The Democrats’ Project 2029 Is Doubling Down On Failure

The Democrats’ Project 2029 takes up the unique strategy of getting the very people who drove their party into the disastrous rut it is now stuck in to come up with the ideas that will get it out.

By Branko Marcetic, Jacobin

For anyone hoping Kamala Harris’s disastrous 2024 loss would make the Democratic Party drastically change direction, the bad news can be summed up in two words: Project 2029.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Democrats are planning their own version of the right-wing policy blueprint that is the driving engine of Donald Trump’s presidency, which they’ll roll out piecemeal each quarter for the next two years in one of the party’s intellectual organs, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. The man leading the effort is also that journal’s founder and coeditor: Andrei Cherny, a New Democrat wunderkind and (briefly) former Arizona Democratic party chair, who claims to have put together a team that’s “the Avengers of public policy.”

But based on the names we know so far, Cherny’s team is less the Avengers and more the Great Lakes Avengers — the hapless joke team of uselessly powered “heroes” who do more dying than saving the day. The Project 2029 brain trust now tasked with saving the Democratic Party is quite literally composed of the same line-up of people who brought the party to its knees in the first place, handing Donald Trump power not once, but twice.

The Democratic Party’s defeat was born of a combination of a decades-long rejection of working-class politics, corporate influence that has captured the party, and a foreign policy hawkishness out of step with a war-weary American public. But it seems Project 2029 is less about reckoning with this reality and more, as Semafor’s Dave Weigel put it, putting out “a Dem[ocratic] message disconnected from left-wing groups,” with one person who’s involved texting him that “the groups are the Achilles Heel of the Deomcratic Party [sic].”

In other words, rather than any change of course, this is a team assembled to double down on failure.

That starts at the very top with Cherny himself, whose most recent project before this was a scandal-ridden corporate venture. For nine years, Cherny was the chief executive of celebrity-backed fintech firm Aspiration, which claimed to be democratizing investing by making it affordable for ordinary people and, in the process, being “in the business of fighting the climate crisis.”

In reality, as a series of exposés from ProPublica and others made clear, the firm sold itself through pathological deception: it boasted that it had planted thirty-five million trees, but counted twenty-three million that hadn’t actually been planted; it claimed that it had five million customers, but the actual number was a little less than six hundred thousand; it let customers round each purchase up to pay for planting a tree, but often pocketed many of the proceeds; it rewarded purchases from companies it deemed sustainable, but were in reality often pollutive; it trumpeted the chance to pay no fee on its investment fund, but actually charged a higher fee than many better performing funds; and far from being “one hundred percent fossil-fuel free,” that fund invested least in renewable energy while owning shares in a number of dirty companies.