Criticizing the DLC, the Third Way and the Blue Dogs is not "bashing Democrats".

[JHan]

110. I'm not denying reality

Last edited Sat Dec 10, 2016, 08:02 PM - Edit history (1)

It's a smear word designed to attack Democrats and we need to retire it- there are other descriptions more fitting for what you describe.

Conservatives argue that Liberals want oppressive big government to intrude on business and impose regulations on industries that hurt their backers and regulations on their way of life ( e.g. enthusiastic gun ownership) And then progressive leftists blame Democrats for deregulation (????) when Democrats typically want larger government to fix problems .. So depending on what part of the ideological spectrum you stand it is a convenient smear against Democrats to whip out at a moment's notice.

In the 1980s, a faction of the Democratic party started calling themselves "neoliberals" to mean "new liberals" in the American sense. They wanted to both contrast themselves with the "old liberals" (like Ted Kennedy) and also compete with the "neoconservatives" who came to power with Ronald Reagan. The Reagan neoconservatives are more in line with what leftists mean by "neoliberal" ( see how stupid all this is?). The Democratic Party neoliberals were people like Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin and they promoted supposedly "market friendly" methods for attaining the traditional American liberal goals of equal opportunity. Whatever you think of those neoliberals, and I don't think all that much of them, they believed themselves to be following the political platform that John F. Kennedy proposed not the one advocated by Ronald Reagan. Robert Rubin who is the "neoliberal" that the left loves to hate deregulated banks (catastrophically) but now says the primary problem with the US economy is that labor unions are weak and taxes on the wealthy are too low. A great deal of left-wing polemic is written as if Democratic Party neoliberals were from the same movement as neoliberals like Margret Thatcher. If your political analysis cannot tell the difference between a Robert Rubin neoliberal and George W. Bush or Augusto Pinochet neoliberal, something is wrong with your political analysis. For some left wingers, the confusion is very convenient because they claim both groups just to be the same evil, imperialistic, capitalist, bad guys and this can all lead up to their favorite theory "Obama = Bush". Everything tied up in a simplistic story that makes left wing theorists the brave truth tellers, the heroes of their own narrative.

Over the past 8 years, we had an increase in regulations, a high corp tax rate, under a Democrat President. If ever Obama had to grind his way with republicans to reach compromise it was due to the fact he didn't have support in Congress - hard to fix the gaps in Obamacare if there's partisan gridlock. If a Democrat sees value in Trade - that doesn't make them "third way" - I am very pro-trade while seeing clearly the negatives of trade deals. However I cannot deny that Capitalism and Trade have lifted people out of poverty. Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years

Are trade deals perfect , no. Can they do more to lift labor standards all over the world - yes. Should they more resemble free market ideals where everyone is on an even footing instead of corporations enjoying max penetration into foreign markets? Yes. And as for wages, while I have my criticisms of the TPP ( such as how it creates an artificial monopoly by extending restrictive intellectual property laws) the TPP requires countries in the TPP region to unionise. An effect of trade lifting millions out of poverty can be seen in China - as the middle class expanded, and the Chinese became more prosperous, Vietnam became the prime destination for outsourcing. That will change again, until -hopefully- it becomes a global phenomenon, country by country. That's the impact of trade - exchange of goods, services and also ideas. What sets this off kilter is Corporatism- where large conglomerates - allowed to consolidate and eat up market share, and also beefed up by subsidies, dominate these markets - this is not "neo-liberalism" but the effect of corporatist culture and cronyism.

What we should not do as Democrats is smear each other because we see merit in a trade deal, or want regulatory reform ( which does not equal deregulation). The Democrat mindset is very different to the conservative and we should never confuse the two to attack each other.