DLC's Al From: Way Forward is the Third Way
Let Liberals Be Liberals
The Democrats, says Al From, need to modernize liberalism, not abandon it.
WILLIAM MCGURN
Wall Street Journal
Mr. From has been here before. He founded the Democratic Leadership Council after Walter Mondale’s 49-state 1984 loss to Ronald Reagan. Within a decade of that defeat, a young Arkansas governor named Bill Clinton would ride Mr. From’s “New Democrat” message into the Oval Office.
Mr. From doesn’t want them to. As for those who regard him as the man who “moved the party right,” he says they get him wrong. His contribution was not to reject liberalism but to “modernize” it—i.e., to reconnect the Democratic Party, as he once wrote, “with its first principles and grandest traditions.”
Many of these first principles he locates in the New Deal. Must liberals, for example, be soft on national security? Because that’s hard to square with an FDR who fought World War II.
Charter schools are also public schools. So again the question: Must liberalism really mean elevating the interests of the education monopoly above innovative new public schools that offer many inner-city children their only hope for a decent education?
Third Way policy is what made voters abandon the party. It's hard to imagine controlling less of the government than the Democratic Party does now, but this is definitely the prescription to get there.
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