Current Events > A Look Inside the World of Third Way Democrats

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/on-safari-in-trumps-america/543288/
This is a bit old, but it's great. Give it a read! Here are some choice quotes:
Molly Ball

I had a very hard time with that meeting, she(Nancy Hale) finally said. The longer the meeting went on, the more it started to feel to me like just another community that had isolated itself, and it was right and everybody else wasnt, you know? The hippies should have been her kind of people, but the attitudes theyd expressed had offended her sense of the way America ought to be. She had come seeking mutual understanding, only to find that some people were not the least bit interested in meeting in the middle. And now she was at a crossroads: Would she have to revise her whole worldview to account for this troubling reality?

A farmer in the group told Third Ways eager listeners he knew exactly what was wrong with America: his fellow Americans.

Youve got all these parasites making a living off the bureaucracy, the farmer declared, like leeches pulling you down, bleeding you dry. We had been in the state for just a few hours, and already the researchers quest for mutual understanding seemed to be hitting a snag.

Others in the group, a bunch of proudly curmudgeonly older white men, identified other culprits. There were plenty of jobs, a local elected official and business owner said. But todays young people were too lazy or drug-addled to do them.

Politics, though, was not the focus of the Third Way interviewers, who believed there was more to be gained by asking neutral, open-ended questions. In accordance with Third Ways ideology, they believed that political partisanship was not most peoples primary concern. But sometimes the Wisconsinites brought up politics anyway.

The men pinned the blame for most of their problems squarely on Republicans, from Trump to Governor Scott Walker. School funding, the minimum wage, college debt, income inequality, gerrymandering, health care, union rights: It was all, in their view, the GOPs fault. A member of the bricklayers union lamented Walkers cuts to public services: If we cant help each other, he said, what are we, a pack of wolveswe eat the weakest one? Its shameful.

Isnt this underwritten by the DNC? a local cafe owner asked Watson after his just-here-to-listen opening spiel. I read somewhere youre spending $20 million, another man said. Another participant asked about corporate donors.

Im not, like, a jumping-up-and-down Berniecrat, the man said. But what you see in these congressional meetings is a refusal to even play ball with ideas considered too extreme, like single-payer health care. All these centrist ideals, he said, are just perpetuating a broken system.

The report is short, covering only three big takeaways from the seven listening sessions Third Way conducted. The first is the importance of hard work; the second is the need for a strong workforce. The third, described in a section entitled Just Get the Hell Out of My Way, is locals purported antagonism to big government.

TL;DR: A bunch of centrist Democratic operatives tour Wisconsin, find that Wisconsites don't want to come together on nebulous "common principles", decide this all confirms their worldview any way. #TheResistance