Neera Tanden wages war on the left — and calls it party unity

Archival photograph: Neera Tanden at the Center for American Progress, April 6, 2016. Alyson Fligg / U.S. Department of Labor, via Wikimedia Commons. Archival photograph, cropped with Pamphlets headline graphics.

Photo license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

OPINION

Neera Tanden’s recurring battles with the left expose a basic contradiction in establishment Democratic politics: the people who demand unity from everyone below them reserve the right to keep attacking the people they expect to fall in line. Socialist media, progressive candidates and critical journalists become permanent defendants. The party’s professional gatekeepers remain the judges.

Tanden returned as president and CEO of the Center for American Progress on February 20, 2025. CAP’s announcement placed her at the center of an effort to build an alternative to Donald Trump, drawing on a career across the Clinton, Obama and Biden administrations. She promised to help build a resilient coalition. That promise provides the standard against which her conduct should be judged.

A scorecard puts the pattern in focus

The supplied scorecard, credited to @theGhostOfRiel and covering July 1 through October 18, lists 82 attacks on Hasan Piker, 55 on Abdul El-Sayed and 40 on Ryan Grim, compared with 94 on Donald Trump. It also lists Graham Platner, Wajahat Ali, Emma Vigeland and Mehdi Hasan among Tanden’s targets. Those figures are the creator’s tally; the image does not include the underlying post archive or counting method.

Graphic: @theGhostOfRiel. Reproduced as the subject of this commentary. Counts and political classifications are the graphic creator’s, not an independent Pamphlets audit.

Tanden’s current public exchanges show the feud continuing. In an October 18 post, she introduced a clip with “Hasan Piker talking about me (for the 7000th time).” That parenthetical is her rhetoric, not a measured count. A separate post called it “kinda pathetic” that the account sharing the clip had blocked her.

The criticism predates this graphic. In a September 2 profile, New York magazine described Tanden’s return to CAP as a campaign against Trump accompanied by persistent battles with her left flank, including Piker. The profile also reported the dispute around his association with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.

The political effect is easy to recognize. Every argument about whether a progressive candidate may associate with a socialist commentator shifts attention from what that candidate proposes to which people the establishment permits into the conversation. A demand for a healthcare system, a challenge to militarism or a criticism of Israeli policy can be displaced by another loyalty test.

Netanyahu got a seat at the table

CAP’s own archive records a revealing comparison. On November 10, 2015, Tanden moderated a conversation with Benjamin Netanyahu. The institution advertised a discussion of Iran, Israeli-Palestinian relations and “ways to strengthen the partnership between Israel and the United States.” The invitation treated the Israeli prime minister as someone the progressive policy world should engage.

That decision faced opposition inside CAP. Reporting by former CAP staffers Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton in The Nation described employees objecting to the visit and challenging the validation it would give Netanyahu. Their account matters because the institution’s critics included people familiar with its own work and internal culture.

The same period produced a more serious dispute over the boundaries of acceptable criticism. Glenn Greenwald’s reporting on leaked CAP emails, republished by Common Dreams, described efforts to accommodate complaints from AIPAC and Ann Lewis about CAP writers’ criticism of Israel, including editorial restrictions. That is a documented reporting allegation about institutional pressure, with a named source and a specific record.

The contrast exposes the priorities at work. A right-wing head of government could be welcomed into a forum devoted to strengthening a strategic partnership. Critics of that partnership encountered arguments over whether their criticism belonged inside the institution at all. In our assessment, this is gatekeeping in defense of the existing foreign-policy order.

The left owes the establishment no silence

Tanden’s defenders can argue that criticism within a coalition is legitimate. It is. The same principle protects the left’s right to scrutinize her record, reject her political judgments and challenge the authority of the institutions she represents. Unity becomes a mechanism of control when only one faction is expected to practice restraint.

A coalition capable of confronting the right needs room for people who challenge concentrated wealth, organize workers, demand universal public services and oppose the use of American power to sustain domination abroad. Treating those commitments as permanent liabilities gives the establishment a veto over the very forces that could change its politics.

This is why Tanden’s feud with the left has significance beyond the personalities involved. A powerful policy institution can help develop a popular alternative. Its leadership can also spend political capital narrowing the range of people and ideas deemed respectable. The public is entitled to judge which activity it sees.

The scorecard’s “F” is an editorial verdict. The deeper charge rests on a public record: coalition-building language alongside sustained conflict with the left, and an institutional history that welcomed Netanyahu while drawing pressure over criticism of Israel. Pamphlets’ judgment is that this form of leadership weakens the popular opposition it claims to serve. The left should organize with the confidence to challenge it.