Matt Bruenig is not the nostalgic or romantic type, even in comparison to his peers in the highly cerebral think tank world. When asked about his childhood with a single mother who worked as a retail clerk and had to scrape by on welfare, Bruenig relayed his experience of moving in with friends and relatives in particularly dire times. But he shrugged off any attempts to build a broader personal narrative of the kid on welfare who made good and founded one of the country’s only socialist research institutes, the People’s Policy Project.
“When you’re a kid, at least this is my experience of it, I don’t know that you really situate it into some broader social theory,” Bruenig, 31, told Blue Tent. “It’s just kind of coming at you, and you maybe don’t think all that much about it, except maybe like, oh, this sucks, I gotta move or whatever.”
While he acknowledges having thought about his own experiences and how they connect with his particular interest in expanding the welfare state for children, Bruenig, a native of Arlington, Texas, dissents from other prominent policy types in cultivating a compelling personal narrative. And that’s not the only thing distinguishing this leftist policy wonk from his peers.
Posting his way into (and out of) a career
Bruenig is not the product of elite Ivy League schools, but a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and Boston University Law School. He began blogging out of boredom in the summer after college, mostly about economics, and was good enough to get hired by the think tank Demos for a part-time position (Blue Tent founder and editor David Callahan previously co-founded and served as senior fellow at Demos). After graduating from law school, Bruenig landed a job with the National Labor Relations Board Honors Program, an ideal first gig for an aspiring union lawyer, and continued prolifically blogging and tweeting on the side.
Early in his career, Bruenig chose neither to climb the Democratic party ladder (like Center for American Progress President Neera Tanden) nor to till a precocious path with the blessing of big foundations (like Data for Progress head Sean McElwee). He also began openly supporting Bernie Sanders and attacking Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries, when most prominent liberals in policy and politics had chosen to do the opposite or simply keep quiet. Instead, Bruenig picked fights with the establishment and refused to back down, nearly destroying his career.
“I was a poster, I was a genuine poster, a shitposter. I was involved in that for a very long time,” Bruenig told Blue Tent, describing his early years of trolling people online. “I did that even before I did politics.”
After a series of hostile and at times personal Twitter attacks on Tanden and The Nation’s Joan Walsh, Bruenig was fired by both Demos and the NLRB. He and his wife Liz, now an opinion writer for the New York Times, were expecting their first child, so Bruenig launched a Kickstarter, began doing temp work, and applied for dozens of jobs. For many prospective employers, a quick Googling of “Matt Bruenig” likely spelled the end of his application process.
Joining the left’s online, indie funding model
But losing his jobs also freed Bruenig to do something that his highly credentialed, less-combative colleagues wouldn’t dream of trying. Seeing the huge cash hauls that the Sanders campaign was able to raise through small donors, as well as the bounty pulled in by popular leftist podcasts on Patreon, Bruenig pulled the trigger on his own crowdfunding project: a socialist think tank.
Bruenig pitched the idea to his large online following and promoted the concept with an appearance on the podcast Chapo Trap House, bringing in some 1,800 small donors who now contribute $5 to $15 monthly. After talking things over with his informal, multi-thousand-member “board” of donors, Bruenig decided to call his venture the People’s Policy Project (3P).
The crowdfunding structure is key to Bruenig’s approach. He told Blue Tent that he harbors no ambitions to go after traditional think tank funders like corporations, wealthy individuals or foundations. He claims to have seen firsthand how donors influence research and advocacy.
While working at Demos, Bruenig says, he was commissioned to write a paper criticizing the “libertarian moment” at the behest of a donor.
“Some of the critiques of libertarianism, you’re going to have to bring in certain notions of property and ownership, and that was one of my angles,” Bruenig said.
The donor didn’t like this, Bruenig claims, and the paper was never published.
Demos Communications Director Arlene Corbin Lewis told Blue Tent that the situation described by Bruenig “is not common practice at Demos” and would have been “a far and extremely unusual departure from how we typically engage with funders.”
Lewis went on to explain that Bruenig’s time at Demos predated much of the current staff, that no one recalled such a project, and that according to their digging, “it doesn’t look like Demos received project-restricted funding” for Bruenig.
Bruenig stood by the story, acknowledging that “it does seem like the organization has had a bunch of turnover at every level.”
Making an influence with a shoestring budget
With a yearly budget of about $120,000, Bruenig has to run a lean operation. (Demos, by comparison, had total revenue of about $7 million in 2019.) He says that he pays his own salary with about half of the donations and spends the rest on hiring freelance researchers, editors and graphic designers to produce a handful of high-quality white papers, usually costing around $10,000 a pop. 3P typically focuses on welfare policy, but has also done research on a green Tennessee Valley Authority, social housing and police shootings.
Bruenig’s “Family Fun Pack,” a series of policy proposals to make raising children easier and more affordable, including universal childcare, free healthcare for children, and parental leave, was included in the 2020 platforms of Presidential candidates like Sanders and Kirsten Gillibrand.
Yet Bruenig is still Bruenig, and his tendency to provoke comes through even in his white papers.
In 2017, partnering with The Week columnist Ryan Cooper, Bruenig authored a paper arguing that the Obama administration failed to take actions that could have protected many Black homeowners after the 2008 financial collapse. Titled “Foreclosed: Destruction of Black Wealth During the Obama Presidency,” the charge that the nation’s first Black president was responsible for the suffering of so many African Americans angered many liberals.
Cooper and Bruenig have acknowledged that the title was intentionally provocative, but stood by the weight of their analysis.
“My observation is, particularly in the nonprofit world, that you can’t say true things if they’re too politically inflammatory,” Cooper told Blue Tent, adding that he sees “a conspiracy of silence” around certain policies championed by plutocratic donors and mainstream Democrats that harm huge numbers of people. Long a fan of Bruenig’s blog in addition to being a friend and colleague, Cooper was an early supporter of 3P and described Bruenig’s writing as “almost revolutionary” in his own thinking about politics and economics.
Other than critical analysis owning the libs, Bruenig sees his young organization’s future tied up with the larger fate of the political left. Since its launch, 3P was laser-focused on crafting policies that could be easily picked up by Sanders, but with Bernie’s loss in 2020 and his imminent retirement as America’s Socialist Standard Bearer, the hunt is on to find other prominent lefty politicians. Bruenig has begun to build relationships with congressional staffers of the ever expanding “Squad,” while biding his time to see who will emerge as a presidential darling for the left in 2024.
“I’ll work with anyone who really wants to work with us,” Bruenig said, referencing many centrist members of Congress whose staffers are on 3P’s email lists.
Bruenig’s somewhat trollish posture is unlikely to dissipate with Joe Biden entering the White House. Bruenig believes that while liberal groups often get lost in the crowd when attacking Trump, few of the same organizations will be willing to stridently criticize their own team. Just as in the 2016 primaries, Bruenig and 3P will have an opening to carve out a place as the lone lefty dissenter.
Bruenig’s prediction?
“It will probably get us a lot of attention.”
