Social Science for What?: Philanthropy and the Social Question in a World Turned Rightside Up

CHAPTER 3. UNSETTLING THE SOCIAL QUESTION: FROM CONSENSUS TO COUNTERREVOLUTION IN THE POSTWAR POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE

 CHAPTER 3  UNSETTLING THE SOCIAL QUESTION: FROM CONSENSUS TO COUNTERREVOLUTION IN THE POSTWAR POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE Among the central conceits of the modern conservative movement has been to cast itself in counterrevolutionary terms. Nowhere does this play more loudly than from within the selfstyled counterintelligentsia (vanguard of the counterrevolution) that for the last three decades has served the movement as a veritable fountainhead of conservative ideas and policy positions, a steady stream of editorial opinion, and—especially important—a keeper of the movement narrative and of its founding myths. As discussed more fully in chapter 5, the circuitry of activist intellectuals , think tanks, law institutes, journals, and foundations that anchors the conservative intelligentsia is itself the product of a selfconsciously countermobilization launched in the 1970s. Of late, this now well-entrenched punditry has taken to writing its own history, if only to mark a slew of recently celebrated twenty-fifth year (the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Manhattan Institute, for example) and other significant movement coming of age anniversaries (ten years of welfare reform). It is, by all accounts, a story of improbable triumph over the liberal Goliath, of tireless crusade against liberalism’s most cherished conventional wisdoms, of irrevocably changing the policy conversation, of victory in the proverbial war of ideas. Told with the all the zestful hubris that the liberal knowledge establishment eschews, it is a story about changing history.1 73 Indeed, though its political influence is easily exaggerated, the ascendancy of the conservative knowledge and policy establishment is at this point beyond dispute. On issues ranging from social welfare to taxes to foreign policy and so-called family values, it has transformed and dominated the terms of policy debate. It has done so based on what is now a well-rehearsed script. First comes reframing issues as crises—of morality, of cultural degeneracy, and if at all possible of violated property rights. This is followed by vaulting a series of not long ago impossibly radical proposals— end welfare, privatize social security, eliminate the estate tax— from the fringes to the mainstream of policy alternatives. Its broader success, however, can also be measured in a historic role reversal that has transformed modern conservatism from an ideology of reaction to an ideology of radical reform, based on a program that envisions (and already is) rewriting the social contract to insist on individual self-reliance, private ownership, and a kind of sink or swim market morality as the guiding principles of public policy. All the while, policy intellectuals on the liberal-left spectrum confine themselves to a much-constricted sense of what politics and policy can possibly achieve. In doing so, they in effect make contemporary liberalism the ideology of (barely) staying the counterrevolution and maintaining what’s left of the New Deal. This transformation in political culture is hardly attributable to the conservative intelligentsia alone. It was, as the following chapters show, part of a broader political mobilization that brought organized constituencies together into an internally conflicted, but resilient political coalition. Nevertheless, the role of conservative intellectuals and the foundations that support them has been both pivotal and consistent over time. In the words of an aptly titled book by a movement admirer, to “think the unthinkable” in policy, and to use the apparatus of knowledge and policy making to bring the unthinkable about.2 I do not propose here to abandon the idea that the modern right should be seen as a counterrevolutionary movement. Indeed, the idea has staying power at least in part because it has considerable basis in reality. Among other things, it underscores the degree to which the modern conservative movement has deliberately deSocial Science for What? 74 fined itself in oppositional terms. Initially these came in response to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, the rise of Keynesianism, and the “collectivist” post–World War II welfare state, and subsequently in opposition to a series of “revolutions” in political economy and culture that conservatives fashion as threats to traditional American values. The list of threats and grievances has only grown and escalated in intensity over time. Today, it incorporates as well Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the all-encompassing rights revolution—feminism, racial egalitarianism, the sexual revolution —and, of course, the moral laxity of the baby boom generation . Such threats have also been periodically (and conveniently) dramatized by association with or accusations of being soft on...