How Gingrich Berserkers
Seized Democratic Party

When Ted Kennedy warned in January 1995 that America doesn't need two Republican Parties, he had the problem inside out. Evidence newly appearing confirms that a single gang, the hyper-New Age fascists around Newt Gingrich and Alvin Toffler, was then strangling Republicans and Democrats, while sweeping aside the traditionalists in both parties. This is the war-crazy faction which has recently been running Bush policy through the Vice Presidency and the Pentagon, and, acting through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), sabotaging and silencing the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt.

When the 'New Paradigm' Was Born

The gang's blatant inter-party arrangement emerged in 1990, when the DLC teamed up with the radical rightists who were then fighting a bruising battle for control of the first Bush Administration. DLC strategist Elaine Kamarck, and her friend James Pinkerton, aide to President George H.W. Bush, established the "New Paradigm Society" to coordinate between right-wing Democrats and Gingrichites. Kamarck reportedly had met Pinkerton at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, where she was a Democratic Party advisor. Pinkerton soon afterward made his mark working for the senior Bush's Presidential campaign versus the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Pinkerton did the research for the Republicans' famous racist attacks on the theme of Willie Horton, an African-American convict, who allegedly committed a murder after being paroled by Dukakis. Pinkerton became domestic policy advisor for the Bush Administration; Kamarck went on the staff of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Around February 1990, Kamarck and Pinkerton set in motion their New Paradigm Society, which was to run for the next two years. They met regularly with Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), DLC officers, and others to promote lower wages, privatization, deregulation, globalist free trade, the post-industrial "New Economy," and the neo-conservatives' global war agenda. Among those associated with this behind-the-scenes initiative were Connecticut Democrat Joe Lieberman, whose first election to the Senate had just been sponsored by William F. Buckley and funded by the most right-wing Cuban exile leadership in Florida.

Pinkerton outlined his "New Paradigm" in an April 1990 speech to the rightist Reason Foundation in Santa Monica, California, and in another talk to the Gingrich/Toffler World Future Society. His radical smash-the-poor, dismantle-the-government program was clothed in caring rhetoric, allowing for gay rights, speculator rights, etc.

Battle in the 'Grand Old Party'

Some more mainstream Republicans soon declared war against Pinkerton's New Paradigm. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Richard Darman spoke out on Nov. 16, 1990, denouncing the trend of "neo-neo-ism" and "neo-Newtism." He called the New Paradigm "a bit too pretentious for a would-be populist movement." Less than two weeks later, on Nov. 29, 1990, Congressman Gingrich demanded that Darman resign, calling him a "Republican Dukakis." The factional brawl dominated Washington political headlines. On the right, Pinkerton, Gingrich, Mississippi Sen. Trent Lott, and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp fought the centrists, led by OMB Director Darman and White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, who were trying to keep the first Bush Administration from becoming a utopian fascist nightmare.

Meanwhile, the allied "DLC moles" continued undermining the Democratic Party. James Pinkerton has told EIR that while Democratic Leadership Council officials collaborated directly with him and like-thinking Republicans through the monthly meetings of New Paradigm Society, the DLC's mafia-linked chief financier, Michael Steinhardt, would meet with Pinkerton only inside the DLC headquarters.

The DLC—acting in the name of its "think-tank," the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), which Steinhardt chaired—held a big Washington public forum jointly sponsored by the powerful rightist Heritage Foundation. James Pinkerton was the star speaker, and though both Heritage and the DLC are now closed-mouthed about the event, it apparently took place Oct. 30, 1991, at the Hyatt Hotel. The forum's reported theme, "Beyond Left and Right," is a kind of in-joke among Friedrich Nietzsche admirers, echoing his slogan, "beyond good and evil."

The Heritage Foundation's leaders worked directly with the DLC in the early 1990s to organize DLC's fundraising and polemics, as DLC founder and CEO Al From confessed in the DLC's authorized history (Reinventing Democrats, by Kenneth S. Baer).

The DLC was then backing Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton for President, since Clinton publicly endorsed their politics, while no politician in their actual inner circle had the popular appeal to win a national election. The DLC's New Democrat magazine for July 1992, outlined the reactionary program the cross-party rightist gang intended to implement in a Clinton Administration. PPI president Will Marshall wrote that "America's now predominantly suburban electorate ... does not pine for massive public works spending or urban bailouts." Democrats should appeal to suburban (read "white") biases, such as hostility to "welfare cheats." Promoting cutbacks against the poor and weak, Marshall quoted former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm: "The economy of the 1990s cannot support the dreams of the 1960s. The public policy of the world's largest debtor nation ... must be dramatically different than when it was the world's largest creditor nation with the highest rate of productivity growth." Lamm was then already notorious for remarking that the elderly should "die and get out of the way."

The DLC as Trojan Horse

Clinton delivered a shock to his DLC sponsors immediately after winning in 1992. He bluntly told an elite dinner gathering at Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham's house, "You aren't going to like what I do." Indeed, Clinton snubbed the DLC on Presidential appointments to top posts and sought to pursue the Old Democratic Paradigm.

Newt Gingrich led the rightist revolution in the 1994 elections. The DLC, disappointed in Clinton, advised Democrats to adapt to the political reality as defined by the new House Speaker Gingrich—who personally promised to imitate the French Revolutionary terrorists.

James Pinkerton pushed union-busting, privatization, and cheap labor in his book, What Comes Next: The End of Big Government and the New Paradigm Ahead, published in 1995. He complained that President Clinton had "back-burnered" DLC strategists Elaine Kamarck and William Galston; Kamarck was relegated to directing Vice President Gore's "reinventing government" initiative.

PPI Vice President Robert Shapiro (a New Paradigm Society man) praised Pinkerton's book as "the political equivalent of magic." Shapiro's boss at PPI, chairman Steinhardt, was then gearing up his effort to defeat Clinton for a second term, or failing that, to put the DLC openly behind a third party effort against the Democrats. The DLC's November 1995 New Democrat devoted its cover story to praising and excerpting the Pinkerton book, What Comes Next.

Senator Lieberman was DLC chairman in the mid-1990s. He made sharp attacks on President Clinton during the failed Republican drive to impeach the President. As Clinton's second term drew to a close, the DLC scurried to position itself for control of the post-Clinton Democratic Party. In October 2000, the DLC held a crucial fundraising event. Michael Lewan, an Enron lobbyist and the chief of staff for Lieberman's Vice Presidential race, arranged this fundraiser with representatives of Koch Industries, the oil company which co-founded the John Birch Society, founded the Cato Institute, and sponsored the Reason Foundation and much of the radical right agenda in America. Koch vice president Richard Fink went on the PPI board of directors, and poured Koch money into the DLC to make a new Democratic Party.

In recent months, we have seen Joe Lieberman and the DLC demand that their fellow Democrats prove their patriotism by surrendering to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz war agenda. And Lieberman's old comrade Newt Gingrich, now on the Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board, re-enacts his antics from the first Bush Administration: He demands Colin Powell's State Department be purged for insufficient war fervor. It's just the tired old New Paradigm.