Meet another Neoconservative DLC Blueprint contributor, Tod Lindberg…

[Emit]

Tod Lindberg describes himself as a second-generation neoconservative.

He is an informal and unpaid advisor on foreign policy and national security to John McCain. He was a columnist for the Reverend Moon's Washington Times, a Contributing Editor to The Weekly Standard, editor of Policy Review, and Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Lindberg founded a newspaper in college with John Podhoretz, called Collegiate Network, where he was paid by Irving Kristol, son of Bill Kristol. Along with Will Marshall (Swamp Rat gets it), he was a signatory of more than one PNAC letter. Lindberg is also general editor (with Peter Berkowitz) of the Hoover Institution Press series “Hoover Studies in Politics, Economics, and Society.” He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. His own website can be found here.

His articles are often found at the Democratic Leadership Council's website, Blueprint: Ideas for a New Century

Much of his writing is in defense of Neoconservatism:

Neoconservatism's Liberal Legacy By Tod Lindberg

Striking a balance between freedom and equality ~snip~

Whether one wishes to call this position “neoconservative” or something else, it is both “neo” and “conservative” in the sense that what is being conserved is our liberalism — its extension in time and space. The distinction between this “neoconservative” position and a “progressive” position amounts to the weight one attaches to two sets of claims. One set, the “progressive,” manifests itself as the demand for expanded freedom or the demand for greater substantive equality in the particular case at hand (that is, in the object of a political dispute). The other set, “neoconservative,” concerns itself with whether a demand for greater freedom might impinge excessively on substantive equality or whether a demand for greater substantive equality might impinge on freedom. If neoconservatism has a claim for the superiority of its outlook, it is that the desire for freedom and the desire for equality are always present in liberal societies and liberal politics (indeed, they are the raw material of liberal society), whereas the striking of an acceptable balance between the two is not a given but a matter to be worked out by politics — a politics that can go badly wrong when the balance is wrongly struck, potentially with disastrously illiberal consequences.

~snip~

The second component was the conviction that communism was singularly evil and indeed, in the world of the Cold War, uniquely evil. Of course, the idea that communism was morally odious was hardly a neoconservative invention. “Godless communism” had been a staple of the rhetoric of the 1950s. The neoconservative moral vision was both secular and more thoroughly grounded in political theory.14 Communism was a form of totalitarianism, the assertion by the state of control over all aspects of people’s lives. Traditional authoritarian regimes, so the neoconservative argument ran, punished political dissent severely but often left open spheres of activity — for example, economic life and family life — in which people were able to act relatively freely. Totalitarian states sought to obliterate these spheres of freedom in the interest of greater control over their subjects’ lives.

It was thus possible to assert a rank order among regime types: democracy, good; authoritarian, ranging from benevolent to brutal dictatorship, not good to bad; totalitarian/communist, worst of all.15 And in the context of an expansionist Soviet Union seeking to spread “revolution” throughout Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America, this rank order led to a distinctly neoconservative formulation of grand strategy for opposing communism: The United States, for moral reasons and not merely reasons of state, should try to prevent bad regimes from becoming worse regimes, which would thereby further enhance the strategic strength of the very worst regime, the Soviet Union. This policy would necessarily entail support for certain unsavory authoritarian governments in their efforts to combat local communist insurrections (which, inevitably, traveled under the flag of national liberation movements). In its mature phase, the Reagan Doctrine16 would entail providing military and other support for armed insurrections aimed at toppling Communist governments.

A detailed critique of the neoconservative view of foreign policy is beyond my scope here. As a second-generation neoconservative myself — which is to say, one who can now look back from the vantage point of 20 or so years later upon my participation in the neoconservative intellectual scene during its (first) heyday — I would observe that the moralism of neoconservative foreign policy amounted to an overlay upon an essentially “realist” view of international relations. This “realist” grounding lent the project of reinvigorating anticommunism a tough-mindedness that I think was essential in confronting the view that Soviet communism presented no special problem in the world. But one must ask: How realistic — in the sense in which I have been praising the neoconservative reconnection with reality more broadly in this essay — was this grounding realism?

~snip~

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3436416.html


And in 2004, he writes in the Weekly Standard "The Referendum on Neoconservatism":

The Referendum on Neoconservatism
From the November 1 / November 8, 2004 issue: It's already over, and the neocons won.
by Tod Lindberg
11/01/2004, Volume 010, Issue 08 ~snip~

In the National Security Strategy and in a series of presidential speeches that historians will study for their insight long after George W. Bush and the rest of us are dead, this administration, with a little help from its friends, outlined a new strategic doctrine that is going to guide national security policy for the next 50 years, regardless of who wins the 2004 election.

More or less at a stroke, the United States made several things clear: (1) It intends to do what is necessary to remain the world's foremost military power by an order of magnitude sufficient to discourage all other states from attempting to compete militarily, thereby encouraging the peaceful resolution of disputes between states. (2) The United States will hold governments responsible for what takes place with their consent within their borders: The proposition that state support for terrorists with global reach may have regime-ending consequences will discourage states from allowing terrorists to operate. (3) The nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction is so dangerous that in certain instances, the United States will act preemptively or preventively against states rather than allowing threats to gather; this, in turn, will discourage some (though, alas, not necessarily all) states from the pursuit of such weapons. (4) The best way to secure the peace is through freedom and democracy, because free, democratic states want to live in peace with each other; the United States should therefore be at the forefront of the promotion of freedom and democracy.

... it would surely have been possible for the Democratic candidate for president in 2004 to set up the election as a referendum on the "neoconservatives"--I revert to quotation marks because I am once again speaking of the monsters of the febrile imagination of their critics.

All that would have been necessary was for the Democratic nominee to: (1) repudiate America's position of power in the world in favor of multipolarity, encouraging others to rise by reducing American military capacity and withdrawing from existing security commitments; (2) encourage Americans to come to terms with future acts of terrorism on our soil and against our interests abroad, rather than overreacting in such a way that we cause more of what we are trying to mitigate; (3) forswear all preemptive or preventive war options as violations of international law and instead warn of consequences that will follow an attack on us, assuming we can figure out who is responsible and what their address is; (4) advocate a return to the doctrine of noninterference in the internal affairs of other states, which would entail the abandonment of any effort to promote democracy in Iraq in favor of immediate withdrawal, as well as a posture of indifference toward genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the like.

~snip~

A second Bush administration will take office having had ample opportunity to learn from mistakes. But not only from mistakes. Also from its largely successful reorientation of security strategy to deal with a very serious new threat. George W. Bush may or may not win the election. If he does, it seems unlikely in the extreme that his critics, especially the most vociferous critics of the neoconservatives, will declare that they erred and that Bush's reelection constitutes vindication for the neoconservative position. They are too in love with their fear of monsters. But win or lose, the vindication of neoconservatism has already taken place, in that the Democratic candidate in 2004 has found it impossible to run for the Oval Office on a platform of its repudiation, but rather has embraced its central strategic insights.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/825cpvzf.asp?pg=1



In the Weekly Standard, he writes about liberal Democrats turning on the DLCers. This is essential reading for anyone who reads liberal blogs, runs a liberal blog, supports liberal blogs and discussion boards, or participates on liberal discussion boards or blogs:

Center Fold?
Democrats turn on their moderates.
by Tod Lindberg
08/13/2007, Volume 012, Issue 45

There's no obvious way to measure such a thing, but as a matter of intuition, you'd have to say that the most hated people in America today are sensible Democrats. The hard-core partisans of the Democratic left have never had a bigger megaphone than they now have on the Internet, and while they are united in the view that George W. Bush is public enemy No. 1, with Alberto Gonzales and Karl Rove alternating in the No. 2 slot, what really pumps up the volume is any sign of deviationism on their own side.

This is an especially acute problem for the Democratic foreign policy establishment--the people who will actually be staffing a Clinton or Obama administration at the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Pentagon. Whether you agree with them on policy or not, they are serious people who recognize they're going to have to deal with the world as it is. Unfortunately, this sensibility often runs afoul of the netroots view that the world flowed with milk and honey until Bush ruined everything.

~snip~

The policy and political headquarters for sensible Democrats has long been the Democratic Leadership Council, which was founded in response to Walter Mondale's massive defeat running as an orthodox liberal against Ronald Reagan in 1984. The DLC was closely associated with Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign as a "New Democrat"--a centrist candidate, that is, who was not beholden to the party's traditional constituencies. Only by moving to the center, such key DLC figures as Al From and Bruce Reed argued, could Democrats expect to achieve national majorities.

The DLC had its annual "National Conversation" late last month in Nashville, and the headline was who didn't show: namely, any of the candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination. Why not? Maybe because, as Noam Scheiber put it in another New York Times op ed, the DLC is now "radioactive" for the Democratic mainstream and especially its netroots agitators. Long ago, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas pronounced a fatwa on the DLC and all its works, and his hostility to any suggestion that the left wing of the party needs to tone it down a bit for national consumption is now ubiquitous.

~snip~

If Democrats conclude they don't need to reach to the center any more, they will be behaving just as foolishly as they did 14 years ago, and as House Republicans did in 2005-06, when most all the legislative action seemed focused on buttering up social conservatives. Understanding this has been the specialty of the DLC for two decades, and Democrats still need it.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/957orazf.asp


Here's an older article, posted on the DLC website, about the 'Third-Way':

The Wall Street Journal | Editorial | May 26, 1999
Why the `Third Way' Is Winning
By Tod Lindberg

~snip~

The chief theorists of the Third Way in the U.S. are the folks at the Progressive Policy Institute and the Democratic Leadership Council, with which Mr. Clinton has a long association. At an April conference that featured Messrs. Clinton, Blair, Schroeder, Kok and d'Alema, DLC President Al From characterized their common Third Way point of view: "Its first principle and enduring purpose is equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none. Its public ethic is mutual responsibility. Its core value is community. Its outlook is global, and its modern means are fostering private-sector economic growth -- today's prerequisite for opportunity for all -- and promoting and empowering government that equips citizens with the tools they need to get ahead."

~snip~

This movement on the part of the world's center-left parties is the most important political development of the decade. They have decided to bury large enough swaths of their old ideology to obtain power and govern. It is true that they have been aided in this by the success of their predecessors' conservative policies in unleashing private-sector economic growth. It is also true that they benefit from the collective outbreak of global wisdom on such matters as fiscal policy. And the end of the Soviet Union has mooted questions about whether they are fit to fight the Cold War. Most of all, these government have not been tested by a major
international crisis or even, in the case of the U.S., so much as a mild recession.

~snip~

If conservatives don't like the role Third Way politicians have assigned them, they are going to have to articulate a different one. It's probably going to have to include a sense of what government is for, a question to which conservative parties don't really have an answer now. The Third Way politicians do, and that's why they're winning.

http://www.dlc.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=811&kaid=85&subid=65

On Hillary Clinton's Iraq War Resolution vote, Lindberg writes:

~snip~

It's not just that Mrs. Clinton voted in favor of authorizing war against the Saddam regime. It's that she has refused to repudiate her vote in favor of the war, to apologize for it, to call it a mistake.

~snip~

She has said it was a mistake to believe President Bush's claims about weapons programs, which is orthodoxy among Democrats, but she is also on record about the consistency of the intelligence information from the George H.W. Bush administration through her husband's two terms to the George W. Bush administration. By the standards of her party, that's very generous to the second President Bush.

Overall, though, what she won't do is try to get right with the party base by acknowledging a mistake. Why not? Cynical explanations abound. She doesn't want to hand an opponent a flip-flop, "for the war before she was against it" opportunity. Her carefully calibrated appeal to the middle will not allow her to repudiate the vote. People would view the repudiation of her vote as a cynical political calculation, which would in turn firm up impressions of her as a cynical political calculator. Therefore, on cynical political grounds, she must not seem cynical. Cynically repudiating the vote would raise the question of whether the vote was, in the first place, a cynical political calculation.

I don't think, however, that a lens of cynicism brings sufficient clarity to the matter. That's because cynical reasons for not repudiating the vote seem to me to be far outweighed by the cynical case for doing so. And that, I'm afraid, leaves us with only one plausible explanation: Mrs. Clinton thinks her vote was right.

In other words, faced with the same information and the same decision now, she would decide the same way: in favor of authorizing the use of force, or if president, of asking for authorization.

If so, Mrs. Clinton's political problem is principle and conviction, not the opposite. The impression that she is behaving merely cynically may turn out to be her refuge from the worse problem of believing in principles out of sync with what Democrats are looking for in 2008.

http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6306287/Hillary-Clinton-s-Iraq-problem.html


Here he is interviewed by Front Page Magazine, in a discussion entitled, "How the Democrats Lost Their Way." He isn't thrilled with Hillary -- remember, he's a McCain advisor -- but gives her kudos, and thinks HRC is going to be the Democratic nominee..

~snip~

FP: So what do you make of the 2008 presidential campaign as it stands right now?

Lindberg: I think Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee. She is tough, organized, funded, and disciplined. On the GOP side, I am an informal and unpaid advisor on foreign policy and national security to John McCain, so that takes me out of the handicapping. The reason I'm with McCain, by the way, is that I think foreign policy and national security are the most important issues in 2008, and he understands them better than anybody, by dint of long experience and a clear moral vision. It's sort of an odd position to be in, but I'm an advisor on foreign policy and national security to the candidate who least needs advice on foreign policy and national security.

FP: Will the Republican nominee be able to beat Hillary? What risks face this nation, especially in terms of national security and the economy, if Hillary becomes President?

Lindberg: Some people seem to think that the Republicans haven't got a prayer for the White House in '08 because of popular opposition to the Iraq war, the spillover effect of George W. Bush's unpopularity, and various and sundry Washington scandals, especially unsavory sex and corruption in office. I don't think that's right, though. A presidential election comes down to a comparative judgment of two people, the candidates. George W. Bush was able to beat John Kerry in 2004 not because objective circumstances were favorable to Bush (they weren't), but because of John Kerry. He was just not a good candidate. People might not have thought so highly of Bush, but that's not the question. It's "compared to whom?" If Republicans nominate a formidable candidate, they have a good chance. Obviously, I think McCain would be the best choice, but he's not necessarily the only Republican who could go the distance against her.

As for the risks of a Clinton 44: First, keep your hand on your wallet. Taxes will go up, if indeed they won't go up and up and up. Second, just because Democrats have gotten a little smarter about things like guns and gay marriage, don't think they have given up their policy preferences. They'll just be looking to appoint judges who are willing to legislate the outcomes they favor from the bench.

On foreign policy and national security, the good news is that even Democrats are talking about the need for a larger military. But for way too many of them, "decisive action" and "moral clarity" are notions to be resisted as "simplistic," which raises the unfortunate prospect of sitting back and admiring the nuances while Iran gets the bomb.

~snip~

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B957E026-83A8-4FE4-B473-A06763BC61A1

edit typo

[Maestro]

1. The DLC can go to hell!

It's the DNC all the way for me. That is the part of the party that gets my money.

[Emit]

7. I think the DLC should form their own political party

and leave the Democrats alone. They could call it the Neoconservative Party.

[madrchsod]

2. if she wins the dlc takes over the party and there will be

a continuation of the neo-conservative government. nothing will change.

[DerekJ]

4. I fear that. I feat that.

:scared:

[Emit]

8. It will certainly give the DLC even more power than what they already wield.

[Swamp Rat]

3. k&r

[Emit]

5. What's with all these McCain advisors involved with the DLC?

:shrug:

[Swamp Rat]

6. Maybe they all 'save' at the same banks?

:shrug: