Recently I was invited to be the token liberal at a major national conference of conservative foundations. The invitation was to debate Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor, TV pundit, and conservative grand strategist, as the after-dinner entertainment. Presumably, conservative donors wished to view the face of the enemy, close up. The better I did, the deeper they would dig into their ample pockets.
The dinner was held at one of New York's most elegant hotels, the Pierre. Thesponsors put me up at the nearby Hotel Roosevelt, a spartan midtown hostelry onecut above fleabag. I gamely accepted this lesser billeting not as demeaningconfirmation of the right's two-class vision for society, but as recognition of myesteem for FDR. But I digress.
The debate itself was good fun, but the real treat was the before-dinnerevent: a panel discussion of four presidents of major right-wing researchfactories, titled, "Philanthropy, Think Tanks, and the Importance of Ideas." Theheads of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato, Manhattan, and American Enterpriseinstitutes were there to tell their patrons what political gains a billiondollars had bought. This session I would have paid to attend.
The panel was chaired by none other than Roger Hertog, a mega-richcenter-right philanthropist and new part-owner of The New Republic recently profiled in these pages as exemplar of a new kind of "velvet conservatism." But there was nothing velvet about the discussion that followed. Most foundations, Hertog began, spend their money on brick-and-mortar institutions -- museums, hospitals, symphonies, universities. These are all fine, Hertog continued, but the four panelists have achieved something far more consequential. They have changed the course of American politics, and they "only" cost, collectively, $70 million dollars a year. "You get huge leverage for your dollars," Hertog affirmed. The panelists smiled.
The first to present was Ed Crane, head of the Cato Institute.Crane complimented his patrons in the audience for recognizing that these battlesof ideas take two or three decades. Cato has been pushing Social Securityprivatization since 1979, Crane noted. Cato allies such as the Federalist Societylabored long years in the wilderness before they became powerful enough toliterally pick the Bush's administration's federal judges.
Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation emphasized his institution'sstrategic planning in building a conservative movement. He emphasized "the fourM's": mission, money, management, and marketing. Heritage places hundreds ofop-eds, all devoted to reinforcing the conservative message. On the money front,Feulner raises millions not just from conservative foundations, but fromcorporations and individuals. Like the Republican Party, the conservative thinktanks use big money to raise small money. Heritage, for instance, getscontributions from 200,000 small donors.
Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, spoke ofhow the right-wing think tanks had reframed national debate by investing in andthen promoting idea-mongers for the long term. The right has been investing inRobert Bork's challenge to antitrust since the 1970s. By the 1990s, hiscontention that antitrust enforcement often backfires had become conventionalwisdom. Charles Murray's claim that welfare actually caused poverty was widelyviewed as an outrage when Murray's 1985 book, Losing Ground, was first published. Though Murray's arithmetic was dubious and his timing backward (poverty came first), the message had a willing audience. The right-wing publicity machine turned the obscure Murray into a policy celebrity. Soon, said DeMuth, Democrats as well as Republicans were saying that Murray was right. Investment in ideas and ideological marketing changed the course of politics.
"There are three lessons," DeMuth told the conservative benefactors in theaudience. "First, things take time. It takes at least 10 years for a radical newidea to emerge from obscurity." DeMuth pointed to school vouchers and SocialSecurity privatization as still incomplete revolutions. But his funders got it,and were with him for the long haul.
"Second," DeMuth added. "Unintended consequences are not enough." For years, astaple of conservative ideology has been the claim that liberal socialengineering backfires: Welfare makes people poorer, antitrust enforcement retardscompetition, safety regulations make people behave more carelessly, etc. "Butnobody claims EPA makes the environment worse," DeMuth cautioned. So theconservative movement also needs affirmative ideas. It needs better ways,conservative ways, to achieve popular social goals.
"Third, all fundamental changes are bipartisan when they happen," DeMuthconcluded. So the right makes great efforts to co-opt New Democrats. Right-wingthink tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies make suretheir ventures include (safely conservative) Democrats. The bipartisan CSISNational Commission on Social Security Reform had no official standing, but withhigh-profile Democrats as well as Republicans it successfully masqueraded as abona fide national commission, and received extensive press coverage.
The final panelist, Larry Mone of the Manhattan Institute, spoke of theimportance of targeting opinion-elites. The Manhattan Institute underwroteCharles Murray's work, but the institute focuses mainly on New York City, as alab to advance policies such as school vouchers and getting tough on crime. Moneclaims credit for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's embrace of the George Kelling-James Q.Wilson "Broken Windows" thesis -- that a crackdown on minor lifestyle crimes wouldalso reduce major crimes.
The Manhattan Institute is especially nimble at co-opting liberals, who areregularly invited to its events both as foils and potential converts. How muchmoney, Mone pressed me, would conservatives need to put into city schools forliberals to support vouchers?
The Philanthropy Roundtable, which sponsored the conference, also likes toinclude a few token liberals. One observed that liberal funders would never speaka language of movement building. "We promote policies piecemeal," he said, "butwe don't think of it as building a progressive movement."
What was impressively revealed here was precisely the right's movementconsciousness. When I was young, the people who spoke of "the movement" and whoused "radical" as an affirmative word were progressive. The movement, at first,referred to the civil-rights movement; by the mid-1960s, it referred to ageneralized movement for social justice. "Movement people" boycotted nonuniongrapes, worked on voter registration, opposed the war in Vietnam.
Today, one hears the phrase "movement conservatism." The right's think tanksand philanthropists alike understand that the enterprise is -- aboveall -- political. IRS rules for foundations and research institutes don't allowthem to be partisan or primarily legislative, but don't mind if they areideological or politically strategic. Heritage, which pushed the envelope aboutas far as one prudently can, got an extensive IRS audit in the 1990s, whichHeritage claimed was politically motivated. Eventually, the IRS relented. Thenonprofit right is also perfectly willing to use the Republican party as itsvehicle, and let the lawyers worry about how to do it legally.
By contrast, mainstream foundations have a tradition of emphasizing researchand reform. Often, the social-change goals are impeccably liberal -- empower thepoor, clean up the environment, improve the welfare of children -- but thepolitical dimension leaves many senior foundation executives uneasy. My tablematewas right: You would never hear senior officers of big mainstream foundationstalking about building a movement. The enterprise is rather understood asphilanthropic. If you research and model good policy, social change will somehowoccur. This tradition harkens back to the Progressive Era conceit that socialproblems have technical solutions. By some alchemy, the research findings willlead to policy reforms through a messy political process whose ignition issomebody else's affair.
This propensity is also reinforced by the composition of mainstream foundationboards, which tend to be patrician and corporate. Activist grantees need to shadetheir purpose to reassure even liberal program officers, who find themselveslooking over their shoulders at their presidents, who in turn must answer totheir boards. It is anomalous, after all, that large private fortunes should belooked upon to underwrite progressive politics. On the right, by contrast, theadvocates, strategists, and funders march to the same tune.
Lately, liberal funders have been more willing to acknowledge that theirenterprise is necessarily political, and to underwrite core progressiveinfrastructure for the long term. The progressive counterparts of the bigright-wing strategy groups -- such as the Economic Policy Institute, the Center forLaw and Social Policy, or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- no longerhave to justify their existence de novo each time they apply for a grant. But the gold standard of grants -- long-term general-operating support -- is still hard to find on the liberal side, and the institutions that the big foundations support are far smaller and less numerous than their conservative counterparts to begin with.
Of course, intellectual energy and political energy feed on eachother. And it has been a while since a progressive idea, per se, transformedpolitics. A generation ago, activists in the streets were energized by books suchas Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and Mike Harrington's The Other America. These in turn transformed national policy. Earlier in the century, progressive foundation-sponsored reports, from the Flexner Report on medical education to Gunnar Myrdal's groundbreaking work on racial relations, An AmericanDilemma, led to changes in the national discussion and, eventually, policy.
Still, it was breathtaking to see the policy strategists of the otherside preen for the edification of their steadfast funders -- the culmination of a25-year strategic alliance between organized business, ideological conservatism,advocacy research, and the Republican Party. Hertog was right: $70 million a yearis chump change to the American elite, but invested strategically in the battleof ideas, it yields a bountiful political harvest. On our side, though strategicfoundation support would be most welcome, it may be that we need to rekindle thepolitics first.
