The "New Democrats"
To Understand Democrats' Agenda in 2025, Study Bill Clinton's and the Democratic Leadership Council's (DLC's) Military Corporate Triangulating
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
On the surface, the Democratic Party looks all but dead: split between democratic socialists and corporate Democrats, riven over issues of identity, its politicos prone and mute or gimmick-addicted as Donald Trump rolls through his agenda. But these headlines deceive. Democratic operators are busy re-orienting their party to a seemingly "moderate" politics that is anything but. This "New, New Democratic" politics does not favor ordinary Americans but rather is radically skewed to the benefit of the military and corporate interests which have co-opted American life for three decades and more.
The most powerful among the post-Biden Democrats have taken for their guide Bill Clinton's 1992 "New Democratic" campaign, which is all but forgotten but whose effects are with us still. Tracing the financial, media, and political players that created Clintonism; the strategies they employed; their policies; and their subtle staying power in Washington shows how we've gotten to our current predicament as a country—and the tactics that centrist Democrats will use to double down again.
The Massachusetts Beginnings of the Military Corporate Democratic Takeover…
Clintonism did not begin with Bill Clinton in Arkansas in 1992. It began with Michael Dukakis in Massachusetts in the 1980s, and it was a product of the very forces Americans, and not just on the populist right, are rebelling against today: Washington's military corporate state and the tech startups and conglomerate universities it funded. The specific site of the beginning was Route 128: an upper-middle and upper-income suburban area outside of Boston and Cambridge. Between the 1950s and the 1980s, this area had been remade by government funding for Research and Development projects to fight the Cold War.
Dukakis, a Harvard graduate and lecturer in between stints as Massachusetts governor, began applying the Route 128 funding model to tech companies coming out of Silicon Valley, another beneficiary of Defense Department spending. He did this by using tax incentives and state support to bring start-ups to "university corridors" like Route 128, at the expense of the Irish and Black working-class communities in Boston which made up the actual Democratic voting base.
According to historian Lily Geismer, whose work unearthed the mechanics of Dukakis's Massachusetts' "miracle," his main economic adviser was MIT's Lawrence Summers, later one of Clinton's and President's Obama's chief economic advisors and responsible for the final push getting President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act through Congress. Summers convinced Dukakis that "the key to successful economic revitalization [lay] in…public-private partnerships": making the role of government to create "deals between high-tech companies and…venture capital firms" that "led to the surge of new software, data processing, and computer manufacturing corporations in the state."
…and the Rise of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC)
Dukakis's political allies were a cohort of rising young Democratic politicians in Washington, nicknamed the "Atari Democrats." Their model applied Dukakis's Massachusetts experiment to finance and weapons contractors. They called this "a new governing agenda that expands opportunity, rewards responsibility and fosters community" via "economic growth in the free markets." In reality, government subsidized corporations: the opposite of the free markets these players claimed to support.
These players, in turn, were backed by the Democratic Leadership Council, founded by Democratic political strategist Al From after the Democrats' 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 to move the Democratic Party center. "Privately funded and operating as an extraparty organization without official Democratic sanction, and calling themselves 'New Democrats,'" the DLC's method was the heavy funneling of money into ad campaigns based on information gleaned not from the (d)emocratic practice of talking to voters (canvassing, events, voter drives) but from focus groups.
Focus groups, standard in politics today largely thanks to DLC allies, were a DC borrowing from Hollywood that ended up attracting the kind of people who show up for free movie screenings: People with a little more time or a little more interest in the subject than the general population. This unreliability, though, was a boon for the New Democrats, who wanted to talk about the wedge social issues on the mind of a small number of voters rather than the political economic ones that concerned most people most of the time.
The Fundraisers and Militarists Backing the DLC…
All of this again, took money: the kind of money necessary to hire political consultants and buy ad time; the kind of money that an organization doesn't need if it is in touch with voters on the ground. As one formerly powerful fundraiser who split with the new approach, Stanley Sheinbaum, said,
The Democrats under Dukakis…were magnificent in [the money] they raised…So who are the players [they raised money from]?...They're the people who don't go into Harlem, don't go into South Central. They don't even fly [commercial] any more, they have their own planes. You get this whole DLC crowd, their rationale is that to talk about the issues will alienate too many people.
"By far the DLC's largest financial contributor," in his own words, was Michael Steinhardt: the inventor, by most measures, of the modern hedge fund. Steinhardt's main issues were Zionism and finance; he later co-owned The New Republic, the main Washington media outlet for pushing the DLC's policies. Steinhardt also served on the DLC's Board of Trustees, about whom he wrote, discretely, that "members…were diverse in almost all respects but one: we were all relatively affluent." Others of these affluent backers were the financiers Jon Corzine and Richard Richman, the prominent Atlanta Zionist Harriet Zimmerman, and the longstanding corporate conglomerates Philip Morris, Merck, and DuPont.
But the DLC's support didn't only come from people or organizations tied to finance, corporate conglomerates and Middle East militarism: it also came from Southern Democrats tied to Washington's military corporate complex. U.S. Senator from Georgia Sam Nunn, the Chair of the Armed Services Committee, was a member, along with U.S. Senator from Virginia Chuck Robb and U.S. Senator from Tennessee Al Gore. All three had made their names with their involvements of the Pentagon, their support of military interventions abroad, or their privatization of defense technology at home. (Al Gore, despite what he said, did not invent the internet, but it was his 1991 legislation which brought what had been a defense project, ARPANET, establishing the technical infrastructure for the internet, into the private sector via investments in universities to monetize computer connectivity.)
…and the Rise of Clinton, The Military Corporatists' Standard Bearer
DLC operators had policies and backers. What they didn't have was a standard bearer skilled enough to sell their vision of an America benefiting contractors and corporatists to the public. They found one in 1992 with Bill Clinton: a member of the new class of corporate military managers (degrees from Georgetown, Oxford and Yale) who acted the part of a Southern good-ole' boy.
But the 1992 Clinton Campaign succeeded on more than just its principal's regional charisma. It also succeeded on a strategy that it made “triangulation” famous: A term often used but rarely understood. Triangulation formally means "the strategy used by a leader or political candidate to present their ideology as neither traditionally left or right wing." What it means in practice is operating from the center (the tip of the triangle) and addressing issues that appease the Left and Right (the triangles' other two sides) while also playing both Left and Right off against each other to the benefit of the Center.
Clinton did this by drafting off popular Republican policies then pairing them with traditional Left proposals to present his campaign as the best of both worlds, while criticizing the Right on social issues and the Left on political-economic ones. All the while, the bulk of his policies supported the military corporate complex. This was the reality artfully obscured by his repeated insistence that, as a "New Democrat," he wasn't ideological, that he embodied pragmatism, that he wanted to expand the party, that a unified party was the only practical way to beat Republicans. In fact he was unifying his party behind an ideology, and that ideology was what would later be known as the Deep State.
Clinton's Campaign Promises…
The absences and inconsistencies in Clinton's proposals were the "tell" about who would really benefit from them.
He spoke about a "peace dividend" from reduced defense spending thanks to military disarmament after the Cold War while proposing gathering unemployed veterans into a National Police Force. But he didn't explain where the funding for this new Police Force would come from and he didn't mention the weapons contractors and training consultancies it would inevitably benefit.
He played to white voters concerned about crime and disorder by condemning the black activist Sister Souljah for inflammatory comments she had made after the 1991 Los Angeles riots ("I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?"). He did this even as he promised to make Democrats "the party of inclusion" which embodied America's "successful multiethnic, multiracial republic": code for the affirmative action hiring practices he would soon begin implementing.
He spoke against trade imbalances, especially with Japan, even as the chair of his campaign committee who became his commerce secretary was a lobbyist with ties to Japan. And he accepted the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the name of Americans who "play by the rules" in "our forgotten middle class" even as he staffed his cabinet with personnel from the financial firms which were already outsourcing the jobs of these very Americans abroad.
He spoke against middle class taxes and "exploding" public debt and also promised universal healthcare while promising to fire 100,000 bureaucrats. But where the money for public healthcare would come from aside from debt or taxes, and who would run public healthcare if not the 100,000 bureaucrats slated for attrition, went unexplained.
And their Political Economic Effects
This was a prelude to Clinton's actions in office, which amounted to an innovative corporate military giveaway under the guise of cost-saving.
Clinton forced consolidation of 50 weapons contractors to 5, giving a small number of corporations an enormous amount of power in the name of reducing inefficiencies and lowering costs. He also encouraged private contracting to replace Pentagon spending for the same purpose: according to data gathered by analyst Stephen Semler, private contractors were "34% of the Pentagon budget in 1992, but 46% in 2000." In 1995, in the American intervention in Bosnia, and 1999, in the one in Kosovo, these contractors manufactured the weaponry for the war that would guarantee another war (in Ukraine) in two decades' time by beginning the encirclement of Russia. They also supplied the manpower to stabilize these countries after the American troops left: a warm-up act for Afghanistan and Iraq, where, by 2006, at least 632 private firms were operating, employing 180,000 civilians at a time when the U.S. troop presence in Iraq was 160,000.
Clinton pushed for and signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, the special project of Joseph R. Biden, Jr., which militarized local law enforcement with federally-funded SWAT teams and helicopters, tanks and surveillance equipment. It also sent thousands of black men to prison for low-level offenses, breaking their communities: a wrong only partially unwound with legislation signed by President Trump in 2018. These moves benefited corporations, security consultancies, and weapons manufacturers at the expense of black families. They also created a booming jobs market—770,000 jobs were in corrections in 2008 versus 880,000 in the entire automotive sector—which helped keep the economy humming and Clinton's poll numbers in clover.
Clinton supported "free" trade via NAFTA, the expansion of the World Trade Organization, the corresponding "normalization" of trade relations (leading to outsourcing) with China, and the conglomeration of too-big-to-fail financial firms in the name of juicing the economy with low consumer costs. These financial firms poured money into real estate and philanthropic projects which redeveloped American cities for upper-income earners. They also used low-interest, little-or-no-down-payment home ownership loans to boost suburban growth with low-cost housing for cash-strapped families, many of them minorities, leading to the 2008 financial crisis.
Clinton backed a government efficiency program, the National Performance Review, run by Vice President Al Gore which cut the numbers of government workers without cutting agencies or reorganizing power over them. The Review also served as the means by which private contractors were introduced into government in the name of "efficiency," even though much of government spending was simply now on corporate contracts.
The Democratic Manipulation of Identity…
Throughout, Clinton played a double game on identity issues to divide and conquer the Left and the Right in favor of the center. Even as he courted Republicans with political-economic language about tackling crime and running government like a business, he carefully championed those social issues like abortion rights, environmentalism, and gay rights which were fast becoming part of the wallpaper of Democratic politics. But he simultaneously made sure that his backing of these social issues never strengthened on-the-ground activism that could challenge military corporate power.
When it came to the environment, for example, Clinton opened the door for what we now know as ESG (Environmental Social and Governance) Investing by allowing labor leaders closely tied to Washington, D.C. to invest their members' pension funds in businesses not just based on profitability but on causes like sustainability. What this ended up doing was weakening on-the-ground labor by putting its leadership in hock to whatever "cause" labor's Washington backers had adopted and wanted them to invest in. It also made environmental activism into corporate cronyism that led by the 2020s to boondoggles like Silicon Valley Bank: Connected financiers investing in an ESG project they knew might go bust, then getting bailed out by government when it did.
When it came to LGBTQ+ issues, Clinton worked through the nonprofit Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which Restoration News has reported on in the past. The HRC was an extension of corporate conglomerates: first, Hollywood's, at the hands of DLC-adjacent Clinton supporters like David Geffen and Rob Reiner; and then directly from military corporatists like Northrup Grumman, one of the "big five" weapons contractors created in the mergers urged by Clinton starting in 1993. Gay rights grassroots groups and activists criticized the HRC for pulling donations away from them and only doing what was convenient for donors: soft-pedaling gay rights in the 1990s and early 2000s; then, when the cultural ground had shifted, pushing the issue over-aggressively solely for the purpose of donations.
…and the Betrayal of Democracy
The function of all these moves was to narrow politics to a small number of corporate and military players. Simultaneously, it also narrowed the most active and engaged parts of the electorate to a small number of people whose dependency on military corporatism trapped them, or freed them up, to be almost solely interested in social issues as the determinants of their politics. These were mostly upper-middle class business, university, media, law, and consulting workers known in the social world as Yuppies: People who had bought in to a heavy security state and the corporate economy and the rights and protections they saw flowing from them. Everyone else—the social democratic Left, the populist constitutionalist Right—was dismissed as either civil libertarian threats to security or religious fundamentalists not too different from the Taliban.
This divide-and-conquer strategy had its limits. Believers in (d)emocracy from different teams, for example Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader, would show up at the same events, for example the 1999 Seattle Protests Against the WTO, and discuss their shared views about the threat posed by the military corporate center. But they were written off as "crackpots" by the major players in their parties, who were encouraging Democrats and Republicans to see themselves as separate tribes off of their social issue differences. In the vacuum of populist politics that this created, Clinton-era practitioners could dominate the field in the name of the powerful interests which backed them.
The Persistence of Clintonism…
Bill Clinton left office in 2001, but military growth and corporate concentration continued to be the pro forma policies of the Obama and Biden White Houses for a simple reason: the DLC's friends and fellow travelers came to Washington in 1993 and never left. These operators who served in or closely advised all three Democratic Administrations after 1992 included Antony Blinken, Rahm Emanuel, Lawrence Summers, Timothy Geithner, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, John Podesta, and Ron Klain. There were also players like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, who served in two of the three administrations; and Andrew Cuomo, who served in the Clinton Administration then took its priorities to New York state.
What made this continuity hard to conceive is that, from 2008 to 2024, Clintonism was, formally at least, on the outs among Democrats, as "triangulation" politics was replaced by more ambitious projects like the Affordable Care Act along with a host of initiatives (on sexual assault, abortion, unauthorized immigrants, transgenderism) meant to stir up a vocal, upper-income, socially liberal base. But, though the veneer was "Obama-Biden progressive," the hands at the tillers of the military and corporate complexes were Clinton Neoliberals.
This is why, even though Obama initially appealed to first-time millennial voters with arguments to break up conglomerates and stop military interventions, during his presidency wars abroad continued and corporate concentration increased. It is why Joe Biden, despite his unprecedented action on antitrust lawsuits to break up crony conglomerates, engineered two proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza, along with a climate bill that was in reality a giveaway to corporate interests (as recognized by some on the Left of his own Party).
…and its New Influence after 2024
When Bill Clinton spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, he called himself an old man, and mainstream coverage presented him as a receding figure. But in 2024 the Democratic Party was Clinton's party, just as it is more obviously and aggressively in 2025. Indeed, as a follow-up Restoration News report will show, those players actively aiming to use heavy spending to retool the Democrats are consciously modeling their moves after what they see as the success of the DLC. In the process they are embracing a more extreme version of the corporate military authoritarianism that is Clinton's, the DLC's, and the Democrats' contemporary legacy in America.