Democracy, an unassuming policy journal with an office near the White House, is a place where members of the new administration have floated ideas that may now become policy.

By Marc Tracy @ NYTimes.com, Feb. 28

It has only 500 subscribers. And yet Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, a 15-year-old quarterly run by a three-person staff out of a small office blocks from the White House, may be one of the most influential publications of the post-Trump era.

Six of President Biden’s 25 Cabinet-level officials and appointees, including the secretary of state and the chief of staff, as well as many other high-level administration members, have published essays in its pages, floating theories that may now be translated into policy.

Democracy’s print edition has no photos or illustrations, and its website is bare-bones. It has no podcast, and the titles of its articles — “Meritocracy and Its Discontents”; “How to End Wage Stagnation”; “Defend Multilateralism: It’s What People Want” — are not exactly the stuff of clickbait.

It is also not one of those publications with a big social presence, hosting public policy discussions at the Hyatt rather than cocktail parties for the Georgetown set [....]

In a 2016 essay for Democracy, “Confronting the Pandemic Threat,” Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, sounded a warning that now seems prescient. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser, argued in a 2018 Democracy essay that, despite the anti-Washington rhetoric that had energized many voters in recent years, most Americans would welcome ambitious federal programs.

Cabinet-level officials from the administration of President Barack Obama have lately used Democracy as a medium for sending advice to their successors. The economist Jason Furman, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Mr. Obama, directly addressed Mr. Biden’s team members in an essay that adopted an older-sibling tone.

“No one needs to check anything with you or listen to you, let alone do what you say,” he wrote. “You do have one power: the opportunity to persuade. If people think you have some useful [....]