The sincerest form of parasitism. It's a compliment, really. Having been involved (however abortively) in an effort last year to begin establishing the term "progressive" as a political identifier in the wider discourse, I take a certain jaundiced pleasure in seeing how much equity the word has acquired in this last little while, at least within Democratic policy circles: enough, that is to say, to tempt various unprincipled opportunists to try to rip some of it off.

Consider the unprincipled opportunists of Third Way, a Democratic policy shop that recently opened its doors on L Street in D.C. (Ain't it just like the DINOs? Hey, if Tom DeLay won't let you onto K Street anymore, just accommodate by moving over a block!) They call themselves a "Senate-focused progressive advocacy group," claiming, per a prominently displayed slogan, an interest in "modernizing the progressive cause." (If you made a drinking game out of it, the number of instances of "progressive" on their homepage alone would get you loopy before you'd had the opportunity to explore further.) The slogan would appear to rest on some rather fancy defining of the words "modernize" and "progressive," something you might suspect from the list of Senators that Third Way says its founder have "recruited ... to champion their efforts in Congress":

Third Way’s honorary co-chairs are Senators Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Evan Bayh (D-IN) and Tom Carper (D-DE). Three others, Senators Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Ken Salazar (D-CO), serve as the group’s honorary vice-chairs. Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT) is chairing the Third Way National Security Project. These Senators are leading progressive Senate voices.

Let me just say that mere highlighting can't do justice to the comic intensity of the spit-take I performed reading that last sentence.

Third Way grabbed itself some buzz this week (via an admiring Kenneth Baer at TPMCafe) with an analysis, based on last year's election returns, demonstrating that "the Democrats are no longer the party of the middle class." Third Way evidently wants us to understand this as fearless, "progressive" truth-telling—and I guess it is, in Joementum land, where the measure of your courage is how eager you are publicly to trash your own when they're down. A courage our leading Dems, of course, have in no short supply in these Dean-bashing days. (Given how much of the buzz around the Third Way report came in the form of gleeful crowing from the likes of the Washington Times and Laura Ingraham, I'd say there's very little room for question about how the game's being played here. Though I'll notice that Ruy Teixeira gave the report some respectful, if critical attention. Teixeira, for the record, considers the Third Wayers "serious, thoughtful Democrats.") After all, the "middle class" in question is, specifically, the white middle class: whose defection from the Dems in a supposed "landslide" last year, point one of the report, is helpfully, er, contextualized by point two, namely that "unlike other voters, blacks conferred overwhelming majorities to Democrats, regardless of income level."

I'm not going to try to critique the Third Way report in detail, beyond making the rather obvious point that a "middle class" defined as all voters (or all white voters), regardless of region or educational level or professional status, reporting household incomes between $30 and $75K, is a statistical shibboleth on which no serious political strategy could ever reasonably be predicated. Why bother with critique, when the agenda is so readily apparent, and we can just cut to the chase? Third Way claims, as one of its core strategy points, that it's "launching initiatives to help progressives reconnect with the mainstream of America on cultural issues while retaining progressive values." "Reconnect with the mainstream" is codespeak, of course, but it's not a very obfuscated code, even without the report as a guide: translation; White suburban cultural resentment's been awfully good to the Republicans. And it's not like the blacks are going anywhere: so why don't we grab ourselves a little of that pissed-off Whitey action, put ourselves over the top with it? I mean, is there any serious question that that's the territory we're in with this thing?

I'm not going to waste time critiquing the utter boneheaded lack of political imagination in that "strategy," either. I can't imagine why anybody with any strategic or historical insight wouldn't realize that the white-resentment ship, as far as the Democrats go, had pretty much sailed by the time Arthur Bremer decided to help elect Richard Nixon in 1972: questions of taste aside, it's awfully late in the game to be chasing after it now.

It occurs to me, after all, that Third Way isn't really making an argument about political strategy: or rather, the argument it's making is just so much intellectual kabuki. What it's really doing is defining a marketing niche: and the chief thing being marketed are the Third Way careerists themselves, who hope with reports such as these to occupy a nice, rewarding slot in the Democratic consulting ecology. (As far as what I mean by careerism: the principals of Third Way all seem to have cut their teeth on a would-be grassroots group turned insider advocacy shop called Americans for Gun Safety, and are now trying to leverage that earlier work into some sort of franchise. Nick Confessore has the goods on AGS in this 2002 American Prospect article.) You almost can't fault the Third Wayers for the disgusting trash they're purveying: which is, after all, simply an expression of the sort of thing that their Senate patrons are most comfortable hearing. The real story here isn't Third Way, it's the parlous moral and intellectual state of the Democratic center-right that Third Way has been custom-designed to serve.

And if an honorable, historically rich term like "progressive" has to get hollowed out for Third Way to perform that service: well, what's a little linguistic collateral damage? It's not like history means anything to these people, anyway.

posted by michael  5:41:29 PM  
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