As most of you have probably already heard, after twenty five years of – well, take your pick:

1.) Helping the Democratic Party reinvent itself for the 21st century
2.) Moving the Democratic Party towards the “center” of American politics
3.) Shaping the Democratic policy agenda to be more pro-business and market-oriented, or
4.) Whoring out America’s last great political party to our overlords in the corporate kleptocracy

the Democratic Leadership Council is closing their doors this month.

It seems like the moment demands a more dramatic denouement. You know, a bittersweet voice-over where the narrator says “And just like that, they walked out of our lives forever.” Or perhaps Al From turning towards the camera and muttering “You Dirty Fucking Hippies™ won’t have the DLC to kick around anymore!”

Alas, the demise of the Left’s great policy Nemesis doesn’t feel like a demise at all. As I and others remarked when the news came out, the DLC doesn’t need to exist anymore; their policy agenda and that of the Democratic Party as a whole are now entirely indistinguishable. Rather than a funeral for the organization, they’re probably holding a retirement party, complete with a “Mission Accomplished!” banner.

Earlier today, Ed Kilgore published his Requiem For The DLC in The New Republic. Kilgore, the DLC’s long-time policy director up until 2006, has always struck me as one of the group’s few somewhat-convincing apologists (although he’d no doubt chafe at that term). He’s not a rigid ideologue and unlike so many of his colleagues he seems to bear no ill-will towards the Left’s activist base. I thought he deserved a hearing. And so:

[T]he DLC was never the ideological or political monolith that its enemies—or even its friends—sometimes imagined. Yes, it was partially financed by corporate money (mainly because corporations wanted to hedge their partisan bets, and because the DLC was at least friendly to them), and it undoubtedly went far over the top in celebrating the “New Economy,” along with the deregulatory demands of the tech industry and its financial allies. But it also pioneered attacks on “corporate welfare” in the federal budget and tax code, opposed state-level tax giveaways as an economic-development tool, and opposed most of corporate America’s legislative priorities (other than on trade policy), most notably the Bush tax cuts and the health care industry’s cherished Medicare prescription drug benefit. Yes, the DLC fought with the labor movement over trade policy, but it also supported the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), which could not have pleased corporate donors, and, on one occasion, PPI’s Will Marshall co-authored an economic policy manifesto with American Prospect editor Bob Kuttner. And yes, the DLC often scourged Democrats for appearing to be weak on defense, and it became too closely associated with the Iraq war (though it quickly split with George W. Bush’s policies on Iraq after the invasion). But DLC founder Sam Nunn led the Democratic opposition to Operation Desert Storm, and many elected officials associated with the DLC opposed the 2003 war from the get-go. The DLC’s reputation for “Republican Lite” policy ideas was never that well-merited: At a time when these ideas were outside even the Democratic mainstream, the group came out for public financing of congressional elections and GLBT rights.

As you can see, Kilgore offers for our consideration quite a few examples of the DLC taking laudable, progressive-friendly positions. And there’s more in the article. See for yourself.

The problem I have with Kilgore’s defense is that his list of pretty trees obscures the policy forest that the DLC led the Democratic party deeper and deeper into over the course of their existence. They may have taken a smart stand here or made a constructive point there, but the greatest effect I see them as having had on the party is one of first re-orienting and then greatly constraining the spectrum of “acceptable” policies that Democrats could advance.

Under the DLC’s waxing influence – and cowed by the Reagan Right’s relentless anti-government PR campaign – the party of the New Deal and the Great Society forsook their legacy. They embraced a new model of governance where any idea that wasn’t “business-friendly” and market-driven was taken off the table before debate even began. The notion that government could do big things – directly, that is, bypassing the marketplace – was consigned to the dustbin of American history almost overnight.

The past two and a half decades are littered with examples of this sort of thinking among Democratic policy makers, but there’s no more perfect example than the demise of the Public Option in the recent healthcare reform debate. From the very start the single payer option – long a dream of liberal activists and a model that has been shown to work quite effectively elsewhere – was ruled out. The idea of expanding Medicare to cover more Americans was likewise shunted aside. Instead, the Democratic Party assembled a policy framework from pieces proposed by conservatives over the years: An individual mandate, means-tested subsidies, regional exchanges, and targeted regulation of a wholly-private insurance marketplace.

Well, wholly private except for one little detail: the Public Option, wherein the federal government would create and run a plan that would compete on a level playing field with private insurers. Surely that would offend no one. Surely, just that one little nod to the not-for-profit, public-spirited approach, that one spot on the policy map – our “Otisburgh” if you will – would be an acceptable part of the mix.

Sadly, no. Late in the debate, despite protestations on its behalf from the president himself, the Public Option got kicked to the curb. And whose boot did the kicking? Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman: Erstwhile Democrat, ostentatious moderate, and, after Bill Clinton, the greatest poster boy the Democratic Leadership Council had ever produced.

The Public Option – the one vehicle which would have allowed the government to act directly in the insurance marketplace as part of the solution – simply Could Not Be Allowed.

This, to me, is the paradigmatic example of world we live in now, of the policy landscape the DLC has left the Democratic Party, its supporters, and indeed all Americans to inhabit. The wisdom of the market is always to be preferred to the wisdom of public servants. Any need worth meeting must be passed through the hands of the for-profit marketplace. Government, if we allow it to intervene at all, can only set rules and boundaries; it is no longer allowed to be an actor in its own right, on our behalf.

It’s an impoverished set of tools they leave us to match an impoverished vision of America – an America where we’re nothing but individuals in one great market, each acting to maximize our own advantage. Homo-consumerus, as it were. Thanks to the blinkers the DLC put on that Democratic Donkey, this vision is no longer cherished by the libertarian right alone. It’s the way both parties see things. It permeates the language leaders on both sides of the aisle employ.

I was struck, after Obama’s latest State of the Union speech, by this acidic summarization of his word’s by Slate’s Tom Scocca:

[W]hether he was capitulating to the plutocracy or trying to co-opt it, Obama spoke largely in the bleak and amoral ideological language of Stage IV metastatic global capitalism—America and Americans are bound by necessity and duty to “invest,” to “compete,” to “win,” to abandon the outmoded notion of a fair paycheck for a fair day’s work and to give their lives over to innovation and entrepreneurship and risk-taking in a ceaseless global struggle to become the exploiters rather than the exploited. To Win the Future.

Harsh words, to be sure, but as I see it totally justified. Ironically, given Obama’s now infamous invocation of the challenge of Sputnik and the space race, what I heard echoed from the presidential podium wasn’t “Ask not what your country can do for you” but rather “Who moved my cheese?” And if you’ve ever sat through that soul-crushing half-hour of animation, you know the message: Get crackin’, bitches, because you’re on your own.

That’s the language, and the reality, of the new policy landscape the DLC-ified Democratic Party inhabits. A reality where the government is no longer a direct actor but merely a referee and a cheerleader, and thus in no position to offer aid or comfort to a citizenry that’s been left to sink or swim in the all-encompassing sea of the market.