Defending the rich and blaming the Left is a recurring theme for Smith. It’s gotten Democrats nowhere.
U.S. Representative Adam Smith, of Washington’s 9th Congressional District, believes the Democratic Party’s brand is “broken.” He’s right. He helped break it, and he’s continuing to break it.
Since Donald Trump’s narrow victory last November, Smith has been busy criticizing the party he’s helped lead for nearly three decades. Smith seems to believe that Democrats have moved too far left to win. In a recent New Yorker interview, Smith claimed that Democrats “can’t govern” because they’ve focused on “concepts like ‘settler colonialism’ instead of on more immediate problems in people’s everyday lives.”
Smith’s purported concern for everyday people hasn’t stopped him from rubbing shoulders with the rich and their proxies. In his New Yorker interview, Smith praised the work of Christopher Rufo, a billionaire-backed bigot who falsely accused African and Haitian immigrants of eating Americans’ pets. Smith also recently “ripped” his fellow Democrats during an appearance on a podcast hosted by Brandi Kruse, who voted for Trump and serves as an “ambassador” for Project 42 — the billionaire-funded campaign to repeal Washington’s popular capital gains tax.
During this media tour, Smith has condemned a vague group he describes as a radical “new left,” who, in his telling, have promoted “a series of policies that have completely and utterly failed.”
Smith’s comments about the “new left” imply that he was part of an “old left,” but he’s only ever served old money. Smith has spent his entire political career aligned with the New Democrats, a uniquely destructive Democratic faction whose spectacular policy failures are directly responsible for the party’s current toxicity.
The New Democrats emerged from the political turbulence of the 1960s and 70s. President Johnson’s Great Society — a halting attempt to broaden the Whites-only New Deal to communities of color — had crumbled in the face of widespread resistance from local governments dominated by wealthy homeowners and chambers of commerce.
Harvard historian Elizabeth Hinton, in From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, explains that early Great Society programs recognized a simple truth: poverty is political. Poor neighborhoods were poor because they were deliberately stripped of their wealth, denied access to services, exploited, and even destroyed outright by both hostile, unrepresentative governments and powerful corporations.
Ending poverty, then, required empowering working people to fight back through, in the words of one federal handbook, “autonomous and self-managed organizations which are competent to exert political influence on behalf of their own self-interest.” This meant anything from voting to “protests, rent strikes, and sit-ins.”
These limited attempts to empower working Americans produced a massive, multi-front backlash from powerful corporations and wealthy individuals. One front was electoral politics, where the wealthy marginalized pro-labor, pro-civil rights candidates and instead promoted the New Democrats — including Adam Smith.
The New Democrats’ pitch was simple: to win, Democrats needed to embrace big money. New Democrats often traced their origin to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide over Walter Mondale, arguing that Mondale lost because he’d been too beholden to unions and civil rights activists. Instead, Democrats should abandon working class voters and embrace policies popular with upper-middle-class professionals: deregulation, tax cuts, free trade, increased military spending, and privatizing Medicare and Social Security.
New Democrats turned their rhetoric into reality by aggressively courting corporate donations — including thousands of dollars from the far-right Koch Brothers — which they used to “assure legislators that business groups would replace campaign contributions from labor” and other traditional Democratic constituencies. The New Democrats were proudly elitist. Unlike the unions and activists they disparaged, New Democrats never had thousands of active supporters. They did, however, have millions of corporate dollars.
Smith began his political career as an outspoken New Democrat. In a revealing 2001 interview with the American Prospect, a liberal magazine, Smith argued that Democrats should avoid differentiating themselves too aggressively from the Bush Administration.
“It’s easier to draw a good contrast if you take the approach that on every issue, Bush is kowtowing to the corporations, that he’s in the pocket of pharmaceutical companies, that he’s in the pocket of big oil,” Smith told the American Prospect. “Too many Democrats want to say, vote for me because Exxon is screwing you, Chase Manhattan’s screwing you.”
Instead, Smith argued, Democrats should adopt more Republican policies, especially privatizing Medicare.
The New Democrats came to dominate the Democratic Party, though the label eventually became mildly politically toxic. New Democrats, in one form or another, have been on every Democratic presidential ticket since 1972. Both Jimmy Carter and, ironically, Walter Mondale, were early adopters of New Democrats’ pro-corporate, anti-union, anti-activist strategy. They were followed by Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
While some of these leaders rejected New Democratic orthodoxy, perhaps none more so than Joe Biden, the faction’s hold on the party remained secure.
New Democrats, including Chuck Schumer and, of course, Adam Smith, became prominent Democratic Congressional leaders. When New Democratic candidates lost, as they frequently did, New Democrats always had the same answer: they were too leftwing — too close to unions and activists.
Under New Democrat leadership, Democrats minimized their differences with Republicans and embraced a sweeping series of policies that, to borrow Smith’s words, “completely and utterly failed”: job-destroying free trade agreements, the wars in Iraq — which Smith strongly supported — and Afghanistan, ineffective healthcare reform, financial deregulation, the resulting 2008 financial crisis, politically toxic bank bailouts, mass incarceration, and invasive government surveillance.
The bill for these failures came due during Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. Harris’ messaging had all the hallmarks of a New Democratic strategy, from an economic message approved by powerful corporate donors to conflict with unions to cozy relationships with prominent Bush-era Republicans — even Iraq-War-architect Dick Cheney. Voters abandoned by Harris decided to abandon her, and the New Democrats gave us the second Trump Administration.
New Democrats’ records have been no better at the local level. The archetypal New Democrat local official was Rahm Emanuel, who served in the Obama White House before becoming Mayor of Chicago. Emanuel spent his tenure closing public schools, imposing regressive taxes, and defending a violent police department. Emanuel’s New Democrat strategy hollows out local governments, leaving them incapable of providing basic services — incapable, in Smith’s words, of governing — and further tarnishing the Democratic brand.
Adam Smith did, eventually, abandon some, though not all of the most toxic elements of the New Democratic brand. His co-sponsorship of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal was enough to convince one local commentator to describe him, incorrectly, as “pretty left-leaning,” though The Stranger’s grudging 2022 endorsement acknowledged that Smith did “nothing meaningful to move those bills.” But Smith’s forays into local politics show that he remains, at heart, a New Democrat.
Smith has relentlessly supported Emanuel-style, New Democrat governance in Seattle. Disturbingly, he appears to have embraced local Republican City Attorney Ann Davison, who joined the GOP during Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign and has spent her tenure prosecuting activists while allowing other cases to pile up.
Most tellingly, though, Adam Smith recently endorsed Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson, the archetype of ineffective New Democratic local governance. Nelson has failed to pass any substantive legislation and supports slashing critical services to avoid taxing Seattle’s 54,000 liquid millionaires. Nelson also opposed the popular Proposition 1A, which created a modest payroll tax to fund mixed-income housing, by promoting Proposition 1B, which did nothing to address Seattle’s housing crisis.
Smith’s alliances with unpopular local leaders – and outspoken bigots – aren’t surprising because he lacks strong ties to his extremely diverse district, which includes much of Southeast Seattle and the Central District. More than 80% of Smith’s campaign contributions come from outside his district; nearly 60% come from outside Washington State.
Instead of cultivating close ties with his constituents, Smith — true to his New Democrat origins — cultivates strong ties with weapons manufacturers. One of his major financial supporters is Palantir, a global surveillance corporation whose software facilitates ICE deportations. Palantir’s chairman, Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor who does not believe “freedom and democracy are compatible.” On December 7, 2024, Smith took a break from disparaging Democratic activists to enthusiastically argue that both Palantir and Elon Musk’s SpaceEx should receive more government contracts.
Smith has argued, during his anti-Democrat media tour, that he’s speaking truth to power and pushing back against unpopular policies. But this conflict is about something deeper than policy: it’s about credibility. Smith and his fellow New Democrats have taken so many contradictory stances over the years – privatizing Medicare before preserving it, invading Iraq before supporting withdrawal, crushing unions before reluctantly supporting them – that even lifelong Democrats no longer trust them.
The New Democrats have only done one thing consistently: favor the wealthy. They will tarnish any policy they adopt.
Smith is not speaking truth to power. He’s doing what New Democrats have always done: cultivating ties with wealthy donors while scapegoating an amorphous, powerless leftist bloc for the failures of party leaders — leaders like him. Smith is right that Democrats can’t govern, he’s just blaming the wrong Democrats.
The blame should, of course, begin with powerful, long-serving Democrats, including Smith, who have failed to govern for decades, endorsed failed local politicians, and fought to block new, talented leaders from climbing the party ladder. Unfortunately, Smith refuses to help fix the Democratic Party he helped break. He doesn’t deserve another chance.
Austin Field (Guest Contributor)
Austin Field is a combat veteran, an attorney, and a resident of Washington’s 9th Congressional District. The views expressed are his own.
