Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

Today, many think tanks have become partisan fighters, armed with rapid-response teams and quickly assembled reports. One think-tank veteran, Steve Clemons, even back in 2003, went so far as to speak of “The Corruption of Think Tanks” in an essay he penned. Then the vice president of the New America Foundation, Clemons wrote about “the development of an underground, or ‘second,’ economy of political influence” where funders of think tanks “increasingly expect policy achievements that contribute to their bottom line.” Think tanks, Clemons added, “are less and less committed to genuine inquiry designed to stimulate enlightened policy decisions and more and more oriented to deepening the well-worn grooves of a paralyzed debate, frozen in place by the contending power of potential winners and losers with armies of lobbyists at their heels.” 5

The old think tanks, by contrast, were more scholarly and almost patrician. They did have ideological bents, but their members shared a kind of wonkiness that could transcend differences. Most important, the old think tanks’ time frame was long rather than short. They conducted multiyear studies, and not necessarily in response to the mood of the moment or for immediate media impact. They produced reports that sometimes gained traction and became mighty policies. Think, for instance, of the work of the Brookings Institution on the federal budget. In the early 1970s, Brookings began publishing Setting National Priorities. This series of studies, along with additional analyses of federal spending, played a role in Brookings’s call for the establishment of the Congressional Budget Office. In 1975, the CBO was born, and its first director was Alice Rivlin, a Brookings economist. 6

The archetypal new-style think tank is hardly stodgy. It prizes performance in the short term: quick reaction to events, media-timed and -friendly reports, and minute-to-minute messaging. It prizes “impact” and metrics to show to donors and the world. Its stars create buzz on social media and TV and organize invitation-only conferences of power brokers. It may act like an advocacy organization, and, even more than in the past, it may express naked ideology.

Not only is the time horizon of this new-style outfit shorter than its older-style counterpart: many of today’s most successful think tanks have only been around for a few years. The most successful think tank is not just dynamic and up to the minute: it is creating the minute.

Meanwhile, the old think tanks are struggling to catch up and merely sustain themselves. A longtime scholar at Brookings, for example, tells me that he and his colleagues are now asked to respond to more press inquiries. Just as with journalists, they are encouraged to use Facebook and Twitter.

The blurred boundaries of the shadow elite era are written all over the new-style think tank. Its playground is an environment where boundaries are porous and the organizational missions of government, business, media, and—yes—think tanks are unfixed and morphing. It’s the same environment where who is a journalist, an expert, a businessman, or a philanthropist, as we’ve shown throughout these pages, is stretched and manipulated as convenience serves.

Think tanks are, by definition, ambiguous and have a hybrid quality, as sociologist Thomas Medvetz shows in his Think Tanks in America . It is no accident, then, that think tanks have mushroomed in the era of blurred boundaries—because they are themselves a product of a blur, rendering them especially in tune with our age. While the appeal of think tanks has always depended on their proximity to different arenas—politics, academia, business, and the media—and their placement in a space that smudges the lines, 7the smudging has grown both quantitatively and qualitatively. As I have illustrated, ambiguity is the very key to the success of shadow elites, lending them deniability. The ambiguity exhibited by think tanks likewise is not an accident, Medvetz argues: 8

By combining elements of more established sources of public knowledge—universities, government agencies, businesses, and the media—think tanks exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the work, unbound by the more clearly defined roles of those other institutions.

The success of think-tankers in this new world hinges on moving among roles in these arenas—scholar, policy adviser, media contributor, entrepreneur, consultant. It depends not only on quick study, but on connecting and forging networks, on conferences and cross-pollination among politics, business, and media. Medvetz documents the fact that formal contacts among think tanks rose significantly beginning in the 1990s, with conferences and publications often sponsored jointly. Similarly oriented think tanks tend to congregate in the same geographical areas of Washington, D.C., 9or even share adjoining office space.

“In” are media-dazzling events; passé are the lengthy studies that used to be the pride and hallmark of a think tank. As another scholar who studies them, political scientist Don Abelson, writes: 10

What has changed over the past few decades is how deeply invested think-tanks have become in the marketplace of ideas. They are more politically savvy, more technologically sophisticated and better equipped to compete with the thousands of organizations in the United States jostling to leave an indelible mark on key policy initiatives. . . . This is what convinced the Heritage Foundation that it should specialize in what has come to be known as quick-response policy research. Several think-tanks and universities have adopted the language of corporations, and, in doing so, devote much of their time to discussing metrics and performance indicators. In the era of corporatization, numbers matter.

Here we see the corporatizing values of fast turnaround and “measurable” results. Those include: number of followers or friends on Facebook or Twitter, times a think-tank scholar has testified before Congress, website views or downloaded research, and—the one that seems most notable to me—number of think-tankers placed in government jobs.

Heritage, an expressly conservative think tank founded more than forty years ago, has gone high-octane under the recent leadership of Tea Party player and former senator Jim DeMint, who, as Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe points out, presided over a nine-city Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour in 2013. His predecessor as president at Heritage made over a million dollars; DeMint’s net worth before joining Heritage stood at around $65,000. 11It looks like a lucrative career move for DeMint. Here’s Bender: 12

Not long ago, Washington’s think tanks constituted a rarefied world of policy-minded scholars supported by healthy endowments and quietly sought solutions to some of the nation’s biggest challenges. But now Congress and the executive branch are served a limitless feast of supposedly independent research from hundreds of nonprofit institutions that are pursuing fiercely partisan agendas and are funded by undisclosed corporations, wealthy individuals, or both.

Where does the appeal of think tanks emanate from? Fundamental to their influence is the ability to trade on a neutral, academic veneer. But also fundamental is the much greater importance of connecting. This chapter, then, looks into the coordinated strategies of various think tanks whose inhabitants move agilely through government, consulting, media, and business roles and who sometimes are more interested in promoting particular agendas than the more scholarly policy research of the past. And, like the company-state and corporations featured in the last chapter, they sometimes stand in for the state in forging policy initiatives and public programs.