The Center Has Moved Left

David Brooks as a column in today's New York Times that suggests that the Netroots and the left wing of the Democratic Party has largely been repudiated by the successful centrism of Hillary Clinton:

In the beginning of August, liberal bloggers met at the YearlyKos convention while centrist Democrats met at the Democratic Leadership Council’s National Conversation. Almost every Democratic presidential candidate attended YearlyKos, and none visited the D.L.C.

At the time, that seemed a sign that the left was gaining the upper hand in its perpetual struggle with the center over the soul of the Democratic Party. But now it’s clear that was only cosmetic.

Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington.

In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. In the various polls on the Daily Kos Web site, John Edwards, Barack Obama and even Al Gore crush Hillary Clinton, who limps in with 2 percent to 10 percent of the vote.

Moguls like David Geffen have fled for Obama. But the party as a whole is going the other way. Hillary Clinton has established a commanding lead. ...

But Matt Yglesias, blogging in The Atlantic, has the appropriate response:

The bigger problem with Brooks' column, though, isn't so much that it says things that are wrong as that it leaves things out. He says Clinton is "hawkish" compared to what the netroots want to see and that "Democratic domestic policy is now being driven by old Clinton hands like Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed." Both are true, but it's still also true that all of the Democrats are calling for substantial reductions of troop levels in Iraq, which none of the candidates (including Howard Dean) were doing in 2004. They're all calling for diplomatic talks with Syria and Iran. They're also all calling for universal health care, which John Kerry didn't do, Al Gore didn't do, and Bill Clinton didn't do in 1996. And they all support serious reductions in CO2 emissions, which, again, neither Kerry nor Gore nor Clinton did.

And that, generally, is the shape of things. "The left" has only been empowered to a pretty minor degree, but the "centrist" wing of the party is . . . way further left on the merits than where it was in the late 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. That, in turn, is largely a reflection of a renewed vibrancy on the left that's both pressured elected officials and expanded the boundaries of conversation. When the centrist strand in Democratic thinking came to represent school uniforms, promises to balance the budget each and every year of the Gore administration, and backing the invasion of Iraq that was one thing. If, instead, we're going to get universal health care, action to halt global warming, and diplomatic engagement with rival powers in the Middle East, that's a very different thing. If Brooks wants to call that latter thing a defeat for the netroots because dKos diarists sometimes find themselves disappointed, well, then I think that's a kind of defeat people can live with.

The left is going to continue to express its disappointment with Clinton and the Democratic Congress, especially over the war. But the fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party, the suburbs, and most of the country has been shifting left on a whole host of issues of concerned to the left wing of the party.