One of the interesting things about capitalism is that, if you have money, people seem to just magically appear to meet your needs. When it rains in New York City, vendors materialize to sell me an umbrella. When I was walking to the inauguration, the streets were lined with people selling hats and handwarmers. I certainly didn’t ask anyone to bring me a hat; I didn’t even realize I would want one, or I would have brought it myself — but people predicted that I would and brought it for me.
The more money you have, the more crazy these desires can get. If you’re rich, people offer to launch you into space, build large buildings with your name on them, or set up lavish cemetery plots. Or, as Steven Teles demonstrates, push the law to be more to your liking.
What’s striking about the rise of modern conservatism is that it was not, in large part, the creation of big business. Big business, all things considered, was pretty happy with the liberal consensus. They weren’t exactly itching to drown the government in the bathtub, especially when it did so much for them.
Teles makes this clear with his brilliant first chapter1 on the liberal legal network. “From the perspective of the early twenty-first century”, Teles notes, “it is perplexing why these wealthy, well-positioned, white men—presidents of the American Bar Association, leaders of the nation’s largest foundations—put their support behind a project to liberalize the legal profession.” (23) You had groups as respectable as the Ford Foundation, the ABA, and the OEO supporting a project as activist as the Legal Services Program which, Teles writes, “helped transform the administration, and ultimately the politics, of public aid.” (32) Law schools started pro bono clinics, and the Ford Foundation funded a dozen legal activist groups. (Admittedly, the other major foundations refused to join in.)
Corporations did attempt to strike back — as Teles documents in a chapter called “Mistakes Made”. He quotes an influential report on these early attempts, complaining that they simply took money from a company and spent it fighting that same company’s legal battles, a law firm structured as a tax dodge. Afraid of alienating the shareholders of their corporate donors, they shied away from principled ideological stands and didn’t influence the larger political debate.
But the real conservative movement was funded instead by wealthy extremists on the fringes of the business world. It was the creation of people like Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited part of the vast Mellon fortune from his alcoholic mother. Joseph Coors inherited a brewing company, John M. Olin ran a relatively-obscure chemical company, R. Randolph Richardson inherited the money his father made by selling Vick’s to Procter and Gamble.2 None of them can exactly be called Titans of Industry, or even titans of industry. Yet these are the men who bankrolled not just the conservative legal movement, but the conservative movement in general.
This fact is sometimes obscured by a document called the Powell Memo. Written by Lewis Powell, shortly before Nixon made him a Supreme Court Justice, it calls on the US Chamber of Commerce to defend “the free enterprise system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” that would dare to criticize it.
The Powell Memo kicks off most histories of the right-wing think tank, not because it was so clearly influential, but because it was so clear: “The national television networks should be monitored”, Powell wrote, “in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” What passionate critic of the free enterprise system could resist such a quote?3
But the quotes have disguised the fact that Powell’s suggestions didn’t exactly come to pass. It wasn’t the Chamber of Commerce or major businesses that took on these tasks, but a network of independent, ideologically-based think tanks. And these think tanks weren’t founded by eminent Men of Business, but by a new class of people — a group we might call political entrepreneurs.
Dan Burt was a little-known Massachusetts lawyer when he took over the Capital Legal Foundation and turned it into one of the first effective conservative-movement law firms. Henry Manne was merely a legal scholar when he began pitching Pierre Goodrich (millionaire stockpicker) on building a new right-wing law school. Lee Liberman Otis was just a law student when she started pitching Scaife and others on the need for the Federalist Society.4
The field even has its serial entrepreneurs. Paul Weyrich was the press secretary for a Republican Senator when he met Joseph Coors. Over the next few decades, Weyrich used Coors’ money to start the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, Moral Majority, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and various other groups that haunt any history of modern conservatism’s rise.
Just like the vendors at the inauguration, political entrepreneurs sought out people with money and tried to sell them something they didn’t even know they wanted. (Manne to Goodrich: “the Augean stables were cleaned by diverting a stream of water through them … One law school dedicated to propositions like those you propound … would do more to discipline all the other[s] than anything I can think of.” Note how Manne claims to promote the ideas “you propound”.) Nonprofits are small enough and rich people are wealthy enough that it only takes a handful of lunatics with money to fund a whole forest of think tanks.
And yet, there must be crazy lefty billionaires too. So why do most lefty think tanks rarely go any farther than the Clintonite consensus? (To take a story in the news recently, conservatives have had some fun pointing out the Center for American Progress, like Obama, is in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan.) It’s easy to understand why big corporations wouldn’t want to push left-wing ideas, but it’s harder to understand why there aren’t any brazen rich people who do.
Which leads me to suspect the limiting factor isn’t the funders, but the entrepreneurs. The average lefty wants to do stuff, not hobnob with rich people and manage a staff. They’re not particularly cut out for organizational work nor do they hang around with the kind of people who are. If they do hang out with entrepreneurs, they’re more likely to be the kind who start small, hip technology companies, which just makes them wonder why they’re not making millions doing that instead of wasting time on this political bullshit. (One friend recently left lefty activism to make Firefox plugins.)
As a good institutionalist, I’m a bit uncomfortable proposing what basically amounts to a cultural explanation for this phenomenon, but while it’s less intellectually satisfying it’s at least more politically optimistic. If one of the things holding the left back is a lack of political entrepreneurs, then all we need to do is make more.
Now I just need to find some lunatics with money.
Full disclosure: Aaron Swartz recently co-founded the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, making him something of a political entrepreneur himself. Before that he was one of those lame tech startup entrepreneurs, founding reddit.com. This piece is written entirely in his personal capacity, of course.
Actually the second — as with most academic books, the first chapter is theoretical background and the story doesn’t begin until after. ↩
Note how many of them directly inherited their fortunes. I’ll leave it to someone more inclined to psychological speculation to comment on the relationship between an conservative philosophy and strong support for the system that let your father make his millions. ↩
Kim Phillips-Fein’s excellent new history, Invisible Hands, is notable for how hard it works to put the Powell Memo in its proper context, noting how much was done before the memo was even written and casting a skeptical eye on claims of the memo’s influence. ↩
For an example in another field, see my previous piece on Roger Bate, whose Africans Fighting Malaria spends its timing trying to claim environmentalists kill African babies. Bate tried to start the organization by hitting up his friends at Philip Morris, but in the end could only get the money from a Californian mining magnate. (Interestingly, many find this hard to believe and argue that Philip Morris must have been the real funder.) ↩