Corporate Democrats have found their enemy, and it isn’t Trump. It’s the socialists in their own party.
Third Way, the corporate-funded think tank that has spent three decades policing the Democratic Party’s left flank, announced this month that it’s dedicating $15 million between now and 2028 to opposition research, polling, and messaging aimed squarely at the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The trigger was Michigan, where DSA-backed physician Abdul El-Sayed upset establishment favorite Rep. Haley Stevens in the state’s U.S. Senate primary, and where Donavan McKinney unseated incumbent Rep. Shri Thanedar in the 13th District.
Third Way President Jonathan Cowan did not mince words. DSA, he told The Nation, poses “a mortal danger” to the Democratic Party, and he dismissed El-Sayed’s coalition politics as the “DSA dodge.”
Co-founder Matt Bennett was blunter still with Fox News: “We believe the DSA poses a serious threat to Democrats. Their ideas are dangerous, and their politics are toxic. If we are to beat MAGA Republicans, we cannot allow our party to be defined by radicals.”
DSA National Co-chair Megan Romer wasn’t impressed. “$15 million to tell working-class people that a better world isn’t possible?” she responded. “We believe in people power, and our vision for a better future is winning. We will keep building our movement, and they will waste their money.”
The Democrats’ long civil war
The Third Way vs. DSA feud is the latest skirmish in a Democratic civil war stretching back to 1985, when a cadre of consultants founded the Democratic Leadership Council in the wake of Walter Mondale’s landslide loss to Ronald Reagan.
The DLC’s founders explicitly built their project against “movement-based” coalition politics, including Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, which they saw as a liability that had to be defeated. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton chaired the DLC before riding its “opportunity, responsibility, community” formula into the White House, and the “third way” brand went global from there, exported to Tony Blair’s New Labour in Britain.
The DLC and its international allies said they were going “beyond left and right,” but the third way was often less of a governing philosophy and more of a branding operation. It was a strategy for shutting down the left and social democracy by rebranding neoliberalism as “progressive.”
The DLC folded in 2011, but Third Way, founded in 2005, picked up the standard—fighting Bernie Sanders in 2016. Today, the DSA is fighting Mamdani, El-Sayed, and the wider left.
The pressure is already working at the top of the party. On Aug. 16, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries used a Meet the Press appearance to distance himself from both Medicare for All and DSA, declaring, “I don’t support the DSA agenda as has been articulated by the DSA itself,” and confirming he no longer even co-sponsors the Medicare for All bill he backed for years in Congress.
Class or race?
In some ways, though, it’s a consistent line for Jeffries, who told The Atlantic magazine back in 2021, “I’m a Black progressive Democrat concerned with addressing racial and social and economic injustice with the fierce urgency of now…. There will never be a moment where I bend the knee to hard-left democratic socialism.”
He argued that “Black progressives…tend to tackle issues first and foremost with an understanding that systemic racism has been in the soil of America for over 400 years,” whereas, “hard-left progressives tend to view the defining problem in America as one that is anchored in class.”
When the party’s top elected Democrat and its best-funded think tank are reading from the same script, it’s clear that the DLC’s old project hasn’t gone away but rather continues under a new name.
What’s notable, though, is how much right-wing Democrats have adjusted their racial framing. Back in the 1980s and ’90s, when they were trying to undermine support for Jackson and the Rainbow and move away from minority and urban voters, they peddled coded “tough on crime” rhetoric and talked about going after “welfare queens.”
These were intended as signals to suburban and Southern white voters who’d been shifting rightward to the Republicans that they could still vote Democrat.
Today, Third Way uses a different vocabulary, casting Black politics as centered on race while oversimplifying “hard-left” politics as a white preoccupation with class.
Does a choice really have to be made between race and class, though? Has American history not shown from its very beginnings that there is no separating class exploitation and white supremacy?
Activists and theorists like Claudia Jones, Henry Winston, Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Gus Hall, Victor Perlo, and others showed repeatedly the unbreakable link between class struggle and the fight against racism in this country. To truly understand U.S. capitalism, you can’t pick just one.
Ideological distortions
Third Way and its allied consultants, however, have worked hard to cast socialist politics as a white, out-of-touch phenomenon that Black voters supposedly reject in favor of “pragmatic” centrism. The data says otherwise.
In Pew Research Center surveys conducted in 2022, Black Americans were the group with the most negative view of capitalism—54% positive to 40% positive. Simultaneously, they were the group of Americans most likely to view socialism positively, 52% to 42%. Nearly eight in ten said the economic system needs either major changes or a complete overhaul.
Third Way’s own research on such ideological questions undercuts its talking points further: The group’s “Voters Are Moderates” memo concedes that only 45% of Black voters identify as ideologically moderate. That means a majority do not, a detail Third Way buries rather than leads with when the demographic in question is the one most skeptical of capitalism in the country.
Electoral results back up the polling. DSAer Zohran Mamdani won more than 60% of the Black vote in his New York City mayoral race, notching up to over 80% among Black youth. Michigan State Rep. and DSA member McKinney beat an incumbent in a majority-Black district, and Janeese Lewis George won a D.C. mayoral primary over a centrist favorite.
These outcomes continue a long tradition of Black left politics, from Harold Washington’s insurgent Chicago mayoralty to the congressional careers of Ron Dellums, John Conyers, and Barbara Lee, who built power by fusing Black leadership with progressive left politics.
The other consistent thread is red-baiting, and Third Way is hardly alone in deploying it. President Donald Trump—caught up in the fever of midterm madness—has spent this summer branding DSA members “hardcore, godless communists” and calling communism a bigger threat than Pearl Harbor.
Communist Party USA Co-chair Rossana Cambron zeroed in on the reason for all the anti-communist and anti-socialist hype: “MAGA is going to lose the midterms, and Trump’s getting desperate.”
Co-chair Joe Sims made the same point about the conflation driving both MAGA and Third Way attacks, telling The Daily Show: “Any effort to put forward an idea of a more equitable distribution of wealth is labeled socialist or communist…. It’s called red-baiting.”
Trump operatives and Third Way strategists use nearly identical language. Trump calls socialists a mortal threat to the country, Cowan labels DSA a “mortal danger” to the Democratic Party. Both MAGA and corporate Democrats have concluded that a working-class movement demanding redistribution is their real enemy.
And in case anyone thinks the “corporate Democrats” label is slander, we need only to check out Third Way’s donor base (details available here and here, plus an admission from Third Way itself here). On the list are Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street executives, and corporate consultancies like Arabella Advisors.
Third Way and the centrist Dems it supports present themselves as a grassroots faction defending “electability” against the extremist left. The truth, however, is that this is capital defending its hold on the Democratic Party, using the same tactics and vocabulary as the party’s opponents on the right.
Socialism will of course survive Third Way’s $15 million onslaught; left politics have faced down far more formidable opponents in the past. The open question is how long corporate Democrats can keep pretending “pragmatism” and capitulation to the right are the same thing as winning—especially when voters and mass movements keep proving the opposite to be true.
As with all news-analysis and op-ed articles published by People’s World, the views expressed here are those of the author.
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