The Conscience of a Liberal

ultimately answering to a small group of people that collectively reward loyalists and punish dissenters. These institutions provide obedient politicians with the resources to win elections, safe havens in the event of defeat, and lucrative career opportunities after they leave office. They guarantee favorable news coverage to politicians who follow the party line, while harassing and undermining opponents. And they support a large standing army of party intellectuals and activists.

The world of right-wing think tanks, although it’s far from being the most important component of the “vast conspiracy,” offers a useful window into how the conspiracy works. Here are a few scenes from modern think tank life:

Item: Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and veteran of the Reagan administration, works at the National Center for Planning Analysis, a think tank that specializes in advocating privatization. NCPA’s financial support includes funding from twelve foundations, including Castle Rock, Earhart, JM, Koch, Bradley, Scaife, and Olin.[11] Disillusioned with George W. Bush’s policies, Bartlett writes Impostor, a book that accuses Bush of not being a true conservative. He is promptly fired from his think tank position.

Item: Sen. Rick Santorum, a hard-line conservative representing the relatively moderate state of Pennsylvania, is swept away in the 2006 midterm election. He promptly takes a job as director of the “America’s Enemies” program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an organization whose self-proclaimed mission is “to clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.” EPPC is supported by grants from eight foundations: Castle Rock, Earhart, Koch, Bradley, Smith Richardson, Olin, and two of the Scaife foundations.[12]

Item: The National Center for Public Policy Research is a think tank devoted to “providing free market solutions to today’s public policy problems”—an activity that in recent years has mainly involved casting doubt on global warming. It made the news in 2004 when it was learned that NCPPR was helping Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist, launder funds: The think tank funneled $1 million to a fake direct-mail firm that shared Abramoff’s address. Why NCPPR? Since its founding in 1982, the organization has been headed by Amy Moritz Ridenour, an associate of Abramoff’s when he became president of the College Republicans in 1981. Ridenour’s husband is also on the payroll, with both being paid six-figure salaries. NCPPR receives funding from Castle Rock, Earhart, Scaife, Bradley, and Olin.[13]

There’s nothing on the left comparable to the right-wing think tank universe. The Washington Post has a regular feature called “Think Tank Town,” which “publishes columns submitted by 11 prominent think tanks.” Of the eleven institutions so honored, five are movement conservative organizations: the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and the Hudson Institute. Only one, the Center for American Progress, can really be considered an arm of the progressive movement—and it wasn’t founded until 2003. Other think tanks, like the Brookings Institution, although often described as “liberal,” are in reality vaguely centrist organizations without a fixed policy line. There are a few progressive think tanks other than CAP that play a significant role in policy debate, such as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute. In terms of funding and manpower, however, these organizations are minnows compared with the movement conservative whales.

The proliferation of movement conservative think tanks since the 1970s means that it’s possible for a movement intellectual to make quite a good living by espousing certain positions. There’s a price to be paid—as Bruce Bartlett discovered, you’re expected to be an apparatchik, not an independent thinker—but many consider it a good deal.

To a very large extent these think tanks were conjured into existence by a handful of foundations created by wealthy families. The bigger think tanks, Heritage and AEI in particular, also receive large amounts of corporate money.

The network of conservative think tanks has its counterpart in the world of journalism. Publications such as the National Journal, the Public Interest, and the American Spectator were, like the movement conservative think tanks, created with a lot of help from right-wing foundations—more or less the same foundations that helped create the think tanks. There are also a number of movement conservative newspapers: The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal has long played a key role, while the Washington Times, controlled by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, has become the de facto house organ of the Bush administration. And there is, of course, Fox News, with its Orwellian slogan, Fair and Balanced.

Last but certainly not least, there’s the nexus among lobbyists and politicians. The apparent diversity of corporate lobbying groups, like the apparent diversity of conservative think tanks, conceals the movement’s true centralization. Until his defeat in 2006 forced him to take a new job confronting America’s enemies, Sen. Rick Santorum held a meeting every Tuesday with about two dozen top lobbyists. Here’s how Nicholas Confessore described those meetings in 2003:

Every week, the lobbyists present pass around a list of the jobs available and discuss whom to support. Santorum’s responsibility is to make sure each one is filled by a loyal Republican—a senator’s chief of staff, for instance, or a top White House aide, or another lobbyist whose reliability has been demonstrated. After Santorum settles on a candidate, the lobbyists present make sure it is known whom the Republican leadership favors.[14]

Santorum’s weekly meetings and similar meetings run by Roy Blunt, the House majority whip, were the culmination of the “K Street Strategy,” the name Grover Norquist and former House majority leader Tom DeLay gave to their plan to drive Democrats out of lobbying organizations, and give the jobs to loyal Republicans. Part of the purpose of this strategy was to ensure that Republicans received the lion’s share of corporate contributions, while Democratic finances were starved—a goal also served by direct pressure. In 1995 DeLay compiled a list of the four-hundred largest political action committees along with the amounts and percentages of money they gave to each party, then called “unfriendly” lobbyists into his office to lay down the law. “If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules,” he told the Washington Post.[15] Equally important, however, the takeover of the lobbies helped enforce loyalty within the Republican Party, by providing a huge pool of patronage jobs—very, very well-paid patronage jobs—that could be used to reward those who toe the party line.

The various institutions of movement conservatism create strong incentives for Republican politicians to take positions well to the right of center. It’s not just a matter of getting campaign contributions, it’s a matter of personal financial prospects. The public strongly believes that Medicare should use its bargaining power to extract lower drug prices—but Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Democrat-turned-Republican who was the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from 2001 to 2004, pushed through a Medicare bill that specifically prohibited negotiations over prices, then moved on to a reported seven-figure salary as head of the pharmaceutical industry’s main lobbying group. Rick Santorum was clearly too far right for Pennsylvania, but he had no trouble finding a nice think tank job after his defeat—whereas Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Rhode Island Republican who lost his Senate seat the same year, had to make do with a one-year teaching appointment at Brown.

Lincoln Chafee’s defeat brings me to another aspect of how the institutions of movement conservatism control the GOP: they don’t just support Republican politicians who toe the line, they punish those who don’t. Chafee faced a nasty primary challenge from his right. His opponent, Steve Laffey, received more than a million dollars in support from the Club for Growth, which specializes in disciplining Republicans who aren’t sufficiently in favor of cutting taxes. “We want to be seen as the tax-cut enforcer,” declared Stephen Moore, the club’s president at the time, in 2001.

The club had high hopes of taking out Chafee: Two years earlier a candidate sponsored by the Club for Growth almost defeated Sen. Arlen Specter, another relatively moderate Republican, in the Pennsylvania primary. And these challenges are effective. As one Republican congressman said in 2001, “When you have 100 percent of Republicans voting for the Bush tax cut, you know that they’re looking over their shoulder and not wanting to have Steve Moore recruiting candidates in their district.”

Specter was first elected to the Senate in 1980, which makes him a holdover from the days when the GOP still had room for moderates.

Younger Republican politicians have, by and large, grown up inside a party defined by movement