The Trouble with the DLC
Posted August 13, 2007 | 01:14 PM (EST)
Why are Harold Ford and others from the more paternalistic and condescending quarters of the Democratic Party so keen on discrediting the rising progressive movement? What have been the consequences of their obsession with "the middle"? Most importantly, how have the Tory Democrats managed to bury the expression of deep progressive values, and what should the progressive movement do about it?
For three decades, advocates of "centrism" have used their money to monopolize the Democratic message and leave the progressive base out in the cold, not spoken to. Since its founding in 1985, the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) has been leading this effort. How did they pull this off? Before we get into that, let's call them what they are. "Centrist" implies conciliation, moderation, compromise. It reinforces the mistaken idea that our political life falls along a neat, linear scale from left to right. That metaphor makes the center a pretty good and safe place to be. And that it certainly is not.
The plutocratic Democrats should be referred to not as centrists, but as industrial authoritarians. Their movement was born after the Nixon re-election in 1972. They blamed that landslide on Democratic Party rules changes that audaciously sought to include Americans formerly excluded from the back rooms of power. They fronted for older corporate interests -- oil and gas, finance, insurance. The are really 19th-Century paternalists who would save us from ourselves by keeping us far from the plantation's Big House.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/the-trouble-with-the-dlc_b_60210.htmlDavid Sirota on the DLC:
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It was the DLC’s president, Al From, who in 2001 said that his goal was to give Democrats “a game plan to try to contain the populism.” Populism, you may recall, is defined as “supporting the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite.” Al From has made that vision a reality. The DLC—which has been funded by the likes of Chevron, Enron, Merck and Philip Morris—has, until recently, been extremely effective at pressuring Democrats to ignore the will of the public and capitulate to big business’s demands. The DLC has also made a public spectacle of itself by berating Democratic candidates who actually stand up for ordinary people.
PUTTING THE “MOCK” IN DEMOCRACY—To be sure, the DLC never openly admits its objectives, or even its funding sources. Instead, it bills itself as quasi grassroots, holding so-called “national conversations” in an effort to create the impression that its corporate-written agenda has some semblance of public support.
Yet the media coverage of its most recent such “conversation,” in Denver this past July, tells the real story. The New York Sun noted that the meeting focused on pondering “how to counter the netroots”—i.e., how to counter the millions of grassroots Democratic Party voters who use the Internet to advocate for a more democratic political system. Perhaps most telling of all was the Rocky Mountain News’s note that the DLC’s supposed “national conversation” at the Hyatt Regency Hotel was, in fact, “not open to the public.”
In an August Rolling Stone column, reporter Matt Taibbi recounted his interview with one DLC leader, who called anti-war activists “narrow dogmatists.” Taibbi pointed out that recent Gallup polls have shown that fully 91 percent of Democrats support a withdrawal from Iraq, and he asked the DLC leader to explain this contradiction. “So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists?” Taibbi asked. “We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they’re narrow dogmatists?”
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http://www.davidsirota.com/index.php/big-money-vs-grassroots/The Democrats 2008 Choice: Sell Out & Lose, Or Stand Up & Win
Posted July 26, 2005 | 03:42 PM (EST)
The 2008 Democratic presidential candidates this week are busy genuflecting at Corporate America's altar -- otherwise known as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Now, it's true -- the DLC is really just a group of Beltway-insulated corporate-funded hacks who have spent the better part of the last decade trying to undermine the Democratic Party's traditional working class base -- a base that had kept Democrats in power for 40 years and now, thanks to the DLC, has been forfeited to the Republicans. Even so, the fact that these presidential candidates feel the need to bow down to the DLC is a troubling sign about whether the Democratic Party is really serious about regaining power in America.
Let's just look at the cold, hard facts about the DLC and its record. The DLC has pushed, among other things, the war in Iraq and "free" trade policies, using bags of corporate money to buy enough Democratic votes to help Republicans make those policies a reality. They have chastised anyone who has opposed those policies as either unpatriotic or anti-business -- even as a majority of Americans now oppose the war in Iraq, oppose the DLC's business-written trade deals, and are sick of watching America's economy sold out to the highest corporate bidder. Additionally, in brazenly Orwellian fashion, the DLC has also called its extremist agenda "centrist," even though polls show the American public opposes most of their agenda, and supports much of the progressive agenda.
Now, you could make a credible argument that the DLC's corporatization/Republicanization of the Democratic Party was justified, had it led to electoral success for Democrats. Few would argue that today's split-the-difference Democratic Party hasn't followed the DLC's policy direction over the last 10 years. That means the last 10 years of elections really have been a referendum on whether the DLC's model -- regardless of any moral judgements about it -- actually wins at the polls.
And that's when we get to the real problem with the DLC -- its policies are BOTH morally bankrupt, and politically disastrous. The rise of the DLC within the Democratic Party has coincided almost perfectly with the decline of the Democratic Party's power in American politics -- a decline that took Democrats from seemingly permanent majority status to permanent minority status. In this last election, just think of Democrats' troubles in Ohio as a perfect example of this. Here was a state ravaged by massive job loss due to corporate-written "free" trade deals -- yet Democrats were unable to capitalize on that issue and thus couldn't win the state because the DLC had long ago made sure the party helped pass the very trade policies (NAFTA, China PNTR) that sold out those jobs.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-democrats-2008-choice_b_4729.html
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