As the Democrats set about clawing their way back toward political relevance, a faction that had been trying since the 1970s to shift the party’s political and ideological direction formed an organization with the explicit goal of reinventing both. They called themselves the New Democrats and named their organization the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). At the helm was Al From, a journalism school graduate who had done stints in the Johnson and Carter administrations before turning himself into a “policy entrepreneur” for the party’s disenchanted centrist flank. Alongside him was a cadre of overwhelmingly white Southern men who shared his critique of the party’s longtime embrace of industrial manufacturing, labor unions, civil rights, and social welfare. In their place, the faction embraced market competition, entrepreneurship, deregulation, and public-private collaboration—all while supplementing it with gentle modulations to create incremental gains in racial and gender equality.
“The political ideas and passions of the 1930s and 1960s cannot guide us in the 1990s!” they declared. To translate many of these ideas into concrete policy proposals, the DLC established the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank run by the veteran Washington insider Will Marshall.
In tandem with this new policy agenda, the DLC also began cultivating an electoral strategy that rested on the twin notions that white middle-class professionals were key to capturing the presidency, and that capturing the presidency was key to the party’s future viability. After yet another Republican victory in the 1988 election, in which George H.W. Bush handily defeated Michael Dukakis, From commissioned two political scientists and seasoned presidential campaign advisers, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck (both of whom would later hold posts in the Clinton administration), to draft a now-famous report that would offer a blunt diagnosis for why the Democrats kept losing presidential elections. Titled “The Politics of Evasion,” the report, published in September 1989, accused the Democratic establishment of failing to reckon with the political realignment reshaping the country, preferring to remain stubbornly attached to their old beliefs, even if it condemned the party to repeated election losses. “In place of reality they have offered wishful thinking; in place of analysis, myth,” Galston and Kamarck charged.
The authors summarized that wishful thinking in a single phrase: “liberal fundamentalism.” “Whether the issue is the working poor, racial justice, educational excellence, or national defense, the liberal fundamentalist prescription is always the same; pursue the politics of the past,” they wrote. The DLC’s mission, therefore, was to come up with something new. Instead of stressing outcomes, the Democrats would tout “opportunity”; instead of promoting New Deal–style master plans to alleviate entrenched inequalities in income, housing, and education, the Democrats would romance Wall Street while sending traditional allies, such as teachers’ unions and displaced industrial workers, to the back of the line.