Last week the Center for American Progress quietly installed Larry Summers as one of the key architects of its flagship “Project 2029” economic platform and handed him final sign-off on a housing policy paper that reads like a foreclosure notice for the entire working class. This is not a personnel decision.
This is a declaration of the internal structures of neoliberal power masquerading as progressivism.
Larry Summers is not just the man who texted a child trafficker for dating tips.
The same hands that wrote the bailouts for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs are now drafting the Democratic Party’s economic vision for the next decade. The same mind that dismissed Brooksley Born’s warnings about derivatives is deciding who gets to live in what remains of the public commons.
And the institution that resurrected him is the Center for American Progress—the beating heart of what passes for “progressive” policy in Washington. CAP was founded in 2003 with the explicit mission of dragging the Democratic Party leftward after the Bush years.
Instead it became the most sophisticated laundering operation neoliberalism ever built: a machine that takes Wall Street, Big Pharma, and Silicon Valley money, runs it through a conveyor belt of Ivy League resumes, and outputs policy briefs wrapped in the language of equity, inclusion, and climate justice. The result is always the same—more financialization, more public-private partnerships, more extraction—now delivered with a rainbow flag and a land acknowledgment.
Neera Tanden is the perfect steward of this betrayal.
A professional-managerial climber who weaponizes her identity the way previous generations of centrists weaponized patriotism, Tanden has spent her career policing the leftward boundaries of acceptable discourse. She lobbied to gut her own creation, the CFPB. She pushed for regime-change wars dressed up as humanitarian interventions. She maintains a board stacked with defense contractors and private-equity barons while performing progressive piety on cable news.
Tanden has long insisted that slashing social safety-net programs—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—must be “on the table” for any serious long-term deficit-reduction plan. Under her leadership, the Center for American Progress repeatedly pushed to replace the standard inflation measure for Social Security with the chained CPI, a statistical sleight-of-hand that deliberately understates inflation and therefore delivers smaller annual benefit increases to retirees, the disabled, and survivors. In plain language: CAP, the flagship “progressive” think tank, actively campaigned to shrink the real value of Social Security checks in the name of fiscal responsibility.
Her CAP does not have a single union leader, tenant organizer, or rank-and-file worker in any position of real power. It is a fortress of expert credentials where “diversity” means more South Asian think-tank presidents presiding over the dispossession of South Asian Uber drivers.
This is the deeper rot the Summers appointment exposes: the complete colonization of progressive infrastructure by a professional-managerial class that speaks in the cadence of social justice while servicing markets. The labor movement is not invited to the table; it is studied, managed, and neutralized. The poor are not represented; they are the raw material for foundation reports on “racial wealth gaps” written by the same economists who engineered those gaps.
Every genuine demand—Medicare for All, public housing, rent control, Green New Deal for public power—is sanded down into a “public option,” a tax credit, a “partnership” that funnels more public wealth into private balance sheets.
Project 2029 is the funeral. Summers’ housing paper is the epitaph: federally owned land handed to luxury developers, tax subsidies for impact-investing landlords, and a polite footnote expressing “concern” about displacement. This is what the Democratic establishment means when it says it is “learning from 2008.”
It learned how to do it again—only quieter, with better branding, and under the leadership of women and people of color who provide perfect cover for the same old looting.
Real progressive politics begins with a refusal. It refuses to let the professional-managerial class speak in the name of the poor. It refuses to let think tanks funded by banks replace unions funded by dues.
It refuses to let the architects of austerity design the next decade. The task is no longer to “push the Democrats left.”
It refuses to let the architects of austerity design the next decade. The task is no longer to “push the Democrats left.”
The task is to build power that does not need their permission—tenant unions that withhold rent, worker co-ops that expropriate factories, land trusts that seize vacant luxury units, mutual-aid networks that replace the nonprofit-industrial complex. The task is to make the entire expert infrastructure of faux-progressivism irrelevant.
Larry Summers is not an aberration.
He is the revelation.
The Center for American Progress is not a progressive think tank.
It is occupied territory that peddles neoliberalism, dressed up as redistribution and equity.
And the only way to liberate the left is to dismantle the communicative ecosystem that peddles neoliberal think tanks as progressive. The only way forward is to delink from the very infrastructures that push market reforms, dressed up in DEI performativity.