Reply #9: my problem with the DLC

[Douglas Carpenter]

First let me say that not all DLC members are the same. There is a range of opinion. It is not monolithic.

However, the DLC still stands for neoliberal economics and militaristic global hegemony. The are not are not the right-wing of the Republican Party. And their version of these core principles are somewhat more moderate than the Republican Party version. There is no denying that.

Many liberals and progressives make the mistake of thinking that the DLC is "right-wing" the same way the right-wing of the Republican Party is right-wing. This is not correct at all. If you check the voting record of leading DLC members of the House or Senate you will see that their voting records on such matters as pro-choice, gay rights or other social issues are about the same as the voting record of leading liberal/progressive members of Congress.

My main problems with the DLC are:

1. The attempt to marginalize progressive voices within the Democratic Party and to represent mainstream opinion regarding trade issues, single-payer universal health care and matters of war and peace as extreme positions. When the evidence shows that it is they if anyone who is out of the mainstream on some very important core issues. When they repeat GOP talking points--bashing progressive Democrats they hurt the entire party including themselves and drive the range of discussion farther and farther to the right; not into the mainstream.

2. They embrace an albeit modified form of neoliberal economic ideology and believe it should be imposed on the third world who do not want it because of the devastating consequences it has on the third world fueling inflation, dispossessing the peasantry from their land--creating a new commercial class for the benefit of the few at the cost of the vast overwhelming majority. The only place where the Orwellian named "free trade" is less popular than the rust belt of northeastern United States is in the developing world -- the very people who would be the greatest theoretical beneficiaries.

3. On foreign policy they just don't understand that the world does not want and the American people do not an imperial America that is in a never ending series of military conflicts while the social contract and social fabric of American society disintegrates on an over-bloated military budget that as as former President Eisenhower described as "so wasteful it weakens the nation". I am very much afraid that America could be led astray into an even more disastrous imperial war in the Middle East or elsewhere not by a Republican President but by a DLC-type Democrat President.