David Horowitz' theory: A "Shadow Party" is trying to pull the Democrats leftward

Great Debates
1

Doing some googling research on right-wing activist David Horowitz (who, back in the '60s and ‘70s, was a left-winger and member of the Black Panthers) turned up a new theory of his: There is a “Shadow Party,” masterminded by George Soros, which is scheming to take over the Democratic Party and/or drag it in a leftward direction (or possibly set up a third party). By his account, this had its genesis in the McCain-Feingold bill, which limited the Democratic Party’s ability to collect and spend “soft money,” thus made it more dependent for money (and footsoldiers) on nominally nonpartisan organizations such as MoveOn. From Horowitz’ website “DiscovertheNetwork” (which is intended as a “liberal-watch” resource for right-wingers who want to know what the liberal orgs are and who is funding them – but which also could serve as a pretty good information resource for newbie leftists who want to know who the players are*) – http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6706:

Issues for debate:

  1. Does this “Shadow Party” really exist, in the terms Horowitz describes? Or is it just his name for every Dem whose politics are to the left of the Democratic Leadership Council’s?

  2. What does he mean, “No Republican Counterpart”? What about the whole conservative movement from Goldwater’s 1964 campaign to the present, which has effectively marginalized liberal Republicans? (See Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (Penguin Books, 2004), which tells the whole 40-year saga in highly readable detail.) How come when leftists do this it’s a “Shadow Party” but when right-wingers do it it’s a movement?

  3. How powerful are the named organizations and individuals within the Democratic Party at present? (Not powerful enough, apparently, to win the 2004 presidential nomination for Dean.)

  4. These are all very public, high-profile political organizations, and the whole world knows they are generally allied or in sympathy with each other, and what they stand for. What’s “Shadow” about it?

  5. Is Horowitz correct in his analysis of the differential impact of McCain-Feingold on the two major parties?

  6. What’s this about Hillary Clinton being “identified with the Democratic Party left”? I think that would come as a surprise to her and a bigger surprise to most Democrats. Her politics are maybe five degrees to the left of Bill’s, and he was no liberal, let alone a leftist.

  7. What role does George Soros (and his fortune) really play in all this?

  • Curiously, the DiscovertheNetwork website (http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/default.asp), while it seems to be a comprehensive effort to list all “liberal,” “leftist,” “progressive” or “socialist” organizations and prominent individuals in America (and the UK), has nothing at all to say about Ralph Nader, the Green Party, the Communist Party USA, or the Socialist Party USA. (There is a page on the Democratic Socialists of America.)
2

:stuck_out_tongue: If someone’s actually pulling the Democrats leftward, I wish they’d get to work already. On the other hand, in my opinion David Horowitz :: credible : George Soros :: poor.

3

Which is more plausible:

That there really is a “shadow party” going to great lengths to accomplish a dubious end by Byzantine means?

Or that Horowitz is peddling a trumped up conspiracy theory to the sector of his constituency that gobbles up this kind of tripe like candy?

:rolleyes:

4

This is called attacknalysis. There are plenty of voices out there that are peddling what they present as political analysis, but their underlying purpose is simply to frame the debate in a certain way or take covert potshots at the other side under cover of simply analyzing things. For instance, Horowitz is simply lying when he talks about the “more moderate” Democratic rank and file. All Democrats are undifferentiated leftist trash to him, and he’d call the most conservative Democrat a communist if it suited his purposes. He’s only currently saying otherwise because it gives him room to claim that the party is getting worse (which is a difficult sell if you already describe them as a the pinnacle of evil to begin with).

5

The conspiracy angle theory is all wrong. There are several groups, however, organized over the internet, who are doing a lot of work to pull the Dems leftward. They have a lot of money, but as of et haven’t gotten much to show for it. Their favorite canidates keep losing (see Howard Dean).

McCan-Feingold comes from another angle. IMHO, they’re both doing something really bad there, and need to be stopped. They’re doing it to try and keep other peopel from claiming their seats and to eliminate public speech as much as possible.

6

It would be really heartening to believe that ANY group associated with the Democrats were that organized, whatever their goals. As it is now, we have The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight vs. The Keystone Kops, standing in a circle and executing each other in the foot for control of the Democratic Party.

7

:confused: Can you back up your assertion that the bill makes it perceptibly easier for McCain and Feingold to hold on to their respective seats? Or that they’re trying to “eliminate public speech”?

Also, does the bill have different effects on the Republican and Democratic parties, as Horowitz argues?

8

Is there a Shadow Party? Er, sort of. I worked for America Coming Together over the summer - one of the liberal “527” groups funded largely by George Soros and the AFL-CIO, among others, that come into existence largely due to the fundraising restrictions of McCain-Feingold. And although we said we weren’t “partisan”, we had no qualms about promoting “progressive” causes - so yeah, we did function as a sort of shadow Democratic party, along with other groups. We even referred to ourselves as such, on occasion.

Now, is this “shadow party” of activists and philanthropists pulling the party to the left? Maybe - my co-workers at ACT and I were probably to the “left” of John Kerry - we had a few Deaniacs and some people who’d supported Edwards in the primary. There were also quite a few people who thought John Kerry was the best thing that could happen to the party, on the theory that he might actually be able to attract centrist voters. That said, other “progessive” 527s - not ACT, so far as I know - have been trying to apply pressure to the DNC to go farther to the left. Heck, that’s one of the reasons Dean won the DNC chairmanship.

So, I’d say that absent the scare-talk, Horowitz is actually right - there is a shadow party, and parts of it certainly are bringing the party to the left. The thing is - I don’t see anything sinister here. There’s a large bloc of committed activists who want to see the party’s platform move more towards the left, they make no bones about it, and they’re having an impact - what’s wrong with that? One could just as legitimately say that a “shadow” party hijacked the Republican party during the Reagan years, in order to move a right-centrist fiscal conservative party into hard-right social/fiscal conservativism and foreign policy neoconservativism - Republicans aren’t griping about that. :slight_smile:

9

Just to elaborate - I’d argue that this is simply the way parties have always evolved. With rare exceptions, party doctrines change due to the actions of (relatively) small, dedicated groups. If the new doctrines mesh with the will of the people, the changed party will do well in elections. If the activists have driven the party in an unpopular direction, it won’t do well in the polls. That’s just the way it goes.

10

I think ‘shadow party’ is a stupid term, meant to suggest some powerful cabal of people pulling the strings of the populist movement. I don’t think that is accurate at all.

Here’s what I think:

  1. McCain-Feingold was a travesty. I said so when it was being debated.
  2. The creation of ‘527’ groups has given some very large organizations the ability to raise vast sums of money.
  3. Groups like “Move-On”, “Worker’s World”, “America Coming Together”, “International A.N.S.W.E.R”, and others have incredibly sophisticated organizing and mobilizing capabilities.
  4. The Internet is giving these organizations the ability to reach deep into the grassroots and raise tremendous amounts of money.
  5. There are some very rich, very powerful people driving some of these organizations. George Soros, etc.

There is no grand conspiracy, go ‘shadow party’. There is, however, a large organization on the left that does not have a right-wing counterpart. The closest the Republicans came in the last election was the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, and the amount of money they raised was trivial compared to the collosses on the left.

The unfortunate thing is that the politicians in Washington are seeing dollar signs looking at the kind of money MoveOn etc. can bring to the table. So they are selling themselves out to organizations that really are far left. The chairmanship of Howard Dean reflects this.

At some point the Democrats are going to have to decide between the money and their desire to be elected, because if they allow these groups to pull the Democratic party over to the far left, they are going to be marginalized for decades.

11

I guess you never heard of the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, etc., etc., or deep-pockets righties like Richard Mellon Scaife.

Yeah, sure. Have I mentioned that I get really tired of conservatives telling us more liberal types how big a mistake we’re making by not moving to the center?

Howard Dean’s chairmanship isn’t about left and right, except in Al From’s nightmares, and a few conservatives’ fantasies. It’s about Democrats actually standing for something and fighting for it, as opposed to seeing everything as subject to compromise. Ben Nelson’s a Democrat who’s willing to stand and fight, even though he’s a conservative Democrat from a conservative state, Nebraska. Joe Lieberman is, overall, a fair distance to Nelson’s left. But Joe would rather sell out on anything and everything, and take all sorts of potshots at his own party, if that’s what it takes to look ‘moderate’ and reasonable in the eyes of the commentariat.

MoveOn has raised some money. George Soros has contributed some money. But in 2004, John Kerry got far more money in small contributions from individual donors across America than Soros contributed to any organization, or MoveOn raised. And the same holds true for House and Senate Democratic candidates, taken as a group.

What McCain-Feingold did for the Democrats was to drastically reduce their dependence on the outfits that used to give them ‘soft money.’ You know what this means? It means that the Democrats are becoming more representative of the people who vote for them, and less representative of corporations that used to funnel money to them. How can this be a bad thing? Last I checked, this was how democracy was supposed to work.

Kinda like the GOP got marginalized by moving to the right over the past 40 years? I never have gotten a straight answer from any of you conservatives about how moving away from the center would be a tragedy for the Dems, despite having worked so well for the GOP. Except as a corollary to your belief that conservatism is the right way to go, so there ought to be two parties, one extremely conservative, and the other only moderately conservative.

But like I said, what’s going on in the Democratic party isn’t about left and right. It’s about staying pretty much where we are, only actually sticking up and fighting for that bit of ground, rather than compromising every last belief we might have.

12

Man, those poor Republicans: how ever will they compete with the much better funded Democrats! (—faints, has to be revived with smelling salts—)

13

Rtfirefly said:

But that’s exactly what DID happen. You guys who think the Republicans have moved to the right are nuts. Remember how powerful the religious right used to be? Remember the Contract with America? Remember how Republicans wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, shut down PBS, eliminate the National Science Foundation, etc?

And what happened to Republicans when they did this? They lost the presidency, they lost seats in the house and Senate. They got absolutely hammered in the 1996 elections.

Then the Republicans turned back to the center. Instead of eliminating the Department of Education, they bumped its funding 40%. Jerry Falwell got taken out to the woodshed. Pat Buchanan was ostracized. Gingrich was out on his ear. Christ, they don’t even talk about school vouchers any more.

The result is that the Republicans are sitting in the center, and the Democrats are moving off to the left. It is my opinion that if this continues, the Democrats are going to lose even more seats in the house and Senate in the next elections. They’ll lose the ability to filibuster, and essentially have no power at all.

As a Canadian, I can tell you that it sucks to have a one-party state. Our conservatives immolated themselves the way the Democrats seem keen on doing in the U.S., and the result was a Liberal government that became essentially unaccountable. That made them lazy and corrupt. It’s not a good thing.

You don’t have to agree with me. From the perspective of the lefties on this board, the Democrats are still centrist. But from the perspective of the center, the people you need to win elections, the Democrats are moving left. Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and Howard Dean are becoming the faces of the party. Harry Reid was supposed to be a moderate Democrat, but he seems to have tossed his hat in with the left wing of the party.

The Clintons know what it takes for Democrats to be elected. They are the two best politicians in the Democratic party, and it should say something that Republicans used to think both of them were lefties, but now they represent the conservative wing of the party.

14

I have to agree with Sam Stone here on the Republicans. As much as people scoff, Republicans have at least in practice, been far more “compassionate” than their rhetoric. They’ve allowed pro-choice members to have center stage in their party, and they’ve basically signed on to a lot of things that drive Grover Norquist batty.

I don’t really agree on the Dems. I don’t think the Dems have moved anywhere at all. Painting them as moving left is just the usual attacknalysis (Reid is a big figure! He disagrees with Republicans on some things! He’s a leftist! I am an incisive critic of politics!). But what Dems HAVE failed to do IS to move anywhere. They have been stuck defending the status quo: ironically even when they are not the party in power! Even with Bush as President, what was the Democratic message? Bush is going to destroy this social programe, Bush is going to destroy that social programe. What Sam cannot see is that Democrats are conservatives, Republicans are liberals. Democrats are reflexive and reactive, Republicans are the reformers, the do-ers.

Face it: Republicans may have bad ideas. They may have good ideas. But they have ideas: they actually have a vision for changing the country, reforming things that aren’t working, bringing things in line with some overall ideal. Whether or not that’s just rhetoric, it’s a lot more exciting and vital than “our Social Security, oh noes!”

15

Until Horowitz provides some evidence that his claims are true, I would list this up there with the sort of rubbish we expect from people like … Horowitz.

I don’t see any “shadow Republican party” either. When you have groups like Focus on the Family on your side, who needs it?

Not very, judging by the fact that the Democratic Party has not stood up for their causes much in the past few years.

Since the “shadow party” doesn’t actually exist, question 4 can’t be answered.

He’s pretty much right about McCain-Feingold. He somehow neglects to mention that the Democrats made up the money they lost from M-F by grassroots fundraising over the internet.

While the idea of Hillary being far-left is absurd to anyone who’s remotely connected to reality, it’s been standard belief among the Limbaugh-Coulter crowd for years. Look: Horowitz is just making all this up, so why should he bother making up stuff that makes any sense when his target audience will believe whatever he says? He could declare that the shadow party was run by Michael Moore, Elvis, and Scott Peterson and his minions would believe it.

16

What Apos said: the Dems need to get them some new ideas.
Reagan won, and rewrote the battle lines of the debate for everyone who came after him, because he identified the increasing tax burden because of inflation affecting salaries even as tax brackets remained unchanged, known at that time as “bracket creep”, as a major problem, promised to fix that, and did it. The Dems of the late seventies resisted doing anything about this bracket creep, thereby squandering the huge lead Nixon had given them via Watergate, and Dems have been resisting new initiatives ever since.
Or, to put it simply, the best defense is a good offense.

17

I don’t agree – so far as I can see, Mrs. Clinton’s policies mark her as a centrist Democrat. She’s left of ME in most things, yes, but not “far left.”

What I see in many cases is a willingness to assign “real” positions to her, unsupported by any evidence. That is, the response to the argument that her positions have been moderate is: “Oh, that’s not her REAL view. She’s only saying/doing that to position herself for the 2008 presidential run.”

It’s unclear to me how the apparent psychic powers of the speaker have developed the ability to see in Senator Clinton’s mind so well.

18

Apos said:

Actually, I agree with everything you wrote. But then, I’m not a conservative. I’m more of a Libertarian. Ayn Rand described herself not as a conservative, but as a ‘radical for capitalism’.

I don’t hear any ideas out of the left any more. What’s the progressive plan for fixing social security? Where’s the overarching defense policy? What about Medicare, which is in far worse shape than Social Security?

And the reflexive anti-Republicanism that has substituted for new ideas isn’t a winning plan. Bill Clinton signed onto welfare reform despite the fact that it was a Republican idea pushed by Republicans in Congress, because he was capable of seeing good policy no matter which side of the aisle it came from. As a result, he gets the credit for it.

It baffles me that the left is in such a knee-jerk obstructionist mode. Take the war on terror - We’re fighting fascists - people who persecute gays, oppress women, and want theocratic government. They should be the natural enemies of the left. And yet, many on the left just can not bring themselves to get behind this war, other than to call out Osama Bin Laden personally, as if he was the beginning and end of what is going on.

Or take Social Security. Right now, social security is hugely regressive. The poor and middle class pay far more into social security as a percentage of their incomes than do the rich. But even worse, Social Security does not allow the poor to pass saved wealth on to future generations. The rich can afford investments that will perpetuate their familial wealth and keep their families rich through generations. The poor give their retirement money to the government, and their own children get to start from scratch. It’s a bad deal for the poor and middle class. If you could figure out a safe way to move that money into property that the people own, you’ll do a lot for class mobility on a generational basis, and the left should welcome that. Instead, they stamp their feet and demonize Bush for daring to re-think a social program.

If the Democrats were at least willing to debate this in the realm of ideas, they’d have a chance to get rid of the most objectional parts of Bush’s plan. He himself has said that EVERYTHING is on the table, including tax increases on the wealthy. He’s just trying to start a real debate. But the dems have slammed the door. It’s poor governing AND poor politics.

19

Not any plan is better than the status quo, ya know. You don’t make changes for the sake of making changes, as you’ve been vociferous about telling us in other categories when you were happy with the Reps, Sam.

But here’s a list of responsible positions on the topics you’re whining about:

Social Security - basic system OK, needs more funding, combination of raising cap and phasing out bogus borrowing from the fund (while restoring surplus to prevent borrowing) should do it.

Medicare: Restore Bush’s cuts - it worked fine for a long time.

Defense policy (“overarching” or not) - engagement instead of confrontation, global alliances and combined efforts, you know, all the stuff that worked fine for decades until the petulant bully attitude took hold.

“Reflexive anti-Republicanism”? Snicker. That’s what you call simple responsibility these days? No, it’s not sexy, it doesn’t appeal to the baser emotions like Bush’s belligerence and spite do, but it’s what civilized society is all about. There’s nothing to apologize for.

As long as it’s already part of his plan. When has Bush given you any indication that those with the temerity to disagree with him on anything can get listened to? Why the hell do you think we should believe it now, especially from you?

20

So you’re position is that there’s nothing wrong with Medicare, and in fact you want to add on to it? That’s your solution? By the way, which Bush cuts would those be? You mean the 700 billion dollar prescription drug coverage he added on to it?

As for defense, what do you do when global alliances don’t work? And alliances to do WHAT? The Europeans staunchly opposed the invasion of Iraq. You do too. Fine, what was your alternative plan? Do you really think that just ‘getting bin Laden’ is the end game?

As for Social Security, you don’t see the fundamental unfairness of a system that allows rich people to invest their money and turn it over to their kids, but poor people have to give a large chunk of their income to the government, and their kids get none of it even if the retiree dies before he sees a nickel of his investment (assuming the kids are grown up)?

This system might have been fair back when the rate of return for participants was decent. At least then you could say that they actually weren’t losing anything. But when the system gets to the point where the rate of return for people paying in is much lower than what they’d get in traditional retirement investments, it becomes unfair, and it hurts the poor and lower middle class the most.