A few weeks ago The New York Times reported that the liberal-centrist Center for American Progress is working on a Project 2029. Modeled after the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, P29 is their attempt to “draft a ready-made agenda for the next Democratic presidential nominee.” On its face, this is perfectly sensible. A number of critics have complained that the proposal seems like an unoriginal copycat initiative, but this seems as fair as charging Biden with unoriginality for appointing a Cabinet. Drafting a detailed political agenda and lobbying for politicians to adopt it is just what think tanks do.
The real problem with CAP’s Project 2029 isn’t the premise of a frontloaded comprehensive agenda — it’s their actual policies. We’ve already seen this in their proposed “New Immigration System,” which is just a tweaked rehash of the same moderately draconian policies that liberal Democrats have advocated for years. That is why, recently, The People’s Line published its own counterproposal: to break up the Department of Homeland Security.
Socialists need their own platform. So moving forward, this site is going to be building our own collection of policy proposals — one that truly reflects the scale of our ambitions. By doing this we hope not only to advocate for our own affirmative agenda, but to set in sharp relief the conservative, unimaginative, and inadequate alternatives proposed by liberal Democratic establishment groups like CAP.
In that light, The People’s Line announces the launch of our own Project 2029. And we would like to invite you to contribute, either by submitting policies that you think would be a good fit for our project or by developing your own! Here’s how it works:
If you have a policy proposal for us, email it to pplsline@gmail.com with the subject line “Project 2029 proposal”. If we select your proposal for inclusion it will be added to our Project 2029 landing page.
We will consider two kinds of submissions. First, proposals written by you or someone else that have already been published publicly. In that case we will simply link to it.
Second, we will consider your own original proposals as long as they have not yet been published anywhere else. We do not ask for exclusive rights to it — once we’ve published it you can publish it anywhere else — but we need to be the first publisher to avoid potential legal problems.
If we accept your original proposal, you give us permission to publish it on this site and to send it our through our newsletter. Please bear in mind that this is a volunteer collaboration on a shared political project, not a business opportunity; we will not be paywalling these articles so we cannot provide compensation to their authors. However,
To encourage submissions we are offering a prize of $300 to the best original proposal. “Best” is purely at our discretion but we will be taking into consideration the paper’s ambition, persuasiveness, commitment to egalitarian socialist ideals, and policy craftsmanship. We strongly encourage participants to develop ideas that are aspirational rather than limiting yourself with conservative judgments about what it is politically possible. We will give out this award no later than December 31, 2025. The winner will be announced on the site.
Please bear in mind that inclusion or exclusion for this project should not be construed as a value judgment — it just means that the proposal was a good fit for what we are trying to do. And don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions!
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