Dear Jonathan:
In college, I read A.J. Ayer’s neo-positivist tract Language Truth and Logic, in which he argued that because moral judgments were not scientifically verifiable, they were neither true nor false. Ayer thought he was cutting through metaphysical cant, but he produced the supreme work of metaphysical nonsense by imposing canons of verification from one form of life (experimental physics) onto another (everyday social and political life). I know this is a long-winded intro, but you make a similar mistake in the way you (following Mancur Olson in this respect) analyze political groups in your book. You try to impose a model of calculable, self-interest-seeking behavior on all forms of political activity. The result is that you obscure one kind of activity that has been very important to our transition from nomadic tribe to global civilization: moral, public-minded behavior. It has also been an important kind of behavior in breaking the legislative deadlock among interest groups that you think has become inevitable.
Let me put this on a simpler level. One person helps an old lady across the street because he believes it is what one ought to do; another does so with the hope of getting a tip. The outward behavior is the same, but the motives are fundamentally different. The same kind of difference exists between a public-interest organization such as Common Cause or a think tank such as Brookings and a lobby such as the American Dental Association or the National Association of Manufacturers. Both might end up serving the public interest, but only the first kind set out initially to do so. The latter kind of group–the lobby–is dedicated first and foremost to the self-interest of the clients or members who fund it. The outlook of the public-interest group is moral; the outlook of the lobby is self-interested, economic, and narrowly utilitarian. Again, let’s be clear: There are public-interest groups that act in a manner that damages the public interest–the American Civil Liberties Union’s misbegotten crusade against campaign-finance reform, for instance–and there are interest groups like, say, the AFL-CIO on a good day that act in a manner that benefits the entire country. But the underlying framework of their activity is still different. And this brings me to your point about elite organizations.
Today’s public interest groups such as Common Cause and think tanks such as Brookings are the descendants of the policy groups and research organizations that sprang up during the Progressive Era. I call them “elite” organizations for lack of a better word, and doing so has caused me much grief from reviewers who misread “elite” to mean “upper class.” Elite organizations are as peculiarly an American creation as our powerful interest groups and our relatively weak political parties. These older policy groups and their founders saw themselves as “disinterested”–that is, above class, party, faction, and region; they often sought to include representatives of competing interest groups, but they saw their role as defining a national or public interest that would unite, or event transcend, all these groups; they were neither revolutionaries nor Social Darwinists, but sought to achieve within corporate capitalism the greatest degree of equality and economic security–and to do so through government intervention guided by the objective findings of social science. Such was the origin of Brookings, the Twentieth Century Fund (now the Century Foundation), and the Russell Sage Foundation, among other groups. And this thinking also guided publications like Adolph Ochs’ New York Times and Herbert Croly’s New Republic.
Many of the conservative think tanks and policy groups that originated or came into their own in the ‘70s fancied themselves to be part of a “counter-establishment” to these kind of organizations, but they were really a counterfeit establishment. They used the same outward identification (“institution,” “foundation,” “council”) and demanded the same deference from the public, but they were not disinterested–they represented their business funders, or particular factions within the Republican Party–and they used social science not as means of discovering the truth but as an instrument of lobbying or political debate. You are right, though: There are distinctions to be made among these groups. One prototype was Charles Walker’s Council for Capital Formation, which called itself a “council” and funded and published studies by distinguished academics but was simply a highbrow lobbying organization for Walkers’ clients who wanted to rewrite the tax code. Another was the Heritage Foundation, whose first president came from the NAM, and which didn’t initially publish studies and books but “backgrounders” aimed at telling politicians what to do tomorrow.
The American Enterprise Institute tried to maintain a modicum of scholarship and objectivity–not out of devotion to the older ideal of disinterestedness but because the Democratic Congress nearly took away its tax exemption in 1965 because of its proximity to the Goldwater campaign. AEI has evolved over the decades into an institution more similar to Brookings, while many of the new conservative groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy are lobbying fronts like Walkers’ Council. Unfortunately, it has been the latter that carry the most weight, and their rise has contributed to the public’s deep and ultimately self-defeating cynicism about Washington and politics.
You take me to task for ignoring the failures of the elite policy groups. You’re right. I talk about the failures in the book, but not enough. In the 1960s, buoyed by their success in previous decades, many of these groups and individuals acquired a sense of their infallibility, which led to disasters at home and abroad. But the critics of these elite groups–on the left and the right–focused on their failings and ignored what had been valuable about them. And in the case of conservative critics, they often focused on what were not really failings. What bothered Henry Ford II about the Ford Foundation was not its funding of anti-Semitic black nationalists in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school fiasco but its support for energy conservation and its funding of consumer and environmental groups. One reason I wrote my book was to revive the ideal of a public-spirited elite and of organizations that are devoted to the public good rather than simply the welfare and wealth of their particular clients or constituents.
I’ve enjoyed our discussions, but I can’t help wonder whether readers will understand after all this back-and-forth that we agree much more than disagree about the general matters under discussion. When I read the key chapter in your book, “Demosclerosis,” in which you talk about the importance of policy-making as experimentation, I found myself agreeing with everything you said. It is the part that sounds like A. J. Ayer that bothers me.
