted by the Republicans (think George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism"). Consider these important election results.
**** Gore won only 48 percent of the popular vote, giving the Democrats an average of just 47 percent over the past three elections.
**** Democrats failed to retake the House once again. The Republicans now control it by nine seats, while before the 1992 election the Democrats controlled the House by 100 seats. At that point, the Democrats also controlled the Senate by fourteen seats, while the Senate is now evenly split.
**** Outside their base (blacks, Hispanics, union households), the Democrats continue to lose badly among mid- to downscale voters. For example, Gore lost white voters with incomes under $75,000 by thirteen points and non-college-educated whites by seventeen points.
**** The Democrats have had some success with certain upscale voters--for example, Gore carried white women with a postgraduate education by twenty-two points. But that's no more than 5 percent of voters.
>snip
....the New Democrats' original political plan was to gain a clear electoral majority by appealing to Reagan Democrats--white working-class voters who had soured on the Democratic Party. Now they lionize soccer moms, wired workers and other upscale voters and seem to ignore the less affluent voters they expressed such interest in in the 1980s. This shift is well documented in their own writings. For example, in 1989 the Democratic Leadership Council published the seminal New Democrat study, The Politics of Evasion. This treatise was replete with respectful references to the "white working class," the "lower middle class" and "middle income voters." In contrast, the DLC's 1998 document, Blueprint: The Next Politics, is rife with laudatory references to a rising, affluent "learning class" and an expanding "upper middle class." This mantra about affluent learning-class voters was repeated by DLC chief Al From at a January 24 forum in Washington that sparked clashes between Democratic centrists and progressives over the direction the party should take. Considering that the income distribution, according to the Census Bureau, has improved only modestly since The Politics of Evasion came out, it's hard not to read a fair amount of significance into this shift in emphasis.
There's also been a big shift in the kinds of policies favored by New Democrats. Ideas endorsed in the early 1990s--reflecting their heavy involvement in Clinton's successful presidential candidacy--included promoting economic security, providing universal health coverage, increasing public investment and fighting inequality. Current DLC documents call for privatizing Social Security, introducing Medicare vouchers, eliminating the national debt (greatly reducing funds available for public investment) and unleashing a new economy that has, so far, shown itself more capable of enriching a new crop of Internet billionaires than of substantially reducing inequality.
In adopting this stance, New Democrats seem oddly similar to New Politics activists of the early 1970s, who were likewise unconcerned with white working-class voters and solicitous toward liberal elements of the upper middle class. The big difference is that this segment of the upper middle class is no longer economically liberal and appears mostly interested in fending off socially intolerant conservatism. For example, data from a postelection poll conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Research for the Campaign for America's Future indicate that affluent white liberals in the 2000 election were motivated more by the desire to safeguard a woman's right to choose and to receive middle-class tax cuts than by investing in education and protecting Social Security. In 1989 New Democrats expressed concerns about the "shrinking influence of lower-middle-class Democrats and the concomitant rise of higher socioeconomic-status Democrats who hold liberal views on social issues" but shunned issues of economic inequality. Over the past decade, those New Democrats have not only failed to find solutions to the problems posed by the party's wealth gap, they have, ironically, adopted many positions they earlier lamented.
Clearly, it's time to rethink the Third Way. While many of President Clinton's political accommodations were probably necessary, he is fundamentally a transitional figure. It is time for a New Liberal philosophy to supersede not only Old Liberal approaches but those of New Democrats as well. This New Liberal approach would share the orthodox Third Way premise--that traditional liberal and conservative approaches are wanting--but would offer a dramatically different program aimed at seriously addressing fundamental problems of social justice and economic inequality. Such is the payoff, after all, that the Third Way movement was meant to make possible.
Entire Article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010305/kahlenberg From SourceWatch, a factual blueprint for "who" and "what" The Third Way is:
All this political mumbo-jumbo and jumping through hoops doesn't change my mind about The DLC, The Progressive Policy Institute, or The Third Way. I feel the subversion of our Party and it's ideals is underway, and they are the entities (or, actually, entity) doing the subversion.
With the '06 elections weeks away, and the Presidential Election of '08 coming quickly, there's no time to waste in deciding who and what WE ARE as THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
TC
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