The age of the conventional Democrat is over. The time of the Democratic contrarian has come.

So says Adam Jentleson, anyway. The veteran political operative and former adviser to the late Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently launched a think tank that asks Democratic candidates to ignore pressure from the far left, take positions outside the “liberal box,” and be a lot more “heterodox” in general. If this seems to you like Beltway speak for asking Democrats to sound more like Republicans, well, you would be at least partly correct. The Democratic Party used to have supermajorities in Congress because it allowed its members to hold a wide range of positions, Jentleson told me. To start winning again, the party needs to bring that back, he said. His new think tank, Searchlight Institute, plans to help.

With its seven-person team, a polling arm, and a $10 million budget, Searchlight promises to offer a “menu” of orthodoxy-challenging ideas for Democrats to run on. “We don’t need to create a new Joe Rogan,” Jentleson said. “We need people to go on Rogan with better ideas.”

Some Democrats are excited about that menu, at least in theory. The party needs to figure out an agenda beyond opposing President Donald Trump, they say. And there are no bad ideas in brainstorming. It’s “like that year in the 1980s when Saturday Night Live fired everybody and kept Eddie Murphy,” Mike Nellis, a party strategist and former adviser to Kamala Harris, told me. “Right now you’ve gotta prove you’re Eddie Murphy or get the hell out of here. So I’m not begrudging anybody that’s trying something new.”

But this attitude does not exist in all corners, and here, as they say, is the rub: Jentleson’s critics, who mostly come from the progressive end of the ideological spectrum, believe that his project amounts to asking Democrats to abandon their values.