It can be said with confidence that the centrist Democrats who dominated the direction of the Democratic Party from at least 1990-2002 were not particularly prolific institution builders. Indeed, what I will refer to from this point forward as the "DLC-nexus" of the party contains so few new institutions from that era that we in the netroots often refer to it as "DLC" (Democratic Leadership Council) largely because there are so few other institutional names that can potentially be applied. Of course, that does not mean that there were no institutions at all. There is the polling firm Democracy Corps, founded by Stan Greenberg, James Carville and Bob Shurm). There is Third Way, one of whose founders
described itself as follows in a recent interview with Chris Cilliza:
Convinced that Democrats needed to craft a message to appeal to moderate voters rather than focusing their message on motivating the liberal base, Bennett joined two other veterans of Americans for Gun Safety in the aftermath of the 2004 election to form Third Way. Their goal, he said, was to "challenge progressive orthodoxy on a range of things." (The group's Web site offers a somewhat more conciliatory description of Third Way as a "strategy center for progressives.")
Somewhat more famously, as I already mentioned, there is the Democratic Leadership Council, which under its current bomb-throwing leadership of Al From and Bruce Reed leads the league in publicly attacking Democrats. Among periodicals, there is the New Republic, but its circulation is declining and far below that of, say, The Nation. Finally, there is the nexus surrounding
the New Democratic Network, is the clear centrist leader in actually building institutions. In 1996, the New Democratic Network PAC formed by Joe Lieberman, John Breaux and Simon Rosenberg, and
within a few years had become one of the nation's most active PACs:
"Our role is to add political muscle," says Rosenberg. In the 1997-1998 reporting period, its first full cycle, NDN raised $1.4 million directly, and another $1.2 million in so-called "bundled" contributions, gathered at fundraisers for individual candidates and funneled through NDN. In the 1999-2000 period, NDN more than doubled its take, raising $4 million directly and bundling $1.45 million more, plus $450,000 for GoreLieberman. Nearly $2 million of NDN's take in the last cycle came in large, unregulated soft-money chunks from companies such as Aetna, AT&T, and Microsoft and from trade groups such as the Securities Industry Association, who helped sponsor a $1.2-million fundraiser honoring Lieberman on February 13.
NDN's brochures sound like investment prospectuses. "NDN acts as a political venture capital fund to create a new generation of elected officials," says the PAC. "NDN provides the political intelligence you need to make well-informed decisions on how to spend your political capital. Just like an investment advisor, NDN exhaustively vets candidates and endorses only those who meet our narrowly defined criteria."
NDN's leaders have more recently been instrumental in helping to set up
the New Politics Institute, and the far more shadowy Democracy Alliance. The connection here strikes me as Simon Rosenberg, who stands out among his former peers in the 1990's centrism crowd as actually understanding the need to build institutions, and having the ability to set up new, lasting structures in response to that need.
Rosenberg's efforts aside, there appears to be very little in the way of actual institutions within the broader DLC-nexus. At the very least, the collection of institutions within that nexus pale in comparison to what the progressive movement has built in the last few years. There is nothing close to a centrist equivalent of
MoveOn.org, and its three million members. There is no DLC-nexus media that compares to the rise of the progressive blogosphere and progressive radio. There is no
Act Blue, no
Democracy for America, no
Progresive State Network, no
Blue State Digital. In the last five years, the nascent progressive activist movement has built a far more extensive list of prominent organizations than did the entire DLC-nexus from 1986-2002. Further, this difference is accelerating. I spend a large percentage of my day in discussions with progressive movement types who seek to build yet more institutions on top of the ones we have already created. Let me tell you, quite a few more institutions are on the way. The progressive movement appears obsessed with building new institutions in a way that the DLC-nexus simply was not.
Continued in the extended entry.
Why is there so much more institution building in the left-wing of the progressive ecosystem than in the centrist wing? My best guess is that while the DLC nexus drew its power from holding influence among a small, but highly influential, set of corporate, media, and political elites, the progressive movement ultimately draws its strength from
an amalgamation of millions of progressive activists with, at an individual level, have comparatively far less influence and power. This leads to fundamentally different attitudes about target audiences, and about available means to leverage available power.
Take, for example, how the comparative lack of prominent institutions within the DLC-nexus is mirrored in the lack of prominent establishment media figures with the progressive movement. While I can point to numerous prominent progressive institutions, I can't point to a single member of the progressive movement with anywhere near the media visibility of say, James Carville and Paul Begala. The DLC nexus, which draws upon the highest elite of corporate donors, media pundits, political staffers and elected officials, can rely on a cult of personality strategy where charismatic individuals from within the movement can quickly gain individual prominence within already powerful institutions. They don't need new media--or at least don't think they need new media--because they can operate with so much prominence within established media institutions. They can even run campaigns by utilizing their prominence within these institutions. Think of how, when the DLC-nexus engaged in its latest attempt to topple Howard Dean as DNC chair following the 2006 elections, it relied upon Carville's media star power to give a public face to the campaign. By contrast, the progressive movement relied upon closing off its vast network of small donors and volunteer activists when making counter-threats of retaliation should any such anti-Dean campaign succeed. One campaign was based upon a media cult of personality, while the other was based on mass, institutional action.
There is simply no comparison in influence between the average participant within the progressive movement and the average participant within the DLC nexus. Consider the following thought experiment. You are presented with two Democrats, and told one is a progressive movement activist, and the other is affiliated with the DLC-nexus, but you are not told which is which. Next, you are told that one is a local precinct captain, and the other is the Chief of Staff for a member of Congress. Given only this information, who would you guess is the progressive movement activist, and who is affiliated with the DLC-nexus? I think 99% or more of political observers would make the same guess: the precinct captain is probably in the progressive movement, and the Chief of Staff is probably affiliated with the DLC nexus. This experiment could be done using several other bits of information, such as a small donor who gave $500 to ten different candidates and a large donor who maxed out his hard money contributions for the cycle, or a panelist on Meet the Press versus a person with a small blog. My point is that there is a cavernous influence gap between the average member of the two movements,
which I have argued is often a major source of tension between the two movements.
I think this gap also explains the different in institution building tendencies between the two movements. Because its power and talent is drawn from large numbers of people who, on their own, have comparatively little influence of the political process, the progressive movement is forced to build institutions in order to amalgamate that power into anything sizable. By contrast, the DLC-Nexus draws its power from a narrow media, political and corporate donor elite that already holds tremendous power over already powerful institutions. They don't need new institutions, because they can utilize existing media, corporate, and political institutions to achieve their ends.
If they only want to recruit millionaire former Republicans to be Democratic nominees in swing House districts, they can accomplish this goal by placing their own people in charge of institutions like the DCCC. By contrast, if the progressive movement wants to have grassroots, volunteer and small donor heavy progressives by the Democratic nominee in swing House districts, we often have to defeat DCCC backed candidates in primaries (see Larry Kissel and Jerry McNerney), or simply run in districts that the DCCC originally considered unworthy of their attention (see the OH-02 special election). In order to do this, you need new local media, new local volunteer organizations, and national small donor networks. In other words, you need new institutions,
This situation has led to an asymmetric battle for influence the Democratic Party, because the two factions are ultimately speaking to different audiences. While the progressive movement is speaking to the activist base, or "working class," the DLC-nexus is speaking instead to the activist elite, or aristocracy. For example, if the same pattern holds when Democrats are in the majority as held when they were in the minority, then I beleive Stan Greenberg of
Democracy Corps will be the main pollster headlining closed-door presentations and briefings to the Senate Democratic leadership. Also, I believe that over the few months new members of Congress will be treated to several small, private policy sessions hosted by a group called
Third Way. I do not know which other groups will be able to present policy information to members of Congress, but from what I understand Third Way will have as much, if not more, access than anyone else. What few institutions there are within the DLC-nexus will have access to the Democratic leadership in a way that the progressive movement simply does not. We won't be giving polling memos, policy presentations, or suggesting language to Senators and members of the House in small, private sessions. While there are not many DLC-nexus institutions, what few institutions there are will speak to an extraordinarily powerful audience.
In this situation, the progressive movement's influence on the Democratic ecosystem is ultimately confined. We may have the resources to fund a small number of the type of candidates we like, once and a while see someone like Russ Feingold lead our legislative battles, occasionally sneak "one of our own" into a leadership position, and watch as a few of our elected officials adopt our language, but we will ultimately lack the ability to broadly influence the Democratic leadership. In order to do so, we will eventually need institutions that will have access within the progressive elite as do the institutions within the DLC-nexus. This means:
- At least one polling firm trusted and respected enough to give presentations to Democratic leaders
- Progressive policy institutions, such as the Progressive States Network, that are trusted and respected enough to hold small, regular meetings with members of Congress.
- A Club for Growth equivalent on the left that holds wayward Democrats accountable.
- A New Democratic Network PAC equivalent that recruits candidates the same way New Dems did during the 1990's. Some of the larger Act Blue pages are already loosely performing this task.
- Pundits from the progressive movement becoming far, far more prominent within established media outlets.
In other words, we need infrastructure that can speak to the leadership as well as the activist base, infrastructure that can speak to the aristocracy as well as to the working class. Until we do that, we will continue to fight an asymmetric battle with severely constructed influence among the higher levels of the progressive ecosystem. Of course, a major problem in achieving this goal is that the DLC-Nexus institutions that currently perform this task as less institutions than they are small groups given immediate credibility because they are founded and / or headlined by one or more cult of personalities within the DLC-Nexus (Bennett, Carville, Rosenberg, etc). Progressive movement institutions do not have the ability to win immediate credibility among the leadership by being headlined / founded by one of our rising stars. The institutions themselves must win credibility, without the benefit of any given personality's stamp of approval.
At the very least, even if we fail in our ultimate goals, the progressive movement is set to bequeath far more political advantage to the next generation of the Democratic ecosystem than the DLC-nexus has bequeathed to our generation. Because we base ourselves on institutions, rather than on cults of personality, the movement will survive and remain powerful after the individuals have left the scene. As we have all witnessed during the current decade, the DLC-nexus suffered mightily once Bill Clinton was no longer eligible to become President. While his individual gifts as a politician were able to make the overall DLC-movement successful, the lack of an equally gifted successor with a compatible temperament resulted in an almost immediate decline for the movement when he left office. Joe Lieberman, for example, could never be what Bill Clinton was, and the DLC-nexus has largely been playing defense since 2002 as a result. The progressive movement, by contrast, actually became far more powerful and effective once it moved out of the dominating shadow of Howard Dean's presidential campaign in early 2004. That the progressive movement thrived when the cult of personality was removed from the equation, while the DLC-nexus faltered demonstrates, I think, an important difference in the long-term efficacy of the two movements. I hope it does not ultimately also restrain our ability to have access to the Democratic and progressive leadership.
