Matt Bruenig


Matthew Bruenig is an American lawyer, blogger, policy analyst, commentator, and founder of the left-wing think tank People's Policy Project. He was a blogger for the American think tank Demos covering politics and public policy and has written on issues including income distribution, taxation, welfare, elections, and Scandinavian economic models. He is married to Elizabeth Bruenig, formerly an opinion writer and editor at The Washington Post who is now at The New York Times.
Bruenig describes his brand of socialism as follows:
Socialism is the idea that capital should be owned collectively. There are divergent ideas about how to achieve this in reality. One approach is to have the government hold it collectively in social wealth funds. This is the socialism of Yanis Varoufakis, Rudolf Meidner, and John E. Roemer. It is also my brand of socialism, at least for the time.

Bruenig's writing has appeared in a range of publications including The New York Times, Current Affairs, Jacobin, The Atlantic
, Dissent, and The Washington Post.
He has been a featured guest of the politics and humor podcast Chapo Trap House, and appeared on other progressive platforms like the NoFilter of The Young Turks and The Michael Brooks Show.
In 2016, Bruenig was fired from his part-time job blogging for Demos after he posted a series of Tweets attacking Center for American Progress president and former Obama and Clinton policy director, Neera Tanden. Journalists who covered the matter disagreed whether Bruenig's ouster was due to his dispute with his employer regarding harassment on Twitter or to outside pressure on behalf of Tanden.
In 2017, Bruenig founded the think tank the People's Policy Project, which raises money through crowdfunding. The think tank analyzes politics and produces Market Socialist policy proposals tailored to the United States context.
Bruenig was diagnosed as autistic in adulthood and has spoken publicly about how his behavioral characteristics associated with the autism spectrum have had both positive and negative impacts on his professional life.