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I mean, the Third Way Democrats whole shtick is embracing right wing policies and injecting them into the democratic party. They gained power as a faction in the democratic party around 1992 with the argument that after Reagan changed politics in the US and after losing the presidency for three elections, they argued that the democratic party needed to shift heavily to the right to chase what Americans were looking for. Clinton got for instance got elected on a platform to "end the welfare system a we know it", and gun control (which at the time was a right wing policy because scary minorities were open carrying. Reagan actually passed the law against open carrying, the Mulford Act, stating at the time that there was "no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons"). The explicit goal here was courting center right moderates.

Since then the Democratic Party has continued tracking to the right, with Newt Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation's 1994/94 HEART Act being slightly edited and passed as Obamacare.

This isn't a "terrifying perspective", but literally public statements and accepted political science.



> I mean, the Third Way Democrats whole shtick is embracing right wing policies and injecting them into the democratic party. They gained power as a faction in the democratic party around 1992

They gained power before that (their main original organization, the DLC, was a powerful force in Democratic politics well before its former head became the Democratic nominee in 1992), but they were definitely the unquestionably dominant faction from that point forward, though that has gotten weaker over the past decade or so.


Sure, by "gained power", I mean that they went from fairly important group to _the_ leadership of the party, actively purging other groups, and their decisions were the de facto decisions of the party as a whole.




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