Photo: Charly Tiballeau/AFP/Getty Images
There’s something very familiar to me in the air right now as some Democrats unhappy with the alleged leftist direction of their party aggressively brand themselves as “centrist.” I spent quite a few years, you see, associated directly or indirectly with 20th and early 21st-century Democratic centrism, eventually serving as policy director for the famous Clinton-adjacent Democratic Leadership Council. That organization finally closed its doors in 2011, mostly because its principal goal of making it possible for a Democrat to be elected president had been redundantly accomplished.
The DLC and the politicians associated with it regularly oscillated between two distinct impulses: (1) advancing a positive policy agenda rather than simply defending past progressive accomplishments, and (2) disassociating the Democratic Party from some of the more toxic policy and political habits of the left. Bill Clinton embodied both impulses in his 1992 campaign and subsequent presidency: promoting polices from national service to reinventing government to welfare reform that also helped position him as a “different kind of Democrat,” or as we liked to say, a “New Democrat.”
All along there were people in and around the DLC who weren’t all that interested in policy ideas, but were really into “pushing off the left” as some of us called it, or “hippie-punching” as some critics described it. Some of the hippie-punchers unsurprisingly wound up becoming Republicans or Republican-enabling deal-cutters, including longtime DLC chairman and 2000 Democratic vice-presidential nominee Joe Lieberman. In any event, the extremism of the 21st-century Republican Party, intensified by the ascendancy of Donald Trump, convinced my kind of DLC Democrats to declare an intraparty truce and work with progressives against the common foe.
Since Trump’s successful comeback in 2024, however, there’s a new era of Democratic intraparty tension clearly underway. And while efforts to bring back some sort of DLC-style institutional presence haven’t born fruit so far, we are definitely seeing the second coming of a breed of centrist Democratic politician who is as interested in “pushing off the left,” almost to the exclusion of any other purpose, as anyone in Clinton’s orbit. Indeed, two of today’s prime examples, Andrew Cuomo and Rahm Emanuel, made their bones as Clinton administration figures (the former as HUD secretary and the latter as a key White House staffer). As Ben Mathis-Lilley argues compellingly at Slate, both men embody what he calls centrist “identity politics,” based on positioning and intraparty conflict more than anything positive or tangible:
[T]here is the tendency of well-to-do Democrats who work in law, finance, management, and the media to become captivated by a certain kind of pugnacious, business-friendly centrist—examples include Michael Bloomberg, Howard Schultz, and Rahm Emanuel. The Bloombergs and Emanuels win this audience—which includes numerous high-level donors and pundits—by taking shots at the left and extolling their own contrasting commitment to pragmatism and realism. Crucially, their hold on their elite base persists even if, in practice, they turn out to be inept candidates or incompetent managers with few practicable ideas. …
And no one coasts on reputation for pugnacious realism, in U.S. politics, like Mario Cuomo’s son. Yes, he was forced into resigning in 2021 because a large number of women (including several who worked for him) said he had harassed or groped them; one of those gross interactions even happened on camera. … But let’s not forget that at that time, he was also being exposed for having lied repeatedly about COVID deaths in New York nursing homes and other aspects of his pandemic response. … Extensive reporting by New York magazine’s Rebecca Traister depicted a Cuomo administration that had almost no interest at all in what the actual consequences of its own policies would be, operating entirely as a vehicle for Cuomo’s spotlight craving and feuds with other political figures.
Cuomo’s “not a lefty” political identity has reached its apotheosis in his current campaign for mayor of New York, in which he has managed to get himself into a virtual two-way race against a young Muslim democratic socialist who has been outspokenly hostile toward Israel’s war in Gaza. “I’m not Zohran Mamdani” appears to be Cuomo’s main message, aside from the personal “toughness” that is supposed to make him an effective battler against the Trump administration.
This last characteristic of latter-day belligerent centrists is key. There are certainly plenty of Democratic politicians who are decidedly not “of the left” — say, Pete Buttigieg, Josh Shapiro, Gretchen Whitmer, or for that matter, Joe Biden. But all of these centrist Democrats have more than a passing interest in policies as opposed to positioning, and also are committed to intraparty civility.
Cuomo and Emanuel, on the other hand, enjoy long-standing reputations for being — to use a technical term — assholes. Cuomo in particular has inspired loathing among a wide swath of associates and observers, regardless of party or ideology. In a Democratic Party longing desperately for someone to fight back against the terrifying second Trump administration, mere pugnacity can be advertised as a real asset.
Unfortunately, in the long run, brains matter as much as spine in politics. To effectively challenge the Trump administration, centrist Democrats need a fresh policy agenda and a reputation of competence, not just a willingness to fight. And within the Democratic Party, new ideas and a sense of camaraderie will do more for centrists than calling progressives names. Perhaps the most encouraging sign on the center-left is the emergence of the so-called “abundance agenda,” which combines some specific policy goals for Democrats with an acute but not unsympathetic analysis of how the left has managed to frustrate the ability of government to get things done. It’s interesting that one of the authors who has helped stimulate this debate, Marc Dunkelman (author of Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress — and How to Bring It Back), was once communications director for the DLC.
In the ongoing emergency of the Trump era, there’s nothing wrong with a robust intra–Democratic Party debate with an occasional sharp elbow. But those promoting a sort of centrist identity politics of conflict without substance would be well-advised to work harder to identify with the common values and goals that unite Democrats (and a majority of swing voters) across the spectrum, and to make successful governance rather than ideological positioning the gold standard.
