The Latest New Democratic Think Tank Is a Dead End

Donald Trump’s approval ratings are cratering^[3]; public support for his positions on crime, immigration, and the economy is underwater^[4]. The upcoming showdown over funding the government affords the Democratic Party rare leverage to marshal this discontent into palpable gains against the consolidation of MAGA authoritarianism. So, naturally, savvy Beltway Democrats have launched a policy shop to steer the party toward the right.

The new think tank, the Searchlight Institute, is the brainchild of former Senate staffer Adam Jentleson. Taking up a common plaint in the centrist consultant wing of the party, it seeks to diminish the influence of “liberal groups” in shaping Democratic priorities, the New York Times report^[5] on Searchlight’s launch notes. Jentleson insists that the Democrats’ path back to political relevance requires repudiation of liberal positions on issues like climate change and LGBTQ+ rights. “The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” he told Times reporter Reid J. Epstein. “Right now we’re pursuing every tactic imaginable except for the obvious one, which is taking positions that are more in line with the people we are trying to win over.”

Whatever else this analysis may be, it’s not exactly groundbreaking. Tacking obsessively to the right was the mission of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), founded in the 1980s to put Democratic presidents in the White House after the successive debacles of the Reagan campaigns. The DLC’s policy arm, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), translated that mandate into policy initiatives, which is how the Democrats, historically the party of the working-class voter, wound up on the vanguard of financial deregulation, the courtship of Big Tech, the rollback of the welfare state, and other unlovely agenda items for right-wing governance.

The DLC folded in the aughts, though the PPI lumbers on^[6], brandishing the self-flattering and entirely misleading slogan “radical pragmatism.” The reason the DLC closed up shop was that its mission had so completely captured the Democrats’ policy infrastructure that the group was pretty much redundant. The Brookings Institute, the Center for American Progress, the New America Foundation, and an army of pollsters and consultants^[7] all chimed in in unison behind the message that America was too deeply enmeshed in right-wing policy aims for Democrats to make any more than marginal and incremental headway. Meanwhile, notionally centrist groups such as No Labels^[8] and Third Way^[9] are all but official recruitment arms of the GOP. Within this tight cordon sanitaire, talk of sweeping universal reforms like truly universal health coverage, an aggressive wealth tax, or serious climate mitigation was mostly banished; in its place a thousand school privatization schemes, carbon-exchange markets, insurance subsidies, and small-bore tax credits bloomed.

Not coincidentally, all the policy savants and consultants in on the grift made handsome livings, and operated in a professional bubble largely impervious to the inconvenient evidence furnished by mounting, and increasingly calamitous, electoral failures. Searchlight already seems well positioned to occupy this same Goodfellas-style niche; the Times reports that its $10 million annual budget is bankrolled by “a roster of billionaire donors highlighted by Stephen Mandel, a hedge fund manager, and Eric Laufer, a real estate investor.”

What Searchlight seems to be adding to this dreary drumbeat of Beltway consensus is a superficially more confrontational rhetorical style. In his interview with the Times, Jentleson lashed out at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), whose most prominent role in Democratic Party politics was to serve as a foil for an otherwise rudderless George H.W. Bush campaign nearly 40 years ago. But in Jentleson’s overheated telling, the ACLU “did more to contribute to Trump’s victory than many conservative groups.” Then there’s the Center for American Progress, a massive sluice gate for corporate donations^[10] that briskly adopts the policy positions that come with them, which Jentleson accuses of purveying “100 percent pure uncut resistance drivel.”

Jentleson himself, though, staked out a position early in his career more than a little adjacent to the drivel he dismisses today. His 2021 book Kill Switch derided^[11] the reactionary record of the modern Senate and called for the abolition of the filibuster, and he worked with Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy group now challenging much of Trump’s second-term agenda in court. But he has followed the same Beltway career trajectory that has seen former left-leaning advocates veering right as a host of professional incentives emerged on that path—he’s a Senate-bred version of Sean McElwee or David Shor, who laid aside more intemperate activist pasts when the Hill came calling. Jentleson’s own ideological transformation seemed to occur after his stormy tenure as chief of staff for Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, who has also veered to the right after running as a left- and working-class-branded outsider (in spite of being the son of a wealthy insurance executive and graduating from Harvard Business School).

One striking irony of Jentleson’s recent transformation is that he now uses his longtime affiliation with the Senate, which he had formerly singled out as a principal obstruction to democratic governance, as his rainmaking calling card. Searchlight is named for the Nevada hometown of the late Democratic majority leader Harry Reid, who was Jentleson’s first employer on the Hill. (Though, even here, the affiliation claimed by the group doesn’t really fit its policy profile; it turns out that Reid was more aligned with the so-called liberal groups, being well ahead of most Democratic lawmakers in endorsing LBGTQ+ equality^[12] and serious climate-change mitigation^[13], in contrast to Searchlight’s agenda.)

It’s long been a sign of wised-up Hill pragmatism to advertise your hard-won bona fides as the only adult in the room—but as has been painfully clear during the Democrats’ four-decade-and-counting march toward rightward retrenchment, that reflex comes with a great many intellectual and strategic liabilities. Among other things, leaving the Democratic agenda in the care of self-styled political managers isn’t remotely consonant with the sort of mass (small-d) democratic politics essential to countering the bad-faith pseudo-populism of the MAGA right. “The Democrats have this constant desire to build something new out of something old,” says Claremont-McKenna history professor Lily Geismer, author of a critical study of the DLC and its legacy, Left Behind. “And it works from this drive to set aside the existing grassroots structure of the party—the classic case is unions—and in its place, you decide to build all these insular think tanks.” This is now the go-to model for Democratic institution-building, she says: “Right after the election, I had a conversation with someone who was trying to start a PPI-like organization. Even though this wasn’t my own politics, I told him to do what the DLC didn’t do: They didn’t build any kind of grassroots structure, or any sort of organization at the state level. They were an organization of party officials agreeing with each other.”

This supremely insider-branded talent pool has produced a “deep disconnect” between Democratic elites and the mass support they need to reverse the party’s downward slide, Geismer argues. It’s telling that former Senate staffers make up most of Searchlight’s leadership team. “That does seem like a core component here,” Geismer says. “It was the same thing with the DLC. [DLC founder and CEO] Al From was a congressional staffer. This poses an interesting question about idea-generating: With this background, you come up with solutions that mostly make sense to people invested in the status quo.”

This brand of self-inflicted intellectual sclerosis is now so ingrained in the Democratic Party’s leadership caste that it’s long past time to examine just where it comes from, and why it endures. “I think existentially, this project is a very stupid thing to do,” says Gabe Garbowit, cofounder of the Citizens’ Impeachment campaign and himself a former communications staffer for Minnesota Democratic Senator Tina Smith. “The eerie part of all this for me is that we’re living in the context of Trump trying to murder everybody in Congress, and everybody who’s influential in the Democratic Party cannot stop humming the tune that in order to succeed, we have to come together with this party.”

Indeed, the right-leaning feints that have been the stock in trade for the Democrats’ consultant class work chiefly to enable a MAGAfied executive branch explicitly designed to exploit all the weaknesses of go-along, get-along centrism. So what has, for decades, been packaged as insider savvy in the sanctums of Democratic power now seems like so much whistling in the dark. Just consider Searchlight’s own model of change, which is a rehash of the Yglesias/Shor theory of “popularism”—a centrist course correction aimed at winning over moderate swing voters to soft-focus policy fixes polled within an inch of their lives, in a negative-partisanship climate of mounting polarization that has rendered such voters a distinctly endangered species. “This is an endemic problem of Democratic consultant proposals,” Geismer says. “They all hinge on an idealized moderate voter, but this is not even a real person that’s out there.”

It’s not as though Democrats have shunned centrist candidates in their banner presidential campaigns: They’ve run them, alongside enthusiastic musterings of donor cash and think-tank messaging, over the past nine cycles. Over the past three, they’ve lost twice to the clownish and demagogic figure of Donald Trump, improbably made over into a tribune of economic populism as he lords over tax cuts for his ruling-class peers and the conversion of government into a rolling bazaar of Christian-nationalist graft.

Yet instead of that record provoking any serious introspection, the same money players and hack messaging merchants continue to insist that the party must under no conditions consider ambitious plans to reverse the collapse of the American political economy into oligarchic squalor. No, the challenge ahead is to pursue ever more finely calibrated feints rightward, to the point where, as voters desperately try to detect a principled stand or a remnant of fighting spirit in FDR’s party, they’re given just more triangulation in a vacuum: Let them eat targeted tax credits. That is not rhetorical hyperbole; it is, rather, the explicit strategy adopted by party leaders^[14] gearing up for the battle over a government shutdown at the end of the month. It’s also the dead-end reasoning that shapes absurdist displays of phony savvy like Ezra Klein’s recent call^[15] for Democrats to recruit anti-choice candidates for statewide office—in states that have already endorsed ballot initiatives to protect reproductive freedom.

All these absurdities are ultimately rooted in the folkways of the cluttered terrarium known as Capitol Hill. Once a Democratic knowledge worker is pressed into service there, it soon becomes clear that the centrist boondoggle is the only game in town. “I was shocked when I got to the Hill about how little strategic thinking there was. There really is almost no space for dissenting thoughts,” Garbowit says. The cumulative effect of this insular and cliquish outlook is a professional culture overrun with perverse incentives—of the most lucrative kind. “Because of the center of gravity, you have to be accepted by people within the system,” Garbowit says. “Then there’s a path forward. If you want to do this career as a stable thing, you’re going to end up having some people paying you money to say completely outrageous things. You can find a lot of people in DC who talk that lingo, but it’s a totally detrimental, awful thing for the country.”

A key component of this argot is bespoke polling numbers—surveys commissioned by party insiders and consultants to ward political leaders off the supposition that they need to alter their thinking or policy options in any fundamental way. “It’s like this complicated ritual to use science to prove the points that a poll seems to establish are valid,” he says. “But there’s no questioning of what happened. At one polling briefing, I remember asking about the underlying assumptions that shaped the findings. The briefer actually turned to the campaign manager and asked if I belonged in the meeting.”

Another former Hill operative, who requested anonymity to speak freely, recounts how this willful state of ignorance creates truly demented policy thinking. “There was a meeting about creating a communications plan to attack Elon Musk,” the staffer recalls. That seemed reasonable enough on the face of things; yet when the meeting convened, it turned out that the actual brief was to drive Musk further to the right—a feat that seemed both mathematically impossible and morally bankrupt. Yet, in the grand Hill tradition, the ultimate prize was a recondite policy objective; the idea was to expand the market for electric vehicles like the ones Musk manufactured by enlisting more hard-right consumers under Musk’s crazed ideological-cum-persecution fantasies. “Someone said to me afterward that Yglesias wrote that,” the staffer recalls. “That shows just how important that kind of stuff is.” Again, however, the broader trend line in the actual political news cycle was unmistakable: “At that point, it was quite clear what direction Elon was going. So the whole thing was like this gambit from people who want to feel like they’re in control of the situation.”

This will-to-narrative control is indeed a prime directive for the centrist power elite, as Adam Jentleson demonstrated the weekend after Searchlight’s launch was announced. In a convoluted set of spats on Musk’s social media platform, X, he offered a delusional account of the origins of the New Deal. In Jentleson’s telling, FDR’s appeasement of the Democratic Party’s powerful segregationist wing played an equally decisive role as his embrace of “economic populism.” That’s the polar opposite of what political history shows. FDR secured an historic surge in African American support during his 1936 reelection campaign, which was a referendum on the New Deal, despite his courtship of Southern Democrats—as a corps of patient online interlocutors pointed out. Yet Jentleson continued digging in^[17], with an unhinged determination to make Roosevelt’s shabby capitulation a savvy Sistah Souljah moment avant la lettre. This is the kind of policy insight that now commands major outlays of cash and clout in and around Capitol Hill—and it is both historically bankrupt and morally incoherent. For all its hectically self-advertised brashness and acuity, Searchlight is but another grim Beltway instance of the blind leading the blind.

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