Entry 5:

Most interesting books have at least one "he can't be serious" postulate. I'll come back to yours, but mine is the notion you just mentioned. Most people feel intuitively that there must be a difference between a public-spirited group like (to use your example) Friends of the Earth and a merely self-interested lobby like (again, your example) the National Federation of Independent Businesses. And, yes, in my book I reject the distinction. I think it just clouds our thinking.

That's not to say I don't have my own opinions of various groups and lobbies. The trouble is, no two of us agree on which lobbies serve the public interest and which serve themselves. I have yet to meet a Washington lobbyist who didn't believe that she was trying to do the right thing. And, believe me, I have conservative friends who are every bit as public-spirited and principled as you or me and who would argue that it's the NFIB that's acting in the public good. After all (they'd say), the NFIB is trying to protect the ability of beleaguered small businesses to pursue the American dream, whereas Friends of the Earth is a bunch of staff-driven yuppies trying to impose their own lifestyle on everybody else.

Inevitably, then, the distinction between public-interest lobbies and self-interest lobbies disintegrates into a shouting match in which everyone claims to have virtue on his side. Unhelpful. I wouldn't say that all lobbies are "selfish," but I would say they're all self-interested. They all want to influence the government to do more of whatever it is that they like. That may mean lower taxes and more smog or higher taxes and less smog. Whatever you or I may think of their virtue, they are all fueling the Washington lobbying arms race.

In the same spirit, I'm puzzled by your distinction between public-spirited think tanks, like Brookings (where I'm a writer in residence), and agenda-mongering conservative ones, like the American Enterprise Institute (where I was once a visiting fellow) or the Cato Institute (which co-published my free-speech book). Sure, they occupy different places on the ideological spectrum (centrist, conservative, libertarian). Yes, Brookings sets a more scholarly tone than most. But they're all filled with thinkers who have opinions and who manifest those opinions in their research, and they're also filled with thinkers who nonetheless try to do work that holds up under critical scrutiny.

The real distinction, I think, isn't between advancing the public interest and obfuscating it. The distinction is between doing good research and doing bad research--and there's plenty of both on all sides. (My own experience has made me especially wary of research sponsored by environmental groups.) Objectivity and disinterestedness come not from sitting in one's office trying to be objective or disinterested; they emerge from the critical exchange of differing ideas. So I think the rise of conservative and liberal think tanks that make no secret of their biases is all to the good. The more, the merrier.

The last word is yours to use as you choose, but perhaps I can prod you to spend it addressing what I think is the "he can't be serious" postulate in your own book. That's what I read as your longing for elites and selfless experts to guide public policy. You write of "the tradition of dispassionate expertise on which twentieth-century American democracy had relied," and speak of the old elite councils and think tanks as seeking to be "above class, party, and ideology." At their best, you write, these elites "have allowed citizens ... to put their trust in a dispassionate group of experts. Trust in their wisdom and expertise has been essential to trust in government itself."

My reaction to all this was: Huh? Those old elites were often noble people, but didn't they often reflect the smug consensus of the day, mirroring an alarmingly narrow spectrum of opinion? And--forgive me--I think I detect a consistent tendency to identify dispassionate elites with liberal ones, a tendency that may itself strike many nonliberals as smug.

The conservative movement didn't need to mount a campaign to discredit the notion of disinterested expertise, as you charge; the disinterested experts did that perfectly well all by themselves. I think the public looked at the track record of those elites of in the 1960s and 1970s and concluded, justifiably, that the Ford Foundation and the New York Times and the Committee for Economic Development and, yes, even the Brookings Institution had been wrong again and again: wrong on crime, wrong on poverty, wrong on inflation, wrong on energy, wrong on resource scarcity, wrong on Vietnam. These days, indeed, I think you'll find a lot more humility around Brookings.

John, many thanks for this splendid discussion. When you get a minute, come have lunch with me in the Brookings cafeteria. The turkey chili, at least, is dispassionate.