Whoever wins the nomination, Sanders and Warren are now undeniably the pacesetters for the party. Responding to a Democratic electorate that has been radicalized by Donald Trump and is still smarting from the 2008 recession, Warren and Sanders have yanked the conversation—and the party—sharply to the left. The upshot has been a Democratic Party that is more willing to argue over radical ideas than any other time since the days of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Nor are Sanders and Warren alone.
Politicians often deemed moderate such as Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris have joined, with candidates trying to top one another with their competing plans to remake America. Suddenly the political conversation is dominated by ideas like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, student debt relief, statehood and,. It’s telling that Warren has become a leading contender “I have a plan for that.” Democratic voters seem positively hungry for plans. 2Yet the new hunger for policies hasn’t been a boon to the outfits that traditionally provide Democratic candidates with their ideas. With a few exceptions, liberal and centrist think tanks such as the Center for American Progress (CAP), New America, the Brookings Institution, Demos, and the Roosevelt Institute have had little impact on the campaign season. And when these influential think tanks have made nods at the big policy debates within the Democratic Party, they’ve often done so in the spirit of hold-your-horses caution, with quibbles about feasibility, or by struggling to play catch-up with campaign proposals.
3If the 2019 Democratic Party has become caught up in a dizzying profusion of new ideas and possibilities, the think tanks have remained the wallflowers at the dance, grumpily standing in the corner, staring at their feet. “Is the Green New Deal biting off too much?” a Brookings podcast.
CAP’s is clearly meant to be a moderate alternative to Sanders’s Medicare for All bill. Meanwhile, Demos that canceling all student debt “would increase the wealth gap between white and black households.” 5Marshall Steinbaum, an economist who teaches at the University of Utah and was previously employed by the Roosevelt Institute, has written a paper that directly refutes this claim. He found that student debt relief was not racially or economically regressive and actually reduced racial wealth inequality. Beyond his specific critique of one bit of policy, he has a larger quarrel with what he sees as the timidity of contemporary think tanks at a time when policy boldness is urgently needed. Mark Schmitt, the director of the political reform program at New America, is more muted but acknowledged that the big think tanks haven’t kept pace with the political conversation. “There’s a lot of think-tanky gentle criticism of the free college and student loan forgiveness ideas. Some of the think tanks have aligned on Medicare for Everyone Who Wants It rather than Medicare for All,” he observed.
“The think tanks aren’t out ahead of the candidates in the way you’d expect them to be.” 8Matt Bruenig runs a crowdfunded democratic socialist think tank called the People’s Policy Project, which Steinbaum and Schmitt praise for its innovative proposals—some of which appear to have been picked up by the Sanders campaign. A cornerstone of Sanders’s version of the Green New Deal is using existing government companies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Power Marketing Administrations to produce renewable energy, an idea by the PPP. 9Like Steinbaum and Schmitt, Bruenig said the big think tanks are mostly sitting out the far-reaching policy debates of the moment.
“If there is a new thing coming, it’s got legs, and it’s popular, usually you try and get your stuff under that heading,” Bruenig said. “You haven’t really seen that.
It’s a little bit strange.” 10The Tax Policy Center has from Cory Booker and Harris. The Roosevelt Institute Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which would bring workers into corporate boardrooms, including the idea of reserving 40 percent of corporate board seats for workers. (In Europe, where codetermination has a longer history, workers usually get half the seats at the table.) The Roosevelt Institute has pioneered a structuralist critique of corporate power that has wide resonance. It also houses the Great Democracy Initiative, which can be seen as a storehouse of Warren-friendly ideas. Sanders gets some of his sharpest talking points about inequality from the Institute for Policy Studies, a more radical outfit that is usually ignored by the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Still, none of these candidates are to big think tanks as Obama and Hillary Clinton were.
When it seemed Clinton was heading to victory in 2016, it was common to speak of CAP’s Neera Tanden as. It’s unclear that Tanden—or any other think tank head—has the ear of candidates in 2019 in quite the same way. 12“CAP was the Democratic Party’s brain from its founding in 2003 until 2016,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute. “If you wanted to get something heard on the Hill or you wanted to get it heard in the Obama White House, you would do it through CAP.” Those organizations no longer play so central a role.
“What has happened is that it’s fragmented. You’ve seen this breakdown of a kind of a consensus.” 13. The disconnect between the most adventurous candidates for the Democratic nomination and the think tank world could pose a real problem if, as seems quite possible, Sanders or Warren becomes president.
Although think tanks are nongovernmental organizations, they’ve been since at least Woodrow Wilson’s administration. Think tanks provided essential road maps for almost all modern presidents with a transformative legacy, be it Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson, Ronald Reagan, or Obama. These leaders not only took policy ideas from think tanks; they also recruited key staffers. 14If Democratic think tanks remain out of sync with the nominee’s policy preferences, this could hobble a future administration. The current disconnect also raises some pressing questions: Why are think tanks keeping their distance from the rambunctious debates in the run-up to the Democratic primaries? Is the reliance on big donors keeping think tanks from moving left? Game plans: Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have looked outside traditional liberal think tanks to develop their policy platforms.
(AP / Paul Sancya)Like the Democratic Party as a whole, the major think tanks remain haunted by the divisive 2016 primary battle between Clinton and Sanders. Steinbaum said he believes that these think tanks came to regret their closeness to Clinton, since it fed divisions in their organizations and in the Democratic Party.
“Think tanks were on Team Clinton in 2016 and in retrospect think that was a big problem,” he told me. “The reaction to that has been ‘In 2020 we will not pick sides, no matter what.’” 16Schmitt suggested that simply for pragmatic reasons, the high-profile think tanks don’t want to align themselves with any candidate as closely as they did with Clinton. “Whoever is going to be the president, you need to keep that open line that you don’t have if you stake yourself out,” he said. 17 Related Article. David KlionThis political timidity goes hand in hand with the caution that Schmitt sees among funders, notably big foundations. “Think tanks want to be ahead of the curve, thinking about what’s the next issue, what we should be doing,” he told me.
World Of Tanks Full Game
“Funding often makes it difficult to do that. Decent, well-meaning foundations are slow-moving.” His adage is that “foundations are two years behind, so the funding tends to be two years behind an issue.” Foundations, according to him, started paying for research into financialization and Wall Street regulations only in 2010, two years after the crash of 2008—and four years after the policies would have done the most good. 18A more cynical interpretation is that big donors aren’t just slow but actively block good policy. 19Though the phrase “think tank” was coined in 1958 and took its current connotation in the 1960s, the institutions it describes date back to the early 20th century, a period when, as now, America was grappling with runaway inequality and a ruthless, unchecked capitalism. Early think tanks (such as Brookings, which traces its roots to 1916) were geared toward overcoming partisan and class divides by offering putatively disinterested expert analysis. This ideal of think tanks as unbiased institutions never described reality—and became especially far from the mark when the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation became the shock troops of the American right, laying the groundwork for the Reagan revolution. The liberal think tanks that emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s (CAP, New America, Demos) modeled themselves in part on the ideological think tanks of the right, hoping to fill the same agenda-setting role for Democrats that AEI and Heritage have for Republicans.
21But as happens so often in America, the left only imperfectly mirrored the right: The wealthy funders on the right were all aboard for an extremist agenda, happy to fund nonsensical nostrums like,. By contrast, liberal donors have been closer to the political center and prefer to fund think tanks that work toward producing consensus. In that sense, liberal think tanks still adhere to the spirit of the original think tanks—wary of partisanship and eager for policies that can win bipartisan support. 22“In order to qualify yourself for that kind of foundation money, you have to not ruffle feathers,” Steinbaum said. He cited the Economic Security Project, co-chaired by Facebook founder Chris Hughes.
According to Steinbaum, that initiative has gotten think tanks talking about the, which he describes as “total wonkish meaninglessness.” He said he fears that think tanks, are too prone to esoteric schemes that please the superrich but have no political constituency. 23 Related Article.