The Pew Charitable Trust is about to offer $2.2 million to forge some sort of consensus position on social mobility in America. Consensus because, as The WSJ explains, "the funding will go to scholars at the American Enterprise Institute and Heritage Foundation, which have a conservative bent, and the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute, which are more liberal."
Sigh. This bespeaks a certain political naivete on Pew's part. It is certainly true that Brookings and Urban are more liberal than AEI and Heritage, but they are not proportionately liberal. Brookings -- which hosts a large number of right wing scholars and former members of Republican administrations -- is a centrist, establishment think tank, while Urban is just a few ticks to the left of it. AEI and Heritage, conversely, are hard right, movement conservative organizations. That's fine: There's a place for that, and it doesn't make their research wrong. But Brookings and Urban are not their analogues. A wiser study would have tapped the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for American Progress.
This is, come to think of it, a fairly serious weakness for the left. Because establishment-oriented institutions such as Brookings or The New York Times are associated with a historical brand of moderate liberalism, they're often allowed to substitute as liberal institutions even as they determinedly hew to a fair-minded, moderate, even non-ideological approach. So if Brookings scholars are quoted in the media, that balances out having an AEI source mentioned. Of course, the Brookings scholar in question could be Bill Frenzel, former Republican Representative from Minnesota and a member of Bush's Social Security Commission, or Susan Collins, a member of George H.W Bush's Council of Economic Advisors.
That's not to degrade the quality of either individual's research or character, they're just not liberals. But the institution that employs them -- and advertises their presence and affiliation in their "Guide to Experts" -- is allowed to stand-in for a genuinely liberal institution. Meanwhile, no similar categorization errors befoul the right. When someone wants to donate or draw from a conservative institution, they don't find a collection of Clintonites or studious moderates. They get serious conservatives, as they should. And so, what you're going to have in this search for consensus is $2.2 million and a fair amount of media attention apportioning to conservatives and centrists, all the better to end with a center-right consensus position. That's not, on the surface, what Pew is pursuing. But it's what they, and we, will get.
