What Liberal Billionaires Want

Recently ThinkProgress, a long running news site published by the liberal think tank the Center for American Progress was shut down.

The news caused quite the stir on the more liberal portions of the internet. It was a staple of progressive online politics over the years and it's one of those more obscure websites that you might not have heard of but cast a pretty long shadow. The Daily Beast summed up it's impact as:

At its peak, there were few more important pieces of unapologetically progressive, online real estate than ThinkProgress. The site combined original reporting with an attack-dog mentality to target Republican lawmakers and conservative ideas. A testament to its success is found in the list of prominent alumni currently working in politics and journalism. That list includes Faiz Shakir, who now serves as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager; Amanda Terkel, the D.C. bureau chief of the Huffington Post; Nico Pitney, the political director at NowThis; Alex Seitz-Wald, a top campaign reporter for NBC News; Ali Gharib, a senior news editor at The Intercept; and Matt Yglesias, one of the founding members of Vox. 

If you follow online progressive writing that's a pretty impressive roster.

Personally I'm not very interested in the ins and outs of why this happened. Suffice to say after years of putting money into an ideologically oriented liberals news venture liberal megadonors in CAP's orbit decided to put it elsewhere, thus causing the site to be shut down. And the most notable of these has to be Tom Steyer who's decided to quit CAP's board and plow his money into his vanity presidential campaign.

It's fair to say that conservative mega donors take a very different approach. Over the decades they've spent huge sums of money to bankroll long term ideological projects on everything from a push to shrink the welfare state to rolling back the regulatory state to advocating for reductions in immigration.

This also applies to online news sites where there's a host of newer sites backed by real conservative money (you can find online if you want, I'm not going to bother to link).

Online there was a lot of heated discussion over this news. With all sorts of progressive and "Left" folks claiming it showed a serious missallocation of resources. The words "stupid" and "corrupt" got thrown around a lot as well.

I suppose it's possible that this is just stupidity, but I think it could be just another good example of how the two parties are actually more asymmetrical than we are often led to believe.

As political scientists David Hopkins and Matt Grossman point out in their book Asymmetrical Politics, one way to think about the two parties is that the Republicans tend to be more of a ideologically driven movement while the Democrats tend to be more of a coalition that comes together in order to win elections.

From that position long term ideological media projects would seem particularly hard for Democratically aligned groups like CAP to keep going. After all, coalitions change over time and it makes sense that projects like a more liberal minded news website could become less important over the years, especially because a lot of online news and commentary sites are like that these days.

More over lots of liberal gazillionaires seem to like more shot term measurable projects, like the bus lanes recently put in by Minneapolis funded in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies. These bus lanes might not change the game in the long term about how the public thinks about transportation and climate change, but the are creating real measurable improvements that also serve as a proof of concept on how to improve existing infrastructure for a more transit friendly future.

Add in the fact that the more progressive policies these sorts of sites would advocate for almost by definition are going to include those that could hurt the material interests liberal billionaires (like saying we should tax billionaires more), and the long term connection between these sorts of megadonors and efforts like ThinkProgress becomes even more tenuous.  

That's not to say that there's no value in long term investment in training young progressive journalists or other ideological oriented projects. Tom Steyer spending his money on keeping ThinkProgress going is surely much more useful for liberals than blowing it on early state ads so he can get into the debates.  But there appear to real problems to the idea of trying to replicate The National Review but for liberals online, and looking for a different model than "Tom Steyer should bankroll us forever" probably makes sense.