“Centrism festival” is not a phrase that would excite most normal people. But DC political types are not normal. So on Wednesday a bevy of political operatives, technocrats, and conservative Democratic lawmakers gathered in the basement of a Washington, DC, hotel for WelcomeFest, a corporate-backed event billed as the “largest public gathering of centrist Democrats.” The event, blazoned with the sizzling theme of “Responsibility to Win,” was held in a conference room big enough to seat several hundred people—and though the last several rows were sparsely filled, that was enough to make it a relatively hot ticket (again, purely in DC terms) on a sweltering summer afternoon.

Who comes to a centrism rally for fun? Someone like Liam Kerr, the cofounder of WelcomePAC, the group that brought WelcomeFest to life. On Wednesday, Kerr wore a West Virginia University football jersey customized with former senator Joe Manchin’s name on the back—a tribute to the conservative Democrat most known for sabotaging his own party’s agenda. What’s a buzzy book at a centrist festival? Abundance, the tome by journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has been embraced as a holy text by the Democratic right. (Thompson was also a speaker.) Who’s a big star at a place like WelcomeFest? Someone like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, a Blue Dog Democrat and one of the few lawmakers in her party who at times votes in line with Republicans. It happened to be her birthday, and attendees toasted her while eating from a big transparent storage bin of gummy bears to celebrate the occasion.

Who is absolutely not welcome at WelcomeFest? People opposed to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, for one. At one point, protesters from the group Climate Defiance interrupted Representative Ritchie Torres—one of DC’s most fervent backers of Israel—with signs reading “Gays Against Genocide” and “Fire Ritchie.” The lanyard-wearing centrists booed. As the protesters were pushed off stage, conference organizers blasted Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” on the speakers. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Torres’s fellow speaker, pundit Josh Barro, fumed. “Enough already.” The crowd cheered once the protesters were removed from the venue, giving Barro and Torres a standing ovation.

That hostility to the protesters was matched by the day’s antipathy toward the left in general. Throughout the day, speakers took aim at progressive advocacy groups—referred to simply as “the groups”—blaming them for the Democratic Party’s electoral losses. Substack pundit and WelcomeFest royalty Matt Yglesias made this thesis the focus of his presentation. To argue that “the groups” create “bad incentives for Democrats,” he pointed to Democratic lawmakers’ recent trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man illegally deported by the Trump administration. (Evidence shows that talking about Garcia’s case actually hurt Trump, but no matter.) Yglesias returned to his long-held position that Democrats should moderate even further, and prepare to get yelled at by everyone.

Getting bullied online was a recurring theme of the centrist conference. But attendees were quick to emphasize that they were totally fine with it, really.

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“The backlash that happens online is actually the sign that you’re doing something right,” said Adam Jentleson, who is currently distancing himself from his previous role as chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman.

Lakshya Jain, a machine learning engineer and political data analyst, said that being yelled at on Bluesky is good. “You’re not fighting fascism. You’re posting on your phone,” he added. “If you want to fight fascism, go and win elections.”

There were scattered references to “everyday people” and calls on the Democratic Party to focus on the issues “keeping Americans up at night.” But campaign finance records reveal that the conference and the organizers of WelcomeFest are backed by several billionaires and other corporate interests, including the Walton family, Michael Bloomberg, and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, the Revolving Door Project noted. The conference was also sponsored by the dark-money group Americans Together, which was founded by Joe Manchin’s daughter, Heather Manchin Bresch—better known as the former CEO of Mylan who infamously defended the company’s price gouging of lifesaving EpiPens.

Many of the figures involved in the Abundance faction have financial ties to AI, crypto, and Big Tech as well. One self-identified Abundist (yes, that is actually the name), Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, made the absurd claim on Wednesday that the left is “carrying the water for the most pernicious, nefarious corporations in modern history,” referring to social media companies.

As for actual policy substance, most of what the speakers promoted amounted to lightly rebranded neoliberalism. During his discussion with Torres, Barro argued that labor unions were to blame for pushing policies that stand in the way of “abundance” in New York. Other sponsors of the conference included Third Way, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Blue Dog Democrats.

To better understand the centrist mind, I wandered around the WelcomeFest happy hour to see what brought people to the event—and what, exactly, they believe in.

One thing they didn’t believe in: music. The only sounds filling up the space were the many very loud conversations about centrism. I kept hearing phrases like “open borders” being thrown around. The crowd was unsurprisingly male-dominated, but surprisingly young, with many twentysomethings chatting away. Everyone was wearing a WelcomeFest lanyard, and lots of people were toting big backpacks. (I witnessed several incidents in which unsuspecting revelers got whacked by other people’s bags.)

I spoke with an effective altruist, a congressional staffer for a powerful House committee, young men who admire figures like Yglesias and Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper, and a college student handing out brochures for the Madison Coalition, a right-wing advocacy organization pushing an amendment to prohibit court packing and lock in nine justices in the US Supreme Court. They were the sorts of people who said things like “Jake Auchincloss is great.… I love that he reads think tank reports and is a nerd,” or, “I do feel like Kyrsten Sinema was treated badly.”

The House staffer gushed about seeing his entire Twitter/X feed materialize in real life. “That’s been pretty surreal,” he said. I asked if he had a political hero, or a political figure he believed the Democratic Party should emulate, and he cited Ritchie Torres. I asked if he thought the New York congressman’s obsession with Israel was a bit strange. “That’s reasonable,” he replied.

The young men grew visibly uncomfortable when I asked whether the Democratic Party’s handling of the war in Gaza might have contributed to its crushing electoral defeat. After a long pause, one offered, “No, the numbers don’t add up.” The rest nodded. (None agreed to speak on the record.)

Polling suggests otherwise. A poll by the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project found that nearly a third of voters who cast their ballots for former President Joe Biden in 2020 but decided against voting for Kamala Harris in the presidential election based that decision on Biden’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza. In April, a poll from the Pew Research Center also found that more than half of US adults now hold an unfavorable opinion of the Israeli state, up from 42 percent before the October 7 attack. But these stats didn’t seem to have made it into centrist orthodoxy.

The effective altruist similarly tensed up when I mentioned Gaza. But unlike the others I spoke with, he eventually offered a hesitant concession: “Showing some empathy to Palestinians is probably good” for the Democratic Party, he said.

If the event were meant to showcase the vitality of centrist politics, it instead offered a portrait of operatives and thinkers preoccupied with online backlash and unable to reconcile their elite backing with their rhetorical appeals to “everyday people.” Their solution to Democratic losses—that Democrats should simply start winning—was less a strategy and more wishful thinking. Enthusiasm never quite filled the room, literally or figuratively, and the centrists I spoke with at the happy hour didn’t seem all that convinced by their message. Or that their movement could resonate with anyone outside the Beltway.