Empire with a Humanitarian Face: Democrats Rebrand
American political successions in recent years happen counterintuitively: implicit hand-offs between two nominally opposing sides. This strange reality is where we derive our notion of “the uniparty” and the media its notion of “partisanship.” Through the “partisan” lens favored by media, our politics appears divided between a party, the Republicans, in hock to Israel, the “big five” weapons contractors, real estate, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley; and a party, the Democrats, in hock to powerful “progressive” or “Left” nonprofits like ActBlue, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Center for American Progress, and the Open Society Foundations.
But the “uniparty” theory of the case shared by many politically disenfranchised Americans is a more accurate read of our political reality. Indeed, Democrats are as in hock to corporate and military interests as Republicans, and the newer “New Democratic” Party they are promising as a replacement to Donald Trump is his mirror image—there to serve the same interests under a different and deceptive cultural guise. Tracing the development of the modern Democrats from the late 1980s and early 1990s, and how that development shapes them today, shows that every sector of the party—from “neoliberals” to “progressives” to the Left—is de facto arbitered by military corporate interests which determine its policies and propaganda.
The initial cooption of Democrats by the military-corporate complex forty years ago is a familiar story, but largely one told by the political Left which is loyal to those economic groups left behind by this cooption, and largely unfamiliar to Americans at large. The story, which I have traced in part in past reports for the Libertarian Institute and elsewhere, goes something like this. In the 1970s and the 1980s, financiers used their influence to underwrite philanthropic ventures in New York City that gave them access to institutional and then political power at the expense of unions and activists—a top-down model of consolidating authority that they then transferred to the Democratic Party at large. During these years, what the scholar Dylan Gottlieb calls “a new generation of politicians and donors — people like Gary Hart, Chuck Schumer and Bruce Wasserstein,” took over the mantle of Democratic politics. In 1992, Michael Steinhardt and Al From at the Democratic Leadership Council and Martin Peretz and Leon Wieseltier at The New Republic along with David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg in Hollywood created the platform for Bill Clinton. In 2008, Penny Pritzker, George Soros, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, with help from sympathetic media like S.I. Newhouse’s and David Remnick’s New Yorker, created the platform for Barack Obama.
These financial and political and journalistic and policy operators quietly refocused the Democratic Party to depend on corporations, so that “Goldman Sachs employees and their families donated more to Bill Clinton’s…campaign than any other firm” and “Barack Obama…raise[d] more money from Wall Street lawyers and law firms than any presidential candidate in history.” During both administrations, government largesse flowed accordingly. Under Clinton, the fifty major weapons contractors were condensed, based on Pentagon pressure, into the “big five,” with a lock on government contracts, and under Clinton and Obama these companies made their bones off of a spate of interventions or proxy fights abroad: in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.
Under Clinton, Wall Street investment banks and Silicon Valley technology companies also consolidated based on government backing and thrived off alleged “deregulation.” And under Obama these corporations further concentrated, so that 2015, the penultimate year of Obama’s presidency, was “the biggest year ever…in worldwide dealmaking…not just for the total value of the deals but for the number of so-called mega-deals, which refers to any deal that exceeds $5 billion.” The structural legacy of the Democratic Party since the end of the Cold War, then, is political dependency on those very military corporate networks which Democratic rhetoric would seem to belie.
A surprising and instructive place to begin tracing these networks and their priorities as well as their distance from Democratic rhetoric is the pages of The Wall Street Journal, which has recently become a favorite gathering space for neoliberal or “business-friendly” Democrats. This is surprising because it was not thirty years ago that the Journal’s op-ed pages were leading the crusade for the impeachment of Bill Clinton. It is instructive because today some of Clinton’s most prominent allies are appearing in them. Indeed, on three days at the end of April (20th, 22nd, and 23rd), the pages ran op-eds by Clinton’s defender during his impeachment as well as Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend, Alan Dershowitz (“Why I’m Becoming a Republican); by Clinton’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo (“Trump is on the Right Track in Renewing Penn Station”); and by Clinton’s Deputy Chief of Staff and a possible contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, Rahm Emanuel (“Trump’s research cuts play into China’s Hands”). These op-eds nicely encapsulate the three political pillars of Democrats’ military corporatism as they have practiced it since the 1990s: reshaping their key voting constituency; funding monopolist development projects; and hinging America’s future on conglomerates’ relationship to China.
Dershowitz assigns his move to Republicans to what he calls Democrats’ abandonment of both Israel and of “moderation,” both of which he hopes the party re-finds:
“…perhaps they’ll wise up and move back to the center, where I (and others) could rejoin [them].”
This “center” was a concept first successfully articulated via the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign platform the “New Covenant” or the “New Choice” or the “Third Way.” Whatever its name, it was a platform which, thanks to the ministrations of the political strategists Stanley Greenberg and James Carville, “redrew our political map” by “help[ing] to shift the Democratic Party away from the unions, Black Americans and urban bosses of the New Deal coalition and toward the interests of metropolitan professionals.” The political economic focus of this “New Democratic” Party adjusted accordingly, based off the urban development ethos of Michael Steinhardt, now embraced by Cuomo in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. It was Steinhardt along with a roster of other financiers and Steinhardt’s protégé Michael Bloomberg who, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in October, used government largesse towards financiers and philanthropy to change the landscape of New York City with real estate development and “public spaces” funded by private money. It was this development which made this city and imitators like Miami and San Francisco playgrounds for tech operators and tourists, while driving out productive industry and the middle class.
This was the most tangible expression of a broader pattern: power percolated to the top of society while alienating the middle and working class and the people at the bottom. And the underwriting engine for these elite operators’ growing power—what kept politically dissatisfied Americans politically inactive in the 1990s and early 2000s even as power slowly concentrated behind the scenes—was a seemingly prosperous economy of low consumer costs based on America’s relationship with China, which Rahm Emanuel in The Wall Street Journal makes the linchpin of our development today. The difference is that, where Clinton did this in the 1990s in the name of importing consumer products and exporting American media, Emanuel does it in the 2020s in the name of government investment in Silicon Valley to compete with China. In the end, these different forms of Chinese-centric policy enrich the same groups via lowering production costs or incentivizing government investment: financiers, technologists, and “the metropolitan professionals” who work for them.
The clearest articulation of the Democratic project of the 1990s as repackaged for 2026 is the “Abundance Agenda”: the brainchild of Ezra Klein, the columnist and podcaster at The New York Times; and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic. The “Abundance Agenda,” as I have reported in the past, is monopolist corporatism dressed up as small government practicality. It is a series of proposals to weaken public and regulatory oversight of tech and urban development projects, from Google’s Waymo cars to Michael Bloomberg’s public parks to various real estate schemes helmed by a small rotating band of connected developers. This is not deregulation for the small business owner; it is deregulation for corporate welfare at the expense of local government, and it is being embraced most energetically by Democratic politicians backed by corporate interests.
These include Daniel Lurie, the Mayor of San Francisco, who is relying on philanthropy from Silicon Valley to “fix” the city; and Ritchie Torres, the self-identified “progressive” congressman from New York. Congresspeople Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA), Tom Suozzi (D-NY), and Jared Golden (D-ME) are also Abundance supporters. Rising Democratic politicians linked to Abundance or its supporters include U.S. Representatives from New York and California Pat Ryan and Jimmy Panetta; Governors of Virginia and New Jersey Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill; and former Deputy Secretary of the Air Force and current San Antonio mayor Gina Ortiz Jones. Ryan, Panetta, Spanberger, Sherrill, Ortiz Jones, and Slotkin are former intelligence officers; and Spanberger, Sherrill, and Slotkin are eager adapters of Rahm Emanuel’s defense-tech-friendly policies towards China.
Almost all of these players, along with nationally “electable” Democrats in “red” or “purple” states like Senator Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins, and Texas senatorial nominee James Talarico, are members of Majority Democrats. According to The New York Times, Majority Democrats is “a new group of elected officials from all levels of government [with] outsized ambitions to challenge political orthodoxies and remake the party” whose “structure resembles that of the Democratic Leadership Council, the once-influential group that successfully pushed the party to the middle in the Clinton era.” One of its strategists is Seth London, who, in a post-2024 election memo, recommended that the Democratic Party should imitate the Democratic Leadership Council and referenced as crucial to the party’s coming success the Abundance Agenda. London’s CV, not surprisingly, is peppered with financial connections, and so is Abundance: among them Michael Bloomberg, Reid Hoffman, James and Kathryn Murdoch, and the Walton Family, along with the lesser-known but influential operators Rob Granieri, Edward Fishman, Mark Heising, and David Nierenberg.
But why is a political economic agenda of billionaires outlined in The Wall Street Journal the most powerful agenda-setter for purportedly “progressive” Democrats? The reason is straightforward. The most powerful constituency of the new Democratic Party as shaped by funders like Michael Steinhardt, George Soros, Penny Pritzker, and Michael Bloomberg is the one constituted of “metropolitan professionals,” or, in the scholar Dylan Gottlieb’s words, “Yuppies,” who staff the corporate conglomerates these operators own. Though the Yuppie constituency does not share the Journal’s cultural values, it does share the Journal’s economic interests; and, at the hands of strategists like Stanley Greenberg and David Axelrod and David Plouffe, this fact has functioned to create a new progressive Democratic definition of “dispossessed.”
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