WelcomeFest’s Moderate Politics Are Stuck in the Past

Attendees of the centrist organization’s latest gathering were full of ambition and self-regard but seemed adrift from the real-world problems their poll-driven ideology is supposed to address.

On Wednesday, the Welcome PAC, a center-left political action committee favored by the proponents of the abundance and popularism movements, held its third annual “WelcomeFest” gathering in Washington, D.C. It was a moderate sort of mess-around, the kind of place where a college student could introduce himself as a former member of the college Republicans, looking for a home in the other party.

Based on what I saw, there were across-the-aisle matches to be made. The first panel’s speakers set a challenge for the day by trying to define what “centrism” is—or at least, what it should be—in 2026. “Moderates seem attracted to incremental, bite-size solutions that seem so much smaller than our problem,” said Steve Teles, a Johns Hopkins professor and Niskanen Center fellow and Abundance champion. “Can everybody in this panel please give me some examples of solutions that you think are appropriately at the scale we’re facing?” What followed were mostly ideas borrowed from Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book that has mostly translated into a deregulatory agenda for addressing the nation’s housing shortage.

Still asked to define what centrism is, most of the speakers could only really define themselves by what they were not. It’s not their fault. Centrism, in reality, is almost always defined by where it lies on the spectrum between two extremes: Its politics are almost monomaniacally focused on arguing that those who stand apart have gone too far. To the WelcomeFesters, in particular, this explains why Democrats are currently out of power. It might be an appealing message to hear among like-minded politicos—those clad in fashionable suits, who follow politics closely, or who work in the knowledge sector, perhaps even running political campaigns in purple and red districts—in a softly lit basement in Washington, D.C. But there are big questions that the organization, and its proponents’ ideas, have yet to answer. This conference turned out not to be the place for it.

Because Welcome PAC is largely made up of Democrats, its speakers spent most of their time distinguishing themselves from the left of the party, especially the ascendent Democratic Socialists of America wing. “Capitalism is the most successful economic system in the world,” said New York Representative Tom........

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