RALEIGH – Now, why didn’t they think of that before?
The American Left is reportedly so frustrated with recent electoral disappointments that they are embracing a “dramatically new approach.” Some 80 wealthy liberals (of the modern-day, not-at-all-liberal variety) have each pledged at least $1 million to a network of existing and new left-leaning think tanks and advocacy groups. Rather than invest their money primarily in voter registration, mobilization, and litigation, left-wing activists are saying, they should compete with “the potent conservative infrastructure built up over the past three decades,” in the words of The Washington Post.
What is referred to as a “potent conservative infrastructure” is apparently not the conservative-oriented lobbying organizations, campaign-fundraising networks, or new media such as talk radio, since these are either directly involved in the electoral process or sustained mainly through advertising. No, the Left’s new view is that what they perceive as a significant political reversal in the United States is really the doing of think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, campus-directed groups such as the Young America’s Foundation and the Leadership Institute, and state-based groups such as, yes, the John Locke Foundation.
Speaking as the head of one of these groups and a one-time writer or fellow at several of the others, my first reaction to all this is to let out a big, loud whoop. After all, it can be difficult sometimes to explain to potential donors what a “think tank” is and how investing one’s dollars in ideas – their identification, study, development, and dissemination – is at least as good a way to express your principles and accomplish your goals as funding politicians or hiring lobbyists.
Now all I have to do is hand potential donors this Washington Post piece. Free-market think tanks, it seems, rule the political world. They shape the course of human events. The Left is terrified of them. Please, sir, may I have some more?
Seriously, though, this new initiative on the Left, called the Democracy Initiative, is based on faulty premises and poppycock. For one thing, its originators have falsely concluded that the think tanks, training centers, magazines, and other intellectual organs of the American Right are somehow directed by a central authority of donors and planners. Thus the Left is planning to replicate the approach with its own “expert” team that will carefully guide donors’ contributions to selected groups in Washington and around the country.
That’s an idiotic strategy. The Right does nothing of the sort. Groups compete spiritedly for dollars. There is no Central Committee handing out assignments, vetting grant requests, or punishing apostates. Indeed, it is my experience that conservative and libertarian groups don’t cooperate or coordinate nearly as much as they should, which is not all that much anyway. The Post describes the brain behind the Democracy Initiative, Rob Stein, as having “spent years studying conservative groups.” He must not be a very good student, either of the groups or of how human societies actually work.
Moreover, the proposition underlying the Democracy Initiative is that over the past three decades, folks on the Right have invested in ideas and intellectual infrastructure while the Left has not. That’s bonkers. Groups such as the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute in the 1970s, and state-based think tanks such as the John Locke Foundation a decade later, were created by conservative and libertarian entrepreneurs and donors precisely because they viewed the intellectual institutions of American society – colleges and universities, the prestige press, taxpayer-funded radio and television, book publishers, etc. – to be overwhelmingly populated and usually firmly controlled by the Left.
Those who think that modern-day liberals, social democrats, socialists, Left communitarians, feminists, Marxist critical theorists, and many others have not in recent decades been publishing gobs of books, essays, reviews, articles, and now websites have not been paying attention. Those who think that speakers of the Left are not the dominant fare on the nation’s campuses have not spent much time on them. And those who think that scholars, writers, authors, and speakers on the Right have access to more funding than do their counterparts on the Left have a warped sense of financial reality.
Consider the market for public-policy institutions here in North Carolina. I recently looked up the tax returns for the major think tanks and advocacy groups here, most based in the Triangle area. I counted nine nonprofits on the Left, ranging from just left-of-center to quasi-socialist, that work on more than just a single issue and engage in activities that might well label them “think tanks” or “advocacy groups”. This set of institutions includes my friends at the North Carolina Justice Center and the Common Sense Foundation, for example. The combined expenditures for all nine nonprofits in the most recent year for which comparable data were available, 2003, was just over $6 million.
On the Right, that year featured only three similarly situated organizations: the John Locke Foundation, the North Carolina Family Policy Council, and the state chapter of Citizens for a Sound Economy (this nonprofit later split into two organizations, FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, both of which have North Carolina chapters). Their expenditures for 2003 totaled just under $2.5 million.
Broaden out the analysis and you have to consider a number of other organizations that work on a single set of issues. Examples on the Right include North Carolina Right to Life and the state chapter of the National Rifle Association. On the Left, examples include the North Carolina Coalition for a Moratorium and North Carolinians Against Gun Violence. Broaden it out some more and you could add civil-litigation groups, such as the state chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the new North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law, as well as campus-based institutions such as the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University (whose leaders have proved to be quite outspoken on policy issues) and the Jesse Helms Center at Wingate University.
What you will find, if you are a fair-minded person, is that there is no conceivable way to spin the numbers to portray the Right in North Carolina as more generously funded than the Left is. The reverse is true, big time.
For example: tens of millions of tax dollars, at least, spent at the various campuses of the University of North Carolina system essentially go to fund left-leaning scholars, graduate students, and activists who advocate particular policy positions or ideologies in public forums. Millions of private dollars flow to these research and advocacy programs, too. By comparison, right-leaning scholars at UNC campuses are sparse, cloistered, or sticking out like very sore thumbs. (Indeed, while they may be oriented towards free markets or traditional values, these conservative or libertarian scholars often part company with like-minded folks outside the academy in their defense of tenure, which they argue is often the only thing standing between them and a hasty shove out the door by leftist or craven administrators.)
What about the millions of dollars spent on business groups and trade associations? Do they balance out the scales? Not hardly. I’d concede that some of these expenditures translate into public-policy advocacy of ideas I welcome, such as tax cuts or deregulation, but then again these groups also spent lots of money arguing for corporate welfare, special tax breaks, protectionism, exclusive contracts or licensing restrictions, and higher state spending in such areas as education, colleges and universities, transit, and a host of other areas that are already sufficiently awash in taxpayers’ money in the minds of most on the Right.
Besides, the picture doesn’t yet include many other Left-leaning groups, both independent and chapters of national organizations, that engage more directly in lobbying or political activism. These would include the NAACP, labor unions (including those representing teachers and government employees), environmental-alarmist groups such as the Sierra Club and the Conservation Council, process groups such as Common Cause and the N.C. Center for Voter Education (both of which I like, by the way), and rabble-rousing groups such as ACORN (which I strongly dislike).
And then there are the editorial pages of the state’s major metropolitan newspapers. None is conservative. I’m not complaining, mind you, just pointing out the facts.
I’ll admit that things have changed a bit just since 2003 in North Carolina, with the birth of some new organizations and expansion of others on the Right, though these events have again been accompanied by corresponding births and expansions on the Left. My point is that modern-day liberals aren’t going to suddenly change the direction of the political debate by for the first time spending big dollars on researching and promulgating ideas. They’ve been doing this for many, many decades. Could it be that the marketplace of ideas is simply yielding an outcome based on merit rather than money?
Nah, can’t be that.
Hood, president of the John Locke Foundation, is already planning a series of shameless fundraising attempts to capitalize on the Democracy Alliance’s back-handed compliments of free-market think tanks.
p.s. I’d welcome any thoughtful responses or rebuttals to these points, but please spare me one kind of missive if you please: I already know that the categories of “Right” and “Left” are loose and sometimes misleading, and that there is plenty of debate within these groups. Believe me, I know that well. There’s plenty of debate within the confines of the John Locke Foundation! I am using the terms available to me given the nature of the debate into which I am entering. My guess is that we all know pretty much what is meant by these terms in modern usage, so no fair trying to wriggle out with semantics.