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

CHAPTER 5. THE COUNTER INTELLIGENTSIA,THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE NEW GOSPEL OF WEALTH

118  CHAPTER 5  THE COUNTERINTELLIGENTSIA, THE SOCIAL QUESTION, AND THE NEW GOSPEL OF WEALTH Ultimately, it was a different kind of political mobilization that channeled right-wing issue revolts in such incendiary areas as welfare, taxes, and race into a more sustained ideological counterrevolution , and that took on the liberal social scientific establishment in a full-scale ideological counterattack. Although building on and steeped in the same bundle of values and animosities fueling grassroots opposition to liberal “welfarism,” this was very much, and very deliberately, a “revolt of the elites.”1 It rested on the activism not so much of populist politicians appealing to the working and middle classes, but instead of conservative intellectuals and business executives. The venue they created was a mirror image of the executive suites, think tanks, university classrooms, and foundation boardrooms that populists had long viewed skeptically. It relied heavily, though not by any means exclusively, on a selfconsciously countermobilization of private philanthropic wealth. The aim of this mobilization was an ambition that presented itself as a new Gospel of Wealth, to align philanthropic wealth with the interests of corporate and free market capitalism, and indeed to establish those interests as expressions of both private virtue and the public good. Convinced that the great fortunes of early twentieth -century industrial capitalism were irreversibly controlled by an anticapitalist liberal elite, the new philanthropic activists would organize to break or at least to counter that stranglehold in an alter- native network of foundations. In a tightly focused strategy that emphasized funding for conservative individuals, institutions, and ideas, the leading conservative foundations set out to launch the counterrevolution long envisioned in such intellectual outposts as the Mont Pelerin Society—this time in earnest and this time with results . Their goal was at once sweepingly ambitious and avowedly conservative. They wanted to recapture not only the social question but American politics and political culture writ large as well. They intended to do so by establishing limited government, free enterprise , and individualism as prevailing political norms. That they have been substantially successful with enormous but still comparatively limited assets has been a point of pride for their leading spokesmen and of puzzlement for their critics. It is principally attributable to the fact that the conservative foundations have been self-consciously part of a broader political movement. In this movement , they represent only a portion of the financial resources but have nonetheless provided critical “venture capital” for the think tanks, university-based research institutes, publications, professional societies, media outlets, and policy advocacy organizations that have been the counterrevolution’s mainstay. Prominent among them were the foundations that, as of the late 1990s, have gained considerable notoriety as the source of the funding that brought us what has been viewed as an “axis of ideology” in recognition of their collective importance as right-wing movement philanthropy: the Lynde and Harry Bradley, Earhart, Koch Family, Smith-Richardson, Sarah Scaife, Coors, JM, and the John M. Olin foundations.2 More than as simply the deep pockets of the movement, these and similarly inclined foundations have also been singled out for what makes them, in sharp contrast to their liberal counterparts, so effective in shaping and steering the outcomes of significant policy debates. First is a willingness to fund institutions with unrestricted and infrastructural rather than project-by-project grants, and to fund over the long term, again with large untethered grants. Second is an emphasis on core ideas over empirical research. Third is a coordinated strategy of network-building that moves from the local to the national and global and from think tank to public sphere. Fourth, of course, is an unapologetic commitment to a conservative Counterintelligentsia and Wealth 119 political and ideological agenda, however orchestrated within the boundaries of what tax exempt status demands. But more significant in understanding the nature of this mobilization and its significance for the liberal tradition it aims to rival were three things that came together in the 1970s and 1980s to differentiate this generation of conservative foundations from their postwar predecessors and to transform what had been scattered, isolated efforts into a full-throttled philanthropic movement with long-lasting effects. One was the central role played by that highly problematic, increasingly controversial group of intellectuals known as neoconservatives , those once-stalwart, now deeply disillusioned former democratic socialists, left-, and consensus liberals who by the early 1970s were turning their energies to...