"Today, We Are All Walter Mondale". Democrats learned the wrong lesson from 1984. [View all]

[madfloridian]

America’s anti-liberal myth: Why Dems learned the wrong lesson from 1984

Your calendar says it’s 2015, but it’s always 1984 in mind of the New Dems. These are the economically conservative Democrats that include centrists like the old Democratic Leadership Council, Third Way and financial sector-centric elected Democrats (plus Robert Rubin, the Rubin-launched Hamilton Project and associated advisers on the policy side). As always, they are again invoking 1984 to conjure images of a grave danger to Democrats’ ability to win elections in the form of ascendant progressive populism.

The New Dems’ scare story goes something like this: In 1984 Walter Mondale lost 49 states because he ran as a Super Liberal. Democrats would have kept losing if the New Dems had not formed to take control of and steer the party. In 1992 Bill Clinton ran as Centrist Man and Democrats started winning elections again. Now, economic progressives who prioritize other things before Wall Street’s approval are causing trouble. If these progressives Democrats represent the party it will again be banished to the political wilderness and forced to relearn the lesson of the ’80s and ’90s.

This premise is not only wrongheaded, in important ways it’s backwards.

Al From and friends got to push ahead with their conclusion that it was all the fault of liberals. They had the money and the circle of influence to do it.

Today, We Are All Walter Mondale

The hits keep coming. In more recent years New Dems have tried to apply the 1984 “lesson” to whatever political moment they’re in. Before declaring itself the New DLC (because in their mind the word “new” is some kind of magic incantation) and then ultimately folding and giving way to Third Way, the DLC tarred Democrats with the pejorative “member of the unelectable Mondale wing.” The trait that earned a Democrat this label circa 2003 was opposition to the Iraq war, a sin no Democrat with serious future national aspirations could commit lest they consign themselves to irrevocable Not President status. Anyone who would have suggested to the DLC that the next Democrat to win the White House would be a Hyde Park State Senator named Barack Obama elected in large part because of his opposition to the Iraq war would have been met with all sorts of political spectrum positioning-based derision.

They put that negative label on liberals not because liberals and progressives were wrong...but because they wanted the big money.

... What they have done is, on a number of instances, shamelessly changed their rationale for why elected Democrats need to do what Third Way’s donors wanted Democrats to do. They do this because New Dems organizations like Third Way are not on a mission to get Democrats to win elections. They’re on a mission to lock Democrats into serving high finance, even at the expense of winning elections. The New Dems are not acting out of concern that progressive populist Democrats will lose. They don’t want liberals to win.

Once money and funding became the goal of those who were pulling the party's strings....winning and losing was just a side issue.

Thus all their calls for "bipartisanship", and this one..."post partisanship". That last one means beyond the level of a 2 party system.

I don't think a nation can function well without the checks and balances of at least two parties.