Third Way or the Highway

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

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With right-wing courts tearing up American democracy, the Strait of Hormuz blocked for two months and counting, and the price of oil heading toward $150 per barrel, the centrist political think tank Third Way is laser-focused on the most important political issue in the country: the leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. Specifically, they are incensed that Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has been campaigning with Piker.

The attacks center on Piker’s anti-Israel positions and what Third Way characterizes as antisemitism. Third Way’s president Jonathan Cowan began the campaign with an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, and the group sent a questionnaire to El-Sayed asking for specific, enumerated instances of agreement and disagreement with Piker.

One could imagine a good-faith debate about whether Piker has crossed the line on occasion. He spends hours a day streaming, and that profession tends to select for people with inflammatory positions. Indeed, there has been a never-ending cavalcade of arguments about whether he is, in fact, antisemitic—or, even if he is, whether his platform is valuable enough to grin and bear it. At a minimum, it’s fair to conclude that some of his comments have been offensive, as Piker himself has admitted.

But that is not what is happening here. Instead, Third Way, along with its centrist allies, is attempting to cancel Piker as a way to suppress and demoralize the left wing of the Democratic Party, and thereby cement the control of centrists and their corporate and billionaire donors over the party. It’s not the first time they have pulled this trick; it has done damage both to the party and to the public standing of the issues Democrats ostensibly support.

To begin, witness the utter lack of good faith in Cowan’s criticism, as well as that coming from his allies. For instance, one of the most common attacks on Piker is that he said, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th,” which is indeed phrased very badly. But in context, what he clearly meant was that rapes can’t justify the Israeli attack on Gaza, and the statement occurred during a conversation in which he was arguing against chatters who denied the rapes happened.

Worse, there is the comparison between Piker and the right-wing streamer Nick Fuentes, heard from former centrist Democratic congressman Ted Deutch, as well as a proposed House of Representatives resolution sponsored by the centrist Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) condemning them both. Even if one grants all the most bad-faith attacks on Piker, this is an outrageous comparison that trivializes antisemitism. Piker, when addressing antisemitism directly, explains clearly why he is against it and in favor of civil rights for all. Fuentes openly praises Hitler. Comparing the two is like saying John Maynard Keynes and Reinhard Heydrich were basically the same.

Then there is the rank hypocrisy. Third Way is saying that Piker must be canceled and kept out of Democratic organizing in the name of “moral clarity,” less than two weeks after hosting a whole conference about how progressives shouldn’t let “moral clarity” limit the size of the Democratic bench! Litmus tests for me, but not for thee, it would seem.

Unlike some of Third Way’s other gambits, this one is at least not transparently farcical. Not like when they literally encouraged Democrats to abandon grassroots fundraising and focus on high-dollar donors, or tried to argue that even taking populist economic stances was actually an example of the dreaded “purity test.” Or when they organized a panel at which San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins said that California’s labor movement had reached a “reckoning point” because of their support for levying a wealth tax on the ultra-wealthy to pay for the state’s public health insurance program, since the wealthy are “giving more than most” already in taxes. (Recall that wealth is currently untaxed.)

Despite this self-parodying behavior, Third Way has been extremely influential within the Democratic Party, and particularly its conservative, corporate-funded wing. In that sense, it has been extremely successful. In the sense of actually helping Democrats win elections consistently, it has arguably done the opposite.

Some history is instructive here. Third Way grew out of a gun safety organization called Americans for Gun Safety, also led by (you guessed it) Jon Cowan. The core of AGS’s work was to be a foil to the mainline gun control movement in order to allow moderate Democrats to court gun owners. They pushed Democrats to stop arguing that the Second Amendment did not create a personal right to own firearms, which had been a mainstream legal position supported by the overwhelming majority of American history. AGS, founded by billionaire Andrew McKelvey, set to work “confronting its peers in the movement.” After successfully campaigning to close the gun show loophole in Colorado and Oregon, the group faded away and was rolled into Third Way in 2005.

Even a largely laudatory Atlantic profile from 2013, soon after the Sandy Hook shooting, concedes that “the whole [gun] debate, in short, has shifted to the right” and that “whether that change makes it more likely something gets done on the issue remains to be seen.” Now, more than a decade later, it seems safe to say that the rightward shift Cowan and AGS engineered did not, in fact, make it more likely for something to get done on gun control.

What it did was cut the legs out from under more progressive organizations. Their early success makes a lot of sense; triangulation can work well if, and only if, there is a credible threat of something more extreme. When AGS first showed up, their moderation appeared to work because it offered an escape from a more militantly anti-gun movement. Once that wing had been undercut to oblivion, there was no credible threat from the left that made moderation effective.

And the same logic cut against the other side of the aisle, too. When Democrats were strong on gun control, and actually implemented policies like the 1994 assault weapons ban, the NRA had an incentive to tack to the middle and offer incrementalist gun measures in order to serve as a release valve for the pressure to reduce the prevalence of gun violence. Once that strong opposition was gone, the NRA went ballistic and swung far, far to the right, to the point where their membership and political support is now unattainable for anyone left of crazy. It’s a process that cashed out last year in the Republican Supreme Court re-legalizing a kind of automatic weapon that had been banned by none other than Donald Trump. (Though to be fair, this trend toward gun rights maximalism began in the 1970s.)

Despite the utter failure to protect Americans from gun violence, the shift did create durable progress on two of Third Way’s most consistent objectives: weakening the left’s organizational capacity and pivoting the Democratic platform toward billionaires’ (in this case, McKelvey’s) policy priorities.

Or consider LGBTQ rights. Back in 2018 when LGBTQ rights seemed hegemonic, Third Way senior VP Jim Kessler co-authored a Washington Post op-ed that lauded: “In the 116th Congress, close to 40 percent of the Democratic caucus in the House will be women, nearly half the caucus may be nonwhite, and the LGBTQ community could boast as many as eight representatives—all a record. That is a welcome and overdue change for the party.” The actual point of the article was to attack progressives for being too white, thus giving economic populism the cold shoulder.

It turns out Third Way never really cared about LGBTQ issues or progressive cultural values. Fast-forward to 2025, and it is encouraging Democrats to “be normal” when it comes to protections for the queer community—implying that pro-LGBTQ groups are, therefore, not normal.

More broadly, Third Way is organizing a retreat to smear the left for doing identity politics that allegedly alienated voters. In their words, Democrats now need to “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery” while getting into “real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches” and “own[ing] the failures of Democratic governance in large cities.” It’s the exact same capitulation to momentary conservative advantage that ends with Trump’s campaign of unhinged transphobia—and if a Seattle conservative zealot gets her way, the re-banning of gay marriage.

Moral clarity, apparently, only matters when it can be a bludgeon against the left, because that is Third Way’s only consistent belief: At all times, in all places, the left has always gone too far, the center is always doing what’s right, and rich people should be protected from taxation.

On economics, the group, especially Kessler, spent most of the Obama years beseeching Democrats to just make nice with Republicans and work toward a commonsense, compromise budget deal of sharp austerity, even as the country suffered a decade of prolonged high unemployment thanks to the 2009 Recovery Act stimulus being about half the size of the economic hole it was supposed to fill.

After that disastrous decision arguably helped enable the rise of Trump to the presidency in 2017, Third Way launched a $20 million effort to “start a top-to-bottom rethink for the Democratic Party,” explicitly about steering the party away from a “populist lurch” on economic policy. In both 2018 and 2019, the group then hosted back-to-back invite-only “stop the left” summits, whose whole focus was preventing another Sanders scare in the next Democratic presidential primary.

They just can’t help themselves. Just since Kamala Harris’s loss in 2024, Third Way has hosted or sponsored at least three more left-bashing convenings. (The irony of criticizing a disconnect with Main Street America at opulent resorts, among a curated list of political operatives, all on the payroll of big business, is clearly lost on these people.) First, in spring 2025, they had a retreat centered around five pages of tired pablum about how Democrats had overemphasized social issues, had no economic vision, and were tied to deeply despised institutions.

Then, Third Way co-sponsored WelcomeFest, which treated attendees to trenchant political analysis like “stop talking about immigration” while ICE is rampaging across America, and “Democrats should have gone along with Florida’s don’t say gay bill” while the administration is terrorizing queer people. Finally, the group hosted a successor to its 2019 retreat in South Carolina about freezing out the left from the presidential primary in 2028. At this latest conference, Third Way hyped up their internal polling about how only 34 percent of Democrats support abolishing ICE, glossing over that they defined abolishing the agency as the cessation of any and all immigration enforcement. Literally the very next day, YouGov published polling showing support for ICE abolition had hit 50 percent for the first time, with a +11 net rating.

Whether it’s shoddy polling, shoddy cancel culture, cynical flip-flopping, or building up institutional pressure to force Democrats to the right, no one can match Third Way’s dedication to keeping the corporate wing of the party punching left. After progressives influenced staffing in the Biden administration with some success, the group first blamed the left for all of Biden’s unpopularity and then set up an effort specifically to try and box out progressive influence in a hypothetical Kamala Harris administration.

Now Cowan is committing to “influencing all of the people who will run for president who are anywhere from the kind of mushy to more moderate” (but remember, they’re not one of the groups!), especially by “hav[ing] a database of all of the campaigns and their huge networks around them, and then [another database of] all of the people that really matter in these early primary and battleground states.” To push candidates to the right flank, Third Way is inviting them to events with high-dollar donors. And that’s really what all of this is: trying to continue Democrats’ dependence on and allegiance to wealth. That’s why they want to, in their own words, “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors.”

All of this leads to the worst possible form of triangulation and moderation, where candidates tailor themselves to appear “moderate” in the ways specifically favored by centrist think-tankers, the ultra-rich, and approximately seven other people: things like opposing billionaire taxes, deregulating cryptocurrency, and blocking price-gouging protections.

The moral panic around Hasan Piker comes out of this tradition of icing the left flank of the Democratic Party out of power and entrenching the corporate wing’s control. For decades now, Third Way has continually tried to use culture war bludgeons to stave off economic populism and progressive politics. If history is any guide, they will keep doing it until there are no more billionaires to fund them.