“Don't look now, but neoconservatism is making a comeback—and not among the Republicans who have made it famous, but in the Democratic Party,” declared writer Jacob Heilbrunn in a May 28, 2006 op-ed for the Los Angeles Times. In “Neocons in the Democratic Party,” Heilbrunn argued that a new generation of Democratic “pundits and young national security experts” are trying to revive the Cold War precepts of President Harry S. Truman and apply them to the war on terror. “The fledgling neocons of the left are based at places such as the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), whose president, Will Marshall, has just released a volume of doctrine called With All Our Might: A Progressive Strategy for Defeating Jihadism and Defending Liberty … Their political champions include Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman and such likely presidential candidates as former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner and Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).”

Concluded Heilbrunn: “It is amusing to see that at the very moment when hawkish realists are trying to extirpate the neocon credo in the Republican Party, it's being revived in the Democratic Party that first brought it to life.”

PPI, founded in 1989 by Marshall and Al From, is a project of the Third Way Foundation, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization. As the think tank for the Democratic Leadership Council, the PPI says its mission “arises from the belief that America is ill-served by an obsolete left-right debate that is out of step with the powerful forces reshaping our society and economy.” PPI claims to advocate “a philosophy that adapts the progressive tradition in American politics to the realities of the information age and points to a ‘third way' beyond the liberal impulse to defend the bureaucratic status quo and the conservative bid to simply dismantle government.”

The PPI's efforts to get Democrats to be more pro-military and pro-defense were also obvious in its May 2006 book, With All Our Might. Edited by Marshall, the book contains an introduction and 14 essays on how to address “jihadist terrorism.”

The reception With All Our Might received from the neoconservative corner was, perhaps unsurprisingly, warm. In a Weekly Standard article entitled “The Loneliness of the Liberal Hawk: Dems Who Understand War, Pols Who Don't,” neocon stalwart Thomas Donnelly opined that the volume “actually represents an impressive lineup of younger defense and security intellectuals.” Book contributor Kenneth Pollack “sounds like a closet neocon,” and Jan Mazurek's essay is “even tougher on Middle East strategy than Pollack,” according to Donnelly (Weekly Standard, May 22, 2006). "