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.”
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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.
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The details of a lawsuit lay bare the less-than-sustainable reality of the industry into which Cherny had steered the firm. In order to ink a lucrative deal with oil-soaked Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup — which was itself a tour de force of greenwashing — Aspiration needed a pile of carbon credits quickly, leading it to do what one executive called “a light version” of the due diligence it would have normally done on a deal that big. Perhaps as a result, the seller never delivered on the $30 million worth of credits they had agreed to.
All of this is a grim prelude to understanding Cherny’s political work, the cause of his life until the nine-year break he took for this ill-fated business venture. Cherny is a loud and proud evangelist for, and former member of, the Bill Clinton administration that laid much of the groundwork for the rise of Trump and the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, as well as an alum of the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council, which was maybe best known for its enthusiasm for privatizing Social Security.
Cherny first showed up on Clinton’s radar as a Harvard senior, when he wrote that the United States needed “government humble enough not to try to solve all our problems for us but strong enough to give us the tools to solve our problems for ourselves.” Clinton loved the line so much, he made his entire Cabinet read it, put it in one of his speeches, and hired Cherny as a speechwriter. He was a perfect fit for an administration that had embarked on its own Democratic version of Trump’s DOGE initiative, called “Reinventing Government,” which boasted of firing three hundred fifty-one thousand federal workers and eliminating hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and regulations. (Some of those Clinton-era powers for carrying out this cull are now being used by Russell Vought to dismantle the federal government at Trump’s behest.)
Cherny cheered on all of it, rejoicing that Clinton had become his “true self”: not “a wild-eyed liberal mad with desire to insert the shadowy hand of the federal government into every nook and cranny of American life,” but a “raging centrist” who purged progressives, pushed budget cuts, and collaborated with Republicans. His “best period as president,” Cherny wrote, came “with Reinventing Government and the extraordinary passage of NAFTA,” and he celebrated that Clinton had cut the deficit, “eliminated scores of government programs,” and made the government “the smallest it has been since John F. Kennedy was president,” insisting that “centrist politics” is “what Americans want now” and “what they have always wanted.”
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In what may be a sign of Cherny’s role in Project 2029, he wrote the Democrats’ losing 2000 platform in a process that was praised for its lack of debate and input from the dreaded “groups,” and its resulting centrist direction, full of “positions that easily could have come from Republican platforms of a generation ago,” as the Los Angeles Times put it. That included support for the death penalty and “open trade,” a boast that Democrats had “ended the era of big government,” and a vow to eliminate the national debt in twelve years.
Cherny beamed with pride that the document’s hawkishness showed “the shift in the party on national security” and that “the old siren songs no longer have a place.” Later, as the country faced whiplash from George W. Bush’s disastrous series of Middle East invasions, Cherny took the side of rabid war-hawk Joe Lieberman, who complained that Democrats were no longer talking about expanding the size of the military, but pulling out of Iraq. There was “a large grain of truth” in what Lieberman was saying, said Cherny, and he predicted that the eventual Democratic nominee would return to themes like “expanding democracy around the world and using force to advance American values.”
Yay!