September 23, 2019 | 19
B
y now, the shape of the democratic party’s presidential primary is clear:
Joe Biden remains the front-runner, but his lead is narrowing as his campaign
runs on the fumes of nostalgia while Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren nip
at his heels. Biden’s campaign is idiosyncratically personal, emphasizing the
former vice president’s friendship with Barack Obama. Sanders and Warren, by
contrast, have been running the most ideas-fueled campaigns in living memory.
Whoever wins the nomination, Sanders and Warren are now undeniably the pacesetters for the party. Re-
sponding 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 the policy arms race, with candidates trying to top one an-
other 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, free public college, statehood for DC and Puertopaign. [Yet] there is almost total disjunction between
those things and the...progressive policy-making ap-
paratus that you...imagine would staff a Democratic
presidential administration,” Steinbaum told me.
Mark Schmitt, the director of the political reform
program at New America, is more muted but ac-
knowledged 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 Every-
one 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.”
Matt Bruenig runs a crowdfunded dem-
ocratic socialist think tank called the Peo-
ple’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 compa-
nies such as the Tennessee Valley Authority
and the Power Marketing Administrations
to produce renewable energy, an idea sup-
ported by the PPP.
Like 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.”
The Tax Policy Center has praised proposals from
Cory Booker and Harris. The Roosevelt Institute
backed Warren’s Accountable Capitalism Act, which
would bring workers into corporate boardrooms, in-
cluding the idea of reserving 40 percent of corporate
board seats for workers. (In Europe, where codeter-
mination has a longer history, workers usually get half
the seats at the table.) The Roosevelt Institute alsoRS
“Think tanks
want to be
ahead of
the curve,
thinking
about what
we should
be doing.
Funding
often makes
it difficult to
do that.”
—Mark Schmitt,
New AmericaILLUSTRATION BY ERIC HANSONRico, and even Supreme Court expansion. It’s telling
that Warren has become a leading contender with the
catchphrase “I have a plan for that.” Democratic vot-
ers seem positively hungry for plans.
Yet 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 Brook-
ings Institution, Demos, and the Roosevelt Institute
have had little impact on the campaign sea-
son. 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 cam-
paign proposals.
If the 2019 Democratic Party has become
caught up in a dizzying profusion of new
ideas and possibilities, the think tanks have re-
mained the wallflowers at the dance, grumpily
standing in the corner, staring at their feet.
“Is the Green New Deal biting off too
much?” asked a Brookings podcast. CAP’s
Medicare Extra plan is clearly meant to be a
moderate alternative to Sanders’s Medicare
for All bill. Meanwhile, Demos warned that
canceling all student debt “would increase
the wealth gap between white and black
households.”
Marshall 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 contem-
porary think tanks at a time when policy boldness is
urgently needed.
“On the one hand, you have robust policy debate as
part of the 2020 Democratic primary nomination cam-JEET HEER