Corporate America’s Attempt to Rebrand Centrist Politics for Zoomers

ExxonMobil, Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, Walmart, and Amazon are funding attempts to make boring pro-corporate Democrats fun and youthful.

A recent op-ed in The Messenger by Tobin Stone had an amusingly labored headline, “Democrats Need To Learn How To Get Excited About the Center-Left.” Without reading any further, one could easily intuit the gist of the essay: a Left-scolding, tedious treatise on voters' responsibility to serve power rather than the other way around. It has all the cliches of the genre: hand-wringing about “purity politics,” several evocations of “the activist left,” cynical fetishization of a mysterious “working-class voter” who happens to want the same things Wall Street does, and implied moral equivalence between Trumpism and the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. One is welcome to read it, but the substance, such that it is, is less important than who is funding this new round of Third Way messaging.

Reading the author’s bio, one would hardly know he works for a group bankrolled by corporate America:

Tobin Stone is the community and communications manager at the Center for New Liberalism, a grassroots organization of “pragmatically liberal” activists with 55 chapters across the country and was formerly a project of the Progressive Policy Institute. The Center for New Liberalism recently merged with New Democracy, a social welfare organization and support network of Democratic governors, mayors, state officials and members of Congress.

A suspicious amount of defensive “progressive” and “grassroots” thrown around. Likely because the primary organization in question, Progressive Policy Institute, is a D/B/A for Third Way Foundation, a nonprofit that has received, throughout recent years, funding from ExxonMobil, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), tobacco giant Altria, Walmart, and Amazon. Perhaps this funding, rather than a “grassroots” “progressive” commitment to “social welfare,” is why Stone is so concerned with young progressive voters being happy with pro-corporate “moderate” Democrats. While the bio and other online copy says Center for New Liberalism was “formerly a project of the Progressive Policy Institute,” it still falls under the purview of PPI, at least according to a puff piece on PPI and Center for New Liberalism in The Washington Post published last November. The article states, “Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a moderate-left think tank whose Center for New Liberalism has established more than 80 chapters claiming over 10,000 members around the world.” When reached for comment to clarify their relationship, The Center for New Liberalism did not respond.

The profile failed to mention the litany of corporations backing the “Gen Z and millennial wonks making neoliberalism cool again,” as the subheadline puts it, instead painting their constellation of organizations as scrappy grassroots underdogs taking on the much cooler Big Socialism on the internet. 

Tobin Stone is affiliated with The Center for New Liberalism, formerly The Neoliberal Project, which also falls under the umbrella of The Third Way Foundation. (The Third Way foundation used to be affiliated with the other Third Way, which emerged from the now defunct “centrist” Democratic Leadership Council, but it has since spun off on its own.) According to the Washington Post, Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for New Liberalism started out as an organic subreddit, Ne0liberal (it still uses this handle on Twitter), with its first stated principle, “Individual choice and markets are of paramount importance both as an expression of individual liberty and driving force of economic prosperity.” This group “joined” the Progressive Policy Institute in February 2020 and remains part of its sprawling group of ostensibly organic, youth-focused organs of this “pro-free market” ideology.

The Center for New Liberalism now supposedly partners with “New Democracy,” which is, for all intents and purposes, is PPI. New Democracy is a more direct political advocacy organization that was created by PPI executives Lindsay Lewis, Will Marshall, and Johnny McInerney in 2017. It shares a physical address with PPI. Public records show Julian Epstein is a fourth founder. He wrote an op-ed in Wall Street Journal last March arguing Biden has been a failure and shouldn’t run in 2024 because, in part, “he and his staff promised centrism but instead governed from the far left.”

PPI doesn’t disclose its funders. And when The Column reached out to PPI and Center For New Liberalism multiple times for a list of current funders, the groups did not respond.

But we do have some evidence, based on digging from reporters like Andrew Perez, Akela Lacy, and Kate Aronoff, about who has been footing the bill for PPI’s $13 million a year budget in recent years. 

In 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022, PPI received an unknown amount of money from Altria/Phillip Morris, the US’s largest tobacco company. PPI, incidentally, took Big Tobacco's side in opposing the Biden Food and Drug Administration’s attempts to clamp down on under-age vaping, in a column written last year by PPI Mosaic fellow Cheryl K. Olson—who, incidentally, used to work for Altria/Phillip Morris. 

In 2018 and 2019, as first reported in The Intercept, PPI received a combined $100,000 from ExxonMobil.

Big Pharma trade group PhRMA gave PPI $125,000 in the last publicly available year, 2021. The trade group gave $50,000 to PPI in 2020 and $50,000 in 2020. In 2016, at the height of the Sanders campaign and broader debates around Medicare for All, PhRMA upped its donation to PPI to $265,000. 

Big Tent Project Fund (a dark money group that ran anti-Sanders ads in primary states in 2020) gave $1.25 million to PPI, also in 2020. A lobbying group for private electric companies, EEI, donated to PPI an undisclosed amount in 2022. A lobby for internet giants like Comcast and Verizon, The Internet & Television Association has given PPI $100,000 every year for the past few years. Walmart’s foundation arm gives PPI an annual gift of $300,000 a year for its work on “education” (see: privatization and bashing teachers unions). We know Amazon gives money to PPI because the company mentioned it does in its 2021 and 2022 “U.S. Political Engagement Policy and Statement,” but didn’t specify an amount. Nor would PPI, when reached for comment, tell us how much Amazon has donated. (Amazon Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos has approvingly tweeted out the Ne0liberal Twitter account’s criticism of President Biden blaming inflation on, in part, corporate greed).

The Ne0liberal account makes an ironic “Neoliberal shill tournament” each year where they and their cohorts get to vote on the biggest corporate sellouts in the neoliberal policy world. Presumably this irony is supposed to hang a lampshade on the fact that, manifestly, this is what their project actually is.

Given that Progressive Policy Institute received many unfavorable reports in 2019 for its attempts to derail the Sanders campaign and combat broader efforts towards Medicare For All while raking in corporation cash, it’s no wonder why it would need to rebrand by absorbing vaguely organic reddit posters to try and sell its stale, Third Way message to people under 35. As the 2024 election ramps up, and money is mysteriously and suddenly poured into groups opposing the specter of progressive politics, keep in mind that these boring screeds calling out “purity politics” are almost always funded by those in power who are perfectly happy with the status quo, and would just as soon dump a few hundred thousands dollars every year into “think tanks” working to convince young people to think the same.