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| Philanthropy |
The Policy Revolutionaries
Elizabeth Harris
05/01/2006
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The conservative and liberal wings of America’s political establishment will
face off once again this November. But while it may seem that the parties’
campaign planks are the product of huge, internal consensus-forming efforts,
many of their core ideas, especially on the right, can be traced to the efforts
of a handful of farsighted individuals who worked behind the scenes for decades
to build support for, and draw attention to, the issues they hold dear. h In the
early 1970s, alarmed by the left’s student uprisings and growing influence in
academia, the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War, conservative Republicans
were desperate to find an effective way to advance their agendas. To build
support for their ideas, leading businessmen such as Colorado brewer Joseph
Coors, chemical and munitions magnate John M. Olin, Richard Mellon Scaife of the
Mellon banking and oil family and Milwaukee industrialist William Brady hit upon
the idea to seed and financially support a new twist on an old concept—the think
tank. But while these policy research entities had been rare, and traditionally
analytical rather than ideological—the Rand Corp. being the ultra-wonky
archetype—this new breed, led by the influential Heritage Foundation, was
designed to forward, not critique, an ideological agenda.
Olin was representative of the group. His response to a hippie-era student
uprising at his alma mater, Cornell, was to begin funding conservative think
tanks, college newspapers and magazines, including the New Criterion, the
National Interest and Commentary, through his eponymous foundation. Nearly four
decades later, political scientists credit the influence of these ideological
think tanks for helping the neoconservatives to power. However, a greater
endorsement of their influence has come from affluent liberals, who are now
scrambling to learn from the right’s successes and establish their own
ideological think tanks.
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