At the Campaign for America's Future conference last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi announced that she and other Dem leaders were going to unveil a 'new direction' for the Party. There was nothing in her remarks that was objectionable, at least not to a democratic-left listener like me. But as I read her remarks, I realized that I'd heard them somewhere before, and had a moment of deja vu. This was confirmed when a friend of mine sent me an email reminding me of a conference he and I helped organize in 1986, 20 years ago, called the New Directions conference--headed up by the sorely missed, deceased social democrat Michael Harrington, who died in 1989. There was nothing that we called for in 1986, when we brought 1000 activists together in the Washington, D.C. Convention Center, supported by at least 10 unions, the congressional populist and Black caucuses, the feminist movement and more, that couldn't be included in Pelosi's new call. We had the right program then--we were sure of it; and that program, anchored by raising the minimum wage, a national health care plan, opportunity and equality, may be the right plan now, but why then, are we still fighting the same fights 20 years later? The music is the same but the world has gotten smaller, the economy has shifted and the Dems are trying to figure out how to become a governing party. So, what went wrong these past 20 years?

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