Dueling Manifestos

It’s hard to believe these two live in the same country, let alone the same party.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Two camps of Democrats each claim to know the better way forward. They have clashing understandings of what is happening in America and sharply divergent ideas about politics and policy. Sometimes, it is hard to believe the contenders are living in the same country, let alone that they are members of the same political party.

On the party’s center-right are the New Democrats, captained by Al From and Sen. Joseph Lieberman of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). New Democrats favor a politics of “reinventing government,” and they want to attract Republicans and independents by focusing on middle-class suburban voters. The DLC claims a network that includes one in 10 Democratic legislators nationwide and more than 50 senators and representatives in Congress.

The DLC’s thinking is laid out in “The New Progressive Declaration,” a manifesto co-authored by From, Marshall, and two former Clinton administration officials, William Galston and Doug Ross. According to the manifesto, the country is undergoing an inexorable transition from an “industrial age” to an “information age” economy. American businesspeople are “pioneers” building “new knowledge industries,” and most workers are “exchanging the mind-numbing drudgery of manual labor for jobs that allow them to think, create, and share in decisions.”

The New Democrats believe the way to beat Republicans is to steal their thunder by offering a market-oriented “third way” between Republicans and outmoded liberal Democrats. “The real challenge,” reads the declaration, “[is to replace] top-down bureaucratic government with a new model for bottom-up self-governance.” Americans should stop depending on government to solve problems, since welfare-state entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare are too expensive to sustain. Rather than “creating government programs for every problem,” the United States should use “information, market incentives, civic networks, and performance standards to equip individuals and communities to solve their own problems.”

Meanwhile, center-left, “populist” Democrats, reinvigorated by the labor unions’ high profile in last year’s election, have gained a new voice by launching the Campaign for America’s Future (CAF), an advocacy group intended to serve as a counterweight to the DLC. Founded by more than 100 left-leaning “activists and thinkers,” and claiming the sympathy of more than 100 members of the House of Representatives, the nascent CAF issued its own manifesto last summer. In “Taking Back Our Future,” the CAF contends that most Americans are trapped in an economic “age of anxiety.” For the past 25 years economic growth and rising profits have been accompanied by stagnating or declining wages, especially for the 75 percent of American workers without a college degree. “Inequality has risen to heights not seen since before the Great Depression. CEO salaries have soared, while wages have fallen…. America, which once grew together, is now growing apart.”

Hoping to avoid the racial conflicts that bedeviled liberal Democrats after the mid-1960s, today’s populists favor broad national efforts to help working families — the middle class along with the less privileged. They see Social Security and Medicare as models to be adjusted and supplemented, not “reinvented” into individual, market-based plans. “The task of the Democratic Party,” declares Jeff Faux of the pro-labor Economic Policy Institute, “is not to echo a Republican view of the world.”

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate