Think Tank Funded by Elites and Corporations Tells Democrats to Drop Small Donors
Democrats are over.
This report by Sludge analyses a recent memo distributed by the Third Way think tank, claiming to identify the steps Democrats need to take after their election losses.
So while some billionaires openly telegraph their alignment with (or rather, shaping and steering of) Trump’s agenda and gut the federal government, other billionaires try to capture the do-nothing Democrats in secret?
This memo is despicable and so thinly veiled in its bid to appeal to the white working class. Which is hypocritical given its stated emphasis on identity politics. Things like gun shows, churches, tailgates, patriotism and individualism, while not the exclusive domain of white people, are definitely more associated with them in the popular imagination.
While Third Way is correct about the Democrats shallow and purely symbolic gestures toward identity being a strategic error, what they get wrong is how those gestures were also a moral failure. While signaling allegiance to or concern for immigrants, LGBTQ, people of color, their policies did nothing to alleviate the everyday struggles we face. Sowing dissent through rhetorical gamesmanship and cultivating a white backlash against us instead of advancing policy that challenges the neoliberal capitalist status quo.
Policies, which of course, were promoted by the actual Left, who are all but absent from the Democratic Party. The idea of the Left having an outsized influence on this party of corporate do-nothings is absurd on its face.
The one surprising and interesting omission from the memo is any guidance on Palestine. But I suppose that’s because it’s the one thing Third Way thinks Democrats got right? And “keep on supporting genocide” isn’t something they’re willing to commit to paper.
Democrats are over.