Breaking up the monopoly on reality

the struggle between the center & the border

Our politics is less a contest of ideas than a contest over who gets to define what’s real. Peter Hitchens has a famous line about polls: “I believe them to be a means of influencing opinion, much more than a means of measuring it.” We don’t really have the language to describe this. Instead, it’s a kind of latent knowledge: a shared but rarely verbalized recognition that polls and consultants don’t merely measure public opinion; they shape the terms of acceptable political debate.

Of course, the “political experts” who strategize around elections and monetize voters’ disenchantment and frustrations will seldom admit this. But step outside their script and you’ll notice how manufactured any political consensus is. Think of a poll or even a political campaign like a restaurant: you show up and the menu is already determined for you.

Recently, the New York Times profiled a new political group called the Searchlight Institute, a ten-million-dollar organization backed by hedge fund managers Stephen Mandel and Eric Laufer. Another group, the Democracy Project at NYU Law School, was recently announced and lists Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, billionaire Mark Cuban, and former New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu among its contributors. The Argument, a four-million-dollar, billionaire-backed Substack to promote liberalism, is another example of these new post-Trump, second-election Democratic-aligned groups.

In his book on the nature of information, The Revolt of the Public, Martin Gurri connects the tension of our political moment to a struggle between the “Center” and the “Border.” He defines these terms as follows:

“The Center envisions the future to be a continuation of the status quo, and churns out program after program to protect this vision. The Border, in contrast, is composed of ‘sects’—voluntary associations of equals. Sects exist to oppose the Center: they stand firmly against it. They have, however, no intention of governing.”

The Center, in Gurri’s sense, consists of the hierarchical organizations that uphold the status quo—institutions that, he argues, “have failed, and have been seen to fail, beyond the possibility of invoking secrecy or propaganda.” Gurri’s point is that the digital environment has destroyed the Center’s ability to monopolize information, leading to a profound loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. All information, he contends, is mediated; it is rarely neutral or witnessed firsthand by its consumer. For decades before the internet, a handful of television channels and major publications could control the narrative around the news. That environment was far more favorable to Center organizations such as nation states, which could influence and manipulate information to serve their broader narratives—around empire, for example, or war.

The Center today, however, still believes legitimacy comes from expertise, law, and institutional continuity. This is their biggest blind spot.

Under Gurri’s framing, initiatives such as the Searchlight Institute, NYU’s Democracy Project, and The Argument function as the Center’s latest attempts to reclaim the right to define reality. What they refuse to see is that the Border—the Donald Trump/ Bernie Sanders voter, the online leftist, the populist voter, the nonvoter—no longer sees the Center as authoritative. The springing up of these multi-million-dollar groups is not evidence of the Center’s strength but of its weakness. Seen in this light, these efforts are probably futile. One cannot curate the right mix of policies and ideologies when the public you are trying to convince has already withdrawn legitimacy.

The entire Searchlight Institute website is a case study in exerting expert control. They declare, “We are here to power the next realignment,” promise to promote “supermajority thinking,” and even go so far as to label their project “heterodox.” I’ll go through each of these.

The realignment claim is telling. A realignment typically entails a profound blow to party orthodoxy—a new political landscape not drawn by elites. This happened in 2008 when Barack Obama took on the Democratic establishment and won, and in 2016 when Trump did the same to the Republican Party. Now we have a kind of Obama/Trump/Sanders voter who leans populist and sees that the Center holds very little credibility. Those who cannot or refuse to see that are the Bush/Biden/Harris voter—or, more precisely, the billionaire who funds groups like the Searchlight Institute. This is the political realignment of our time, and no amount of reverse engineering by elites will change that. Realignment is something the center must survive, not something it can manufacture.

Second, their supermajority-thinking concept is less about listening to voters’ real concerns and more about seeing them as data points in a puzzle to be solved. Their thinking goes like this: if we can bring in 33 percent of independents, 42 percent of Democrats, 15 percent of Republicans, and 10 percent of populists, we’ve cracked the code! They will then tailor a menu of options to “fit” what they want to believe these voters believe. This is particularly irritating around social issues, when centrist groups blame voters for not being open-minded enough and blame the left for pushing those issues. I’m not saying there isn’t some merit to this, but here (as in most culture war issues) it’s wielded by those in power in bad faith. By casting tens of millions of people into deceptive categories, the consultants decide what the public believes. The most offensive part of this is that it shuts down debate before it is allowed to start.

Finally, an organization like this calling itself “heterodox” is insulting to what that word has historically meant. Heterodox thinking involves a challenge to orthodox dogmas. In economics, this has meant rejecting the dominant neoclassical framework as the default theory and embracing schools of thought that have been purposely sidelined or taboo, such as Marxism. True heterodox thinkers often risk upsetting the status quo and finding no home amongst well-funded political camps—that’s what makes the work both important and difficult.

In the New York Times profile of the Searchlight Institute, its consultants go after groups such as the ACLU and the Center for American Progress for pushing Democratic candidates too far left and into losing elections. The irony is lost on them. Searchlight is also a product of the same ecosystem: a well-funded, consultant-driven machine that depends on defining “acceptable” opinion and pre-sorting policy ideas. They are wrong to think they are somehow above this. They are simply wearing a better mask. An organization funded by billionaires and staffed by D.C. insiders is not going to restore public legitimacy in government. Gurri would see this as a Center group using special vocabulary to pose as a Border one—claiming to smash groupthink while working to reassert the Center’s power to define the alternatives.

After 9/11, what did our intelligence agencies get? A flood of new taxpayer funding. After losing not once but twice to Donald Trump, these Democratic consultants are asking for more money and influence. We’d all be wiser to see this for what it is.

The public does not want more consultant-driven polling. They want to break the monopoly the Center thinks it has on reality. In many ways, they already have—and that is a step toward something yet to be defined.