Perhaps one of Carter's smartest advisors

and one of my alma mater's smartest professors, Alfred Kahn is worried about the big crack opening up in the middle of his party (via Glenn Reynolds):

The assumption of Democratic control of Congress last year and the probability that its majority will be increased by this year's elections portends a growing, deeply troubling ideological split within its ranks, already visible, on matters of economic policy generally and regulatory policy specifically - between the more radical (and at the same time reactionary) populists, who label themselves Progressives, and the 20th century liberals, who have dominated in the formulation of their party's economic programs for the last three-quarters century.

[I examine] the economic issues on which the two are likely to diverge, defending and proposing policies consistent with historical 18th through 20th century liberalism:

• international trade policy, in which the Progressives demonstrate a formidable misinterpretation of our huge trade deficits and insufficient appreciation of the major contribution of retaliatory beggar-my-neighbor policies to intensifying the Great Depression of the 1930's;

• threatened recartelization of industries deregulated in the 1970's and 80's - such as the airlines, trucking, and telecommunications;

• recourse to wage and price controls rather than monetary policy as a curb on inflation;

• recourse to concerted anti-competitive restrictions or rationing rather than market pricing as a remedy for congestion, and

• proposed laws imposing network neutrality obligations on providers of access to the Internet.

UPDATE: Roger Clegg's reporting unfortunately bolsters Kahn's worry (via Greg Mankiw):

Now that the excitement of Super Tuesday has passed, we should remember the kinds of policies and principles at stake, Exhibit A: three pieces of legislation pending in Congress that would dramatically increase the liability of private companies for alleged acts of employment discrimination.

The first would resurrect the discredited idea of "comparable worth." The second would add various sexual orientations to the classifications protected from employment discrimination. The third is a plaintiffs' bar wish list, aimed mostly at overturning cases it lost in the Supreme Court.

President Ronald Reagan correctly called comparable worth "a cockamamie idea." A great lesson of economic theory, not to mention historical experience, is that government-set wages and prices not only curtail freedom, but lead to shortages, surpluses and market disruptions.

In addition, this [third] bill would make it easier to bring and win "disparate impact" lawsuits under a variety of statutes, including Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Disparate impact claims need not allege that the criteria an employer uses to hire workers are discriminatory on their face, or discriminatorily applied, or adopted with discriminatory intent. Disproportionate results are enough.

The threat of such lawsuits not only decreases productivity by pressuring private (and public) entities to abandon perfectly legitimate selection criteria, but also encourages the use of surreptitious quotas. Both of these outcomes, needless to say, are perfectly fine with the civil rights lobby and its lawyers.