New Democrats
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
- For the Canadian New Democratic Party, see New Democratic Party.
| It has been proposed that this article or section be merged with Democratic Leadership Council.
This request may be discussed on the article's talk page. |
The New Democrats are a loosely-organized faction within the Democratic Party who identify themselves with moderate positions on political issues, especially fiscal issues. They are often identified with the Democratic Leadership Council, which was strengthened when Ronald Reagan attracted many previously-Democratic voters in his 1980 and 1984 campaigns against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale. New Democrats saw the defeats of Carter and Mondale as proof not that the majority of the electorate in the United States had been truly converted to conservatism, but rather just that it had rejected the excesses that it had come to associate with the traditional Democratic version of liberalism. The respected opinion journal The New Republic has been associated with the movement as it generally takes moderate-to-liberal views on social issues, but was associated since the 1970s with a vigorously anti-Communist, and now anti-radical Islamist, foreign policy.
Bill Clinton is the single Democratic politician of recent years most identified with the New Democrats; his promise of welfare reform in the 1992 presidential campaign, and its subsequent enactment, were classic New Democrat positions, as was his 1992 promise of a middle-class tax cut. New Democrats tend to be less linked with labor unions than previous leadership groups within the party.
New Democrat successes under Clinton are largely regarded to be the inspiration for Tony Blair in the United Kingdom and his moderate policies, which he explicitly refers to as "New Labour."
