Where the Liberals are.

• Author: Press, Eyal
• Position: Explaining rightist movement in the Democratic Party - Column

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Al From must have been smiling to himself. From is the current president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the right-leaning outfit that has arduously been pushing the party away from liberalism since the mid-1980s. One of the group's founders, From takes pleasure in recalling that in 1980, the Democratic Party's platform included a crime plank denouncing excessive police brutality, an education agenda focusing on social concerns, and billions in job programs and public investment. This year's document, echoing Newt Gingrich on point after point, contains an explicit pledge to reduce the role of government and shift spending to localities; calls for cracking down on criminals; endorses the death penalty; denounces the "failed" welfare system; brags of cutting off aid to illegal immigrants; and champions NAFTA.

"The ideological battle in our party is over," From has declared. What he means is that old-style liberalism--forged during the New Deal and Great Society years and dedicated to government activism on economic and social matters--is dead in the water. In its place is the neoliberalism of the "New Democrats," whose guiding principle (indistinguishable from that of most Republicans) is, "Leave it to the market."

Culminating a trend to the right that began in the late 1970s when Jimmy Carter set the stage for Reaganomics by cutting social spending and raising the defense budget, the Democratic Party is now, under the auspices of the DLC and Clinton completing Reagan's task of demolishing the welfare state. Clinton's decision last summer to sign the welfare bill on the White House lawn with two black welfare recipients at his side epitomized the demise of "bleeding-heart liberalism."

No longer the party of blue-collar workers, blacks, women, immigrants, and the poor, the party of the New Democrats now speaks proudly for information-age technocrats, suburbanites, yuppies, elite professionals, and the upwardly mobile portions of the middle class.

Is the party over, then, for progressives and the left? A new group, calling itself the Campaign for America's Future, contends that it is not. "There is a battle yet to be waged," insists Roger Hickey, who is co-chair, with Robert Borosage, of the Campaign.

However complete the drift to the right may seem, say Hickey and Borosage, the future in American politics lies not with the free-market technocrats of the DLC but with old-style progressives...