It seems like many Democrats have developed a severe case of Think Tank envy exemplified by Bill Bradley's
op-ed in Wednesday's New York Times. They call for a Democratic Manhatten project to build a comparable infrastructure on our side.
I think that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of the current Republican Party: those think tanks are not a sign of Republican strength, they reflect the weakness of their ideas and support, and far from being a stable foundation, they are part of a cancer which has consumed the Republican party and threatens the whole country.
Republicans need those think tanks and a partisan media because they are trying to sell a view of the world that conflicts with reality in so many ways. That is their purpose, to sell unlikely untruths, left over from their origins as mouthpieces for the Tobacco Industry.
Bradley writes:
....Big individual donors and large foundations - the Scaife family and Olin foundations, for instance - form the base of the pyramid. They finance conservative research centers like the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, entities that make up the second level of the pyramid...
...The ideas these organizations develop are then pushed up to the third level of the pyramid - the political level. There, strategists like Karl Rove or Ralph Reed or Ken Mehlman take these new ideas and, through polling, focus groups and careful attention to Democratic attacks, convert them into language that will appeal to the broadest electorate...And then there's the fourth level of the pyramid: the partisan news media. Conservative commentators and networks spread these finely honed ideas.
At the very top of the pyramid you'll find the president. Because the pyramid is stable, all you have to do is put a different top on it and it works fine....
Bradley is right in recognizing that the President is just a figurehead for a vast largely independent political structure, but is mistaken in believing that structure is driven by the ideology of a few wealthy patrons, or that it is carefully planned to implement their vision for America.
To understand the current Republican Party and its support network, you need to look back 50 years to the founding of the Tobacco Institute (from http://roswell.tobaccodocuments.org/about_TI.htm)
In the early 1950s the tobacco industry could no longer ignore the increasing evidence pinpointing cigarette smoking as a cause of cancer and other disease. The hard-hitting studies of Wynder, et al, and the corresponding British study by Richard Doll, forced the industry to acknowledge the "major scientific and public relations problem" it was facing (2024972574)....
In a December 14, 1953 meeting of the cigarette industry, tobacco heads made the call to build a "pro-cigarette" "public relations" entity. It was the feeling of those present that the industry could most effectively face this problem by
jointly engaging a public relations counsel. On December 15th, the industry hired Hill & Knowlton, a New York-based public relations firm, to develop the trade association. Within the month, Hill & Knowlton and the industry joined together to provide public relations for the industry and, at the same time, fund science to investigate the harmful claims made against its product. In January of 1954, Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was created.
Through ads placed in national papers as well as other media outlets, the TIRC publicly questioned the claims of experiments linking cigarette smoking with lung cancer; argued that there was no legitimate "proof that cigarette smoking is one of the causes" of cancer; and questioned the soundness of the statistics linking cigarette smoking with cancer. ... Even before a Scientific Advisory Board was selected the TIRC compiled and published pro-cigarette "scientific" statements.
By the end of 1954, all of the major tobacco companies were involved in litigation (2024972576). The public relations needs of the industry were continually increasing and, correspondingly, the legitimacy of TIRC was increasingly jeopardized: the tobacco industry had to acknowledge that TIRC could not simultaneously maintain its existence as an objective and independent scientific organization committed to informing the public on smoking and health and attend to the public relations problems of the Industry.
In 1958, the tobacco industry formed the Tobacco Institute, whose main purpose was to publicize "the industry's position on the smoking and health issue, representing the industry's position to the Congress and the state legislatures and generally stating the industry's position to the public on issues ranging from smoking and health to taxation and all legislation affecting the industry" (2024972579). Lead by attorney-based committees (the Committee of Counsel) and Covington and Burling (TI counsel), the TI was the tobacco lobby, legislative, PR, State and Federal affairs arm of the industry.
With billions of dollars at stake the industry was willing to spend vast sums to head off legislative and regulatory threats, and to provide their loyal customers enough reassurance that they would continue smoking right to their dying wheeze. That money helped found and support an assortment of right wing and libertarian organizations to argue against the intrusion of big brother government into the choices of individual smokers, and to generate research to challenge the claims of the "junk" scientists and greedy plaintiffs attorneys. Those very organizations are cornerstones of that coveted Republican infrastructure today, but at the time they weren't partisan at all. Indeed in the 50s the South, where support for tobacco was strongest, was entirely Democratic.
That changed in the 60s as the Civil Rights movement began the shift of the white southern establishment (and their supporters) to the Republican party. The emergence of Reagan as a probusiness libertarian cemented the alliance, and ensured that big Tobacco and the think tanks it sponsored would take on an increasingly partisan tone. The realignment would bring with it allies for the Tobacco industry. Extractive industries like oil, mining and timber embraced the antigovernment approach, as did manufacturers seeking to avoid liability for faulty products and regulation of working conditions.
While Cato, Heritage, American Enterprise and lesser groups were supported by and working on behalf of these economic interests, they were not out of the academic mainstream. Nobel prize winner George Stigler wrote an essay in 1959 examining why academic economists were overwhelmingly conservative. The following 20 years had only increased the sense of the profession that Government intrusion in the economy, while well meaning, so often ignored basic economic principals that it generally harmed the general weal. Important scholars in Law and the Social Sciences worked with their counterparts in Academia (indeed often held university seats) to refine a legal theory emphasizing individual rights and economic ideas based on incentives and free markets. In comparison the ideas of the left seemed stale and hidebound. Stagflation was seen as a metaphor for the failure of New Deal liberalism.
The truly egregious distortions of reality, claiming that Tobacco was not addictive, or didn't cause cancer, or that clear cutting improved forest health, were left to the industry groups themselves, and think tanks rarely bore the taint of their stench. In many ways the early 1980s marked the high point for political think tanks in terms of their respectibility and academic (if not political) influence.
Ironically it was Reagan's success, and his implementation of their libertarian theories that set the stage for the corruption of the intellectual right. Reagan instituted many of the rolebacks of regulation, huge cuts in marginal tax rates especially at the top and eventually tax simplification endorsed by conservative academics. Three things became clear. One - the economy was less responsive to incentives than many proponents hoped, so, for example, huge cuts in taxes failed to generate the expected surge in investment (or tax revenue) some predicted. Two, the free market was not so self regulating as was promised and the incentives which brought forth strong reactions were the ones that allowed unscrupulous and manipulative businessmen to reap rich rewards at public or taxpayer expense (see Savings and Loan Scandal), and finally, that the big money patrons of the think tanks were not so committed to their free market and libertarian principles that they would pass up an opportunity to make a buck by way of congenial but unjustifiable legislation or regulation.
Suddenly the scholars at the think tanks faced a conflict between their professional responsibility to reflect the new information while remaining true to their values and the interests of their corporate supporters. The money guys wanted to keep the tax cuts which were driving ruinous deficits, restore the loopholes and incentives which had been cut for efficiency (and to offset some of the tax cuts) and to take advantage of their new political power to secure advantageous policies ranging from trade protection to subsidies to protection from legal liability. It didn't matter to them that those policies often ran directly counter to the economic and legal theories they had paid to laboriously construct.
The problem was exacerbated when Big Tobacco finally succumbed in its legal battle with cancer. That dried up the biggest source of funding, and set loose a bunch of hungry hacks willing to say almost anything to maintain their cushy lifestyles.
Public policy scholars who cared about their integrity left the think tanks and were replaced by Bill Bennetts and Ann Coulters, folks who had honed their ability to forge alternate reality flacking for Tobacco and now offered their services to all comers, using what remained of the authority of think tanks as a cover. The press corps, driven by a combination of incompetence, laziness and corporate connivance, was happy to adopt a he said she said formula that denied any objective response to the fiction of the moment. Unscrupulous politicians confronted with a seemingly insatiable need to gather special interest money to fuel increasingly expensive television ad campaigns were happy to have rationalizations for their compulsive whoring.
That is today's Republican party. A pathological amalgam of pandering power hungry politicians, big money looking to buy an edge, and, in the middle, a class of professional prevaricators willing to package it all up and tie a bow around it for the right price. There is no academic apparatus to convert conservative principles into sound policy, just policy entrepeneurs on the make for a little cash for bs. That can be a couple dollars from thousands to save a poor damsel from starvation and murder, or a millions from Halliburton to get a war on. Their refusal to be bound by facts gives them a huge political edge, stories are always so much more compelling when you change inconvenient details. And their stories actually shape political reality, a point Rove and company aren't shy about making.
The problem for the Republicans is that reality has a way of intruding. Just as Tobacco could only deny the combined weight of medical science and the shared experiences of millions of smokers for so long, the demands of governance will soon demand a reality based response or manifest its failure. Health care is a huge issue, not just for ordinary Americans, but for their employers and federal state and local governments. A pandemic brews in Asia which may test our public health system. The cost of failure could dwarf 911 a thousand times over. The current problems are a result of policies designed to enrich related industry at public cost. The time is running out when that course is politically feasible, but I see no evidence that the Republicans can muster the will or the intellect to find a way out. Global warming and runaway gas prices are the direct result of an industry driven energy policy. Denial wont recoup the losses of insurance companies when tornados and hurricanes strike, or help people pay their heating bills. They will demand real action with real results.
That is were we Democrats have an edge. Increasingly we are gathering the experts who study the evidence and build sound policy on it. Lifelong Republicans like Richard Clarke who understand the real security threats facing the country. Libertarians who are frightened by the Patriot act or the Schiavo bill. The overwhelming majority of real economists who see looming disaster in this administration's contempt for their work. Our political problem is not that we lack the right's machinery for manufacturing reality; we have a monopoly on reality itself, which is sometimes harder but always better. What we sometimes lack are political leaders who have the guts to stand on reality and make the case for what we must do. We are losing because we don't trust the truth and try and make up our own fictions, just a bit more honest and moral than the other guy's. Often that means we swallow half their lies to sound reasonable, so Kerry was for the War in Iraq before he was against it (or was that the other way round) and Lieberman acknowledges that SS is going bankrupt. We gotta stop that cause voters will take a baldfaced lie over a half hearted one every time.