Doesn't the name "The Progressive Policy Institute" sound like something that is probably good, perhaps that you would want to support and contribute to? It's suppose to sound that way... but it's very much the opposite of what it sounds like. The Big PhRMA and Exxon Mobile-funded Progressive Policy Institute is a mainstay of the corrupt Republican wing of the Democratic Party, a 501(c)(3) think tank/propaganda unit founded in 1989 by the DLC to propagate corporate and neoliberal ideas under the guise of the Democratic Party. It is currently under the aegis of Third Way.
"PPI," a prominent Democratic congressman told me yesterday, "is a nexus of anti-Climate activities inside the party and reeks of corporate corruption... They're a bunch of energy lobbyists... worst of the worst." Joe Lieberman/John McCain creature, conservative Democrat and warmonger Will Marshall is the president and Lindsay Lewis is the executive director. This morning, with no background on Lewis or the odious Progressive Policy Institute, the right-of-center Hill ran a guest piece by him, Pragmatic bipartisanship-- not hard left intolerance-- is Democrats' surest path back to power. Hard left intolerance?
Lewis is a hard-right corporate whore and hater of all things and people progressive. The Hill should have explained that before they posted his propaganda piece. He and his organization are, needless to say, campaigning to take Biden's Build Back Better agenda and he delighted in smearing Pramila and blaming the defeat of the right-of-center Virginia Democrats on the progressives. He wrote that the worms like himself who exist on the payoffs from corporate special interests-- he calls them, proudly, "DC Insiders"-- while puking out GOP-manufactured vitriol: "the missteps exposed the progressives as poor negotiators and paper tigers. To average voters, however, it exposed the Democrats as easily intimidated by a hard left that represents maybe 6 percent of the electorate. Democrats’ off-year shellacking in Virginia and near-loss in New Jersey underscored the error of this strategy. Swing voters responded by abandoning the party in droves. In Virginia, Democrats’ 19-point edge among independents in 2020 flipped to a 9-point deficit in 2021."
I have no doubt that Lewis and his colleagues never considered that their sabotage of Biden's agenda is what caused that swing. The party’s corrupt right flank "doesn’t seem to have learned the obvious political lesson here. And despite failing to seize control of the Biden legislative agenda," DINO activists like himself and the PPI are still agitating to grab the reins through Manchin-Sinema blackmail.
Lewis' purpose for writing was to smear Biden's FCC nominee, Gigi Sohn, hated by Republicans, anti-Semites, homophobic bigots and Republicans pretending to be Democrats like the anti-regulation PPI people. He called her a "career Beltway activist who has built her resume advocating for the most extreme regulatory approaches. He wrote that "most troubling is Sohn’s pattern of illiberal intolerance for voices on the left who dissent from her hard left orthodoxies. Sohn criticized civil rights leaders, for instance, for speaking up on telecom issues, arguing that they don’t possess any 'core expertise' to weigh in, and threatened to 'expose' and 'flush' those with heterodox views." He's flipping out because Sohn has long been associated with groups that sought local censure of bribe-taking sociopath Kyrsten Sinema for her right-wing, GOP-oriented approach. He then went on to accuse Biden of intolerance and threaten that if Biden doesn't turn in a more rightist, anti-working class position, Democrats will fail.