WelcomeFest’s Moderate Politics Are Stuck in the Past

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 Suozzi, who won his Long Island district after George Santos left Congress in disgrace. “It’s lifted more people out of poverty, it’s created more innovation, it’s done more to make people’s lives better than any other economic system. Socialism has failed and has also resulted in a lot of authoritarianism throughout the world, and so I think that this, there’s a very big, I think that [New York Mayor] Zohran Mamdani and the DSA … did a good job of feeding into people’s economic insecurity; they correctly diagnosed the problem, they just have bad solutions.”

The fact that the people in the room all felt the same obsession to set themselves against the monolithic left of their imaginations was made especially clear in the Promise to America—a pact presented by college students and signed by Representatives Tom Suozzi and Adam Gray, two Democratic congressmen from competitive districts—in its “this, not that” formulation on the promises’s taglines.