Insider Memo Envisions a New DLC

A former venture capitalist and fundraiser has a bold idea: market-friendly moderation.

by David Dayen December 2, 2024

Both Politico and The New York Times have reported on a four-page memo written by Seth London, a former Obama administration official and adviser for some of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors. They described the memo, dated November 11 and addressed to “Discouraged Democrats,” as primarily a rejection of identity politics, with a hint that London wants to build a faction inside the party to support “charismatic, moderate officeholders.”

The memo, which the Prospect has obtained, has an explicit model in mind: the Democratic Leadership Council. Founded in 1984 after a 49-state re-election landslide by Ronald Reagan, the DLC was a beachhead for conservative Southern Democrats seeking to promote a market-friendly agenda more in line with the right-to-work states they represented. The DLC’s fiercest critic, Jesse Jackson, promptly won several Southern states in the 1988 presidential primaries. The generational political talent of Bill Clinton, with an assist from Ross Perot (Clinton never won an electoral majority), eventually brought a DLCer inside the White House. Democrats then lost the House for the first time in 40 years, and began a 30-year movement away from the party’s working-class roots. The DLC officially shuttered in 2011.

The DLC is strongly associated with Robert Rubin’s view of international economics, emphasizing unfettered free trade, financial deregulation, faith in markets to solve societal problems, privatization, military escalation and intervention, and austerity budgeting. Historian Nelson Lichtenstein painstakingly documented this era as “a fabulous failure” in a recent book.

A 1.5 percent loss (and a one-seat gain in the House) is not a landslide. Yet London is reintroducing the DLC banner at a moment when the Democratic Party is leaderless and the opportunity to capture influence is high.
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-12-02-insider-memo-envisions-new-dlc/

Fail, repeat, fail, repeat.