The DLC didn't just vanish. It was reformatted and repurposed

[cali]

First of all, what is third way politics:

In politics, the Third Way is a position that tries to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of right-wing economic and left-wing social policies.[1][2] The Third Way was created as a serious re-evaluation of political policies within various centre-left progressive movements in response to international doubt regarding the economic viability of the state; economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism and contrasted with the corresponding rise of popularity for economic liberalism and the New Right.[3] The Third Way is promoted by some social democratic and social liberal movements.[4]

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way

Why did the DLC close shop? An increasingly negative perception of the DLC ensued following the 2008 financial disaster. The DLC advocated and lobbied vigorously for policies that helped pave the way for the financial meltdown. Democrats becoming more economically populist played a role, as did such actions as the DLC supporting Lieberman's independent run.

The most important Democratic think tank, The Center for American Progress, with its very liberal sounding name, has a lot of commonality with the DLC. It stresses its differences, but it's not too difficult to pull back the curtains. CAP has operated as an arm for the Obama administration and it recently transitioned into being an arm of the Clinton campaign- one thing it is not, is an independent think tank.

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It was also deeply out of character for the think tank’s carefully tended public image, which brings new meaning to the word banal. On its website, CAP explains that its mission is to “critique the policy that stems from conservative values, challenge the media to cover the issues that truly matter, and shape the national debate,” and cites “progressive pioneers” such as Teddy Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr. However, when visitors to the site toggle over to the actual content of the group’s policy portfolio, they meet a barrage of platitudes that sound as if they were lifted directly from the collected works of Ronald Reagan. “As progressives, we believe America is a land of boundless opportunity, where people can better themselves, their children, their families, and their communities through education, hard work, and the freedom to climb the ladder of economic mobility,” CAP states. “We believe an open and effective government can champion the common good over narrow self-interest, harness the strength of our diversity, and secure the rights and safety of its people. And we believe our nation must always be a beacon of hope and strength to the rest of the world.”

Such self-advertised vacuity makes perfect sense for an institution like CAP, for the simple reason that these pious word clouds are also the standard argot of corporate America. CAP’s board and roster of scholars are stuffed with the most rancid elements of the Democratic Party, many of them Clinton administration veterans or key political supporters. Last December, it named Lawrence Summers, formerly Clinton’s treasury secretary and Obama’s National Economic Council director, as a distinguished senior fellow. “As our country continues to confront challenges to establishing economic growth that is more broadly shared, there are few thinkers with Larry’s insights, keen intellect, and policy creativity,” Tanden said at the time.

Summers was, of course, famously named by Time magazine in 1999 as one of the three members of “The Committee to Save the World,” along with Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan. They earned that title for pushing through the near complete deregulation of financial markets—which then worked, in fairly short order, to engineer the collapse of the global economy. (In a sort of sideline gambit of epic managerial incompetence, Summers also managed to squander hundreds of millions in endowment funds during his Bush-era tenure as president of Harvard, by putting together an enormous 2004 interest-rate swap predicated on a disastrous reading of market trends.)

Unlike his two superhero colleagues, Summers has since mildly repented for his worst deregulatory excesses and now calls for greater oversight of the financial industry and some limited government intervention in the private sector to spur recovery and growth. Of course, nothing in his revisionist policy playbook is disturbing enough to prevent him from continuing to make millions by consulting for and speaking to financial giants and hedge funds, and accepting perks such as free jet rides from Citigroup. (This firm, you may recall, was the first major merged financial titan of the post–Glass-Steagall age, which Summers’s pal Rubin matriculated back to after his own term as treasury secretary in the Clinton White House; Rubin, clearly determined to follow in Summers’s distinguished footsteps, nearly bankrupted the flailing investment bank before departing as a “senior counselor” in 2009 after pocketing more than $100 million.)

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Another former staffer offered a somewhat more generous interpretation of the group’s tight alliance with the business wing of the Democratic Party. “Corporate influence is a huge part of American politics,” he said. “CAP is interested in politically achievable policy, and if no one is going to profit from it, it is not going to be achievable.” Translation: CAP is going to advance a self-styled progressive policy agenda by greeting the steady creep of plutocratic rule with a variation of “Everybody into the pool!”

It’s therefore no surprise that the other plank of the CAP research agenda—the eager acquisition of greater corporate backing—commands an increasing share of the group’s efforts. There’s little functional difference between the Democratic Party and the corporate world when it comes to running campaigns and elections; why should the promotion of policy debate be any different? In 2007, CAP launched the Business Alliance, which is a Membership Rewards–style program for big donors. Though CAP refuses to release any of these donors’ names, I obtained various lists (as I first disclosed in The Nation), and they have included Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, Wal-Mart, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, GE, General Motors, Amgen, Pfizer, and Verizon.

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http://www.thebaffler.com/salvos/they-pretend-to-think-we-pretend-to-listen

CAP isn't alone in adopting DLC third way philosophies, but it is the most powerful of all Dem think tanks, and it's much, much better at dressing up those philosophies and repurposing such figures as Larry Summers into the "new populist". It's reconfigured its pro-corporatism with such language as "shared prosperity" and a greater emphasis on liberal social issues. Other think tanks such as the Progressive Policy Institute (another name that leads one to believe in their liberalism), Brookings and Third Way, exert varying degrees of influence on the direction of the democratic party.

[djean111]

1. Hey, it was not that long ago that we would have been swiftly, loftily, and sneeringly admonished

that the Third Way didn't even exist!!!!!! But then they stupidly and haughtily told us all, in the WSJ, that Warren was getting uppity and should be reined in or shut up or something.

Some days it looks like the Democratic Party should be named the Corporatist Party, and just let it all hang out. We Progressives are just barely tolerated, for our votes, anyway.

[cascadiance]

2. Yep, once the Koch brothers were shown to help found the DLC, they needed a new "image"...

... much the way that:

Blackwater subsequently became "Xe Services" and later "Academi"...

and Clear Channel ultimately became "IHeartMedia"...

and Diebold Systems became "Premiere Election Systems"...

and so forth...