Welcome to Firedoglake!

Steven, Welcome to the Lake.

Henry, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Thanks Henry, and I’m very excited to be part of the FDL book salon

In response to Henry’s first set of questions:

I think what this gets at is the difference between the interests and incentives of a movement “base” and that of movement elites. Movement elites typically have to operate in insulated professional contexts in which success requires adaptation to the particular practices and norms of those practices. This systematically generates internal movement conflict, since the “base” may think their elite members are sell-outs, only interested in credibility with others in their particular professional space (whether it’s media, academia, law, etc.). On the other hand, those elites get frustrated with those on the outside, since they don’t understand that the only way to influence insulated, professionalized social spaces is to generate credibility in those spaces’ own terms.

In addition, as Henry sort of hints at here, the time horizons of “mass” and “elite” are likely to differ, as will the acceptance of strategies of indirection. Elite movement affiliates are likely to have to expend a great deal of energy on projects that will only have a glancing impact on the goal at issue, and will take time to do so (since the ideological project is going to be wrapped up in a professional project). Movement activists are likely to have a hard time understanding precisely what all this professional activity is all about, and how it actually advances the movement’s objectives.

Thanks for joining us!

I have a couple of friends who are prominent in the Federalist Society in Georgia. They are involved with their community, great parents, way into the Athens music scene and generally really good people. I keep looking for their horns but I can’t find them. Am I looking in the wrong place?

In addition, I think this difference in time horizon means that the movement base is likely to misunderstand what’s necessary to be taken seriously be elites, or even to underestimate how important being taken by elites is. Conservative public interest law groups in the 1970s, for example, were so close to business that they were hard to differentiate from business’ own law firms. This created the impression that conservative public interest law firms were “in the pocket” of business, which harmed their reputation for actually serving the “public interest.”

The horns may be further toward the back of the head…rookie mistake.

Steven welcome to FDL.

I have not had a chance to read your book but have followed the “Conservative Legal Movement” through the news reports. Especially the rise of the Federalist Society as a “counter” to the ABA. How do we get actually Rule of Law and respect for precedent back to the legal arena?

As a technical note: There is a Reply button in the lower right of each comment box. You can click on it and it will identify the commenter and comment to which you are replying

I wish I was a rookie!

Seriously, I’m not sure why we’d think that Federalist Society members would, necessarily, be “bad people.” Part of the discipline that I went through in writing the book was to constantly try to ask myself why someone who disagreed with me might do so, for reasons that were as serious and reasonable and public-interested as my reasons.

Steven (and Henry)–thanks for joining us today!

I appreciate that answer and I’ll order the book now.

Sorry I am late to the discussion – my login decided to die for reasons best known to itself. I think that there are some really interesting questions here about the relationship between the base and elites. Another issue, which Steve talks about in the book, is the relationship between funders and intellectuals. Funders from the business movement often wanted to have control over, say, libertarian intellectual groups of one sort or another. But Steve’s findings suggest that when they had too much control, the groups they were funding were pretty useless. These groups needed a certain degree of intellectual autonomy to be effective – which sometimes involved treading on the toes of particular businesses.

Why is there no Federalist Society analogue on the left?

This question may get me too close to the substance of legal questions, which really isn’t my strength (my strength is in the organizations, not their ideas). But I would just make the point that no one really cares about fidelity to precedent. Liberals didn’t when they supported Brown, Gideon, Roe, etc. And many conservatives deeply care about the rule of law. I think this is a case where liberals have wrapped what are basically partisan (and I say this in a totally neutral way) objectives in seemingly professional clothes.

Well, there is a Federalist Society analogue on the left, the American Constitution Society.

As Steve discusses, there is – it is called the American Constitutional Society – but for a variety of reasons it is not as prominent, or as successful.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about it, since I’m writing something on ACS, but I’ll just note that ACS may be an example of the issues that Henry identifies in point #2.

The Federalist Society, again, came into being largely as a response to the absence of conservatives in the university, in this case the legal academy. The Society was designed to provide a “parallel curriculum” to what was being presented in universities. Eventually it expanded to take on other functions, but in my judgment this is still its core mission. Liberals don’t have the problem that consevatives have, and consequently creating organizations that mimic the Federalist Society’s structure doesn’t make sense.

Steve – here, being married to a litigator, I have mixed views. When I look at the evidence from political science, it suggests that precedent doesn’t have an enormous impact (although as Knight/Epstein suggest, ’stare decisis’ – the basic principle of precedent does have some normative weight). When I look at what my wife does, it is _all_ about precedent, trying to argue that this precedent is controlling here and that one there etc. Which is to say that there is strategic struggle over precedent – but there is a sense as to which arguments based on precedent will work, and which will not, and a pretty good sense, often, as to what the ‘right’ way to address a case given existing precedents is.

I’ve not heard of the American Constitutional Society. I just looked at its website and it seems to be a mishmash of some farther left and some DLC types. Can you describe it and it’s influence a little?

C-SPAN broadcasts the Federalist Society’s meetings, or at least some of them. Does it do the same for the ACS?

Let me re-phrase then: As I say, I have not read your book, just the intro Henry provided and you probably cover this but what legal rulings and such (other than I’m sure Roe v Wade and the No formal Prayer in school decisions) made the Conservatives feel the need to take over the legal system?

Especially since it appears that the very existence of the Conservative Legal Movement is to bring implementation of a specific political agenda AND the dis-mantling of legal decision with which they disagree?

Harry Reid needs to read this book.

Thanks! That’s the right answer! Part of the point of my book is that for liberals to really learn from conservatives, they have to be close enough to them to understand what they went through in making decisions, building organizations, etc. Most liberal writing on conservatives has been too “far from the action.” To learn lessons from conservatives, you need to actually talk to them, go through their papers, etc., enough to recognize that they are just as fallible as liberals are. But because so few studies of conservatism get that close, we have generated among liberals what I call the “myth of diabolical competence”–the impression that conservatives are mad geniuses who had infinite resources and intelligence. That’s just not true–they made a huge number of important mistakes.

Maybe you hit on a basic liberal issue with organization-not enough definition due to many points of view.

The American Constitutional Society sponsored Gore’s 2006 MLK day speech, amongst other things.

I strongly suggest that all FDL readers send copies–multiple copies!–to their member of Congress.

It wasn’t so much that conservatives were brilliant, but that centrists and liberals kept refusing to notice what was going on.

:-)

Steve – maybe it might be useful to talk through one of the conservative screw ups you describe in the book to give a practical illustration.

You can think of ACS as having two layers. On the one hand, it has its national meeting. This is well-run and generally serves a useful purpose. On the other hand, it has chapters that mimic the Federalist Society. These, in my experience, are not nearly as effective. But the national meeting is the part of the iceberg that sticks out from the ocean, so it’s what people pay attention to.

Harry Reid needs to read the Amtrak schedule and book a one-way trip!

General observation about law and other politically important fields. I get the impression that everyone thinks that the left controls the academy and so the right went off in a huff to form their alternative universe. Which then became much more influential in the political aspect of the discipline. True of law, foreign policy, economics.

Agree or disagree?

Why have the academics lost political influence? Because in order to achieve in the academy they must pay more attention to peer opinion that to influencing policy? Is Paul Krugman a potential example for the left to replicate, i.e. the role of public intellectual?

Sure. I’ll provide a couple. First, as I noted above, conservatives invested huge resources in the 1970s into a network of public interest law firms. The first conservative PI law firm was the Pacific Legal Foundation. When PLF seemed like it was getting somewhere, there was talk about PLF developing other branches across the country. Instead of doing that, conservatives created a network of relatively autonomous firms across the country (like Mountain States, New England Legal Foundation, etc.).

This turned out to be a massive mistake. What conservatives had done was to cartelize their public interest law organizations on the basis of geography. This was done at a time in which the law was becoming much LESS geographically oriented than it had been, and more nationalized. So you had all these firms that were general-purpose, and thus couldn’t develop any real specialty in a particular area of law–allowing them to become “repeat players,” which is essential in such a technical and complicated area of law.

In addition, conservatives organized geographically because that’s what had worked for them before–especially in electoral politics. In electoral politics, it makes sense to organize geographically, since that is how we organize elections in the US. But it’s not how we organize law–you need to be functionally specialized and geographically opportunistic. The other reason they organized geographically is that they were good at it, and that’s where many of their activists and funders were. But the consequence is that they poured a lot of money into firms that didn’t get them many victories in court.

Where does the funding for this movement come from? The usual rightwing suspects?

Did the conservative funders ever question the implementers who came up with the regional strategy?

Or were they the ones who drove the strategy?

This is a GREAT question, and one that isn’t susceptible of an easy answer. But to start out, liberals are massively over-represented in the academy, esp. in policy or politically-sensitive areas. That’s just a fact. How relevant it is to their teaching or anything we care about is another question entirely. I think that the fact that there are so few real movement conservatives in academia does have an impact–in any deliberative context where there are no contrary opinions, it is very easy to go to extremes. Just the presence of a single intelligent conservative in a conversation can often change it dramatically, by forcing liberals to have to question their assumptions, deal with counter-arguments, etc. I think the consequence of not having to do that on a regular basis makes liberals in the academy often very weak in their capacity to debate effectively, when they try to do so on a broader public platform.

Heh. In my field, economics, it seems really really easy to counter the wingnuts, who have driven the economy into a black hole. Do we have to wait until that happens in the other fields before the left’s answers are cogent?

Where do places like Regent and Liberty fit into the deal?

So, consequently, I think liberal academics would generally be better in engaging with conservatives in the broader public conversation if they had to do so on a regular basis inside the academy. That’s one reason (other than simple fairness) why I think liberals actually ought to take the absence of conservatives in disciplines like political science seriously. Of course, the other reason why there is a dearth of good liberal professors capable of debating in the public sphere is that the norms of professions tends to select them out. As the professions have turned in on themselves, they’ve developed norms that have largely excluded the ability to engage with issues that the public cares about in a compelling manner. This is compounded by many professions (including mine and Henry’s) tendency to define the “core” problems of the discipline in such a way that the exclude things that politicians and citizens want to know the answers to.

Steve – that last point is kinda interesting – one possible interpretation is that it would be a good idea for lefty academics to start blogging wholesale (as long as they directly engage right wing arguments). But there also is a deficit on the other side too. I haven’t read the Shields book you recommend, but my impression is that across a whole host of policy areas, conservatives are sorely lacking people who have any real policy expertise, and hence are pretty clueless when it comes to debate (albeit for different reasons than lefties). If lefties have trouble connecting policies to politics, conservatives (as the movement stands at the moment) have difficulty in articulating real policies from their politics. And those that are maybe better (whether you like them or not, Douthat, Frum etc have at least made efforts on this) find themselves being marginalized for not being sufficiently obeisant to Rush Limbaugh et al.

Steven – Aside from self-consciously movement oriented conservatives, you also discuss the law and economics movement – which was connected to movement conservatism pretty tangentially. Is there anything similar to that for liberals today?

Seconded.That is really excellent.

Great follow-up. In 1980, the Scaife Foundation asked a young lawyer named Michael Horowitz to write a report on conservative public interest law. He went out and looked at these firms–which most conservative funders thought were just great–and recognized that they were an expensive waste of time. This report got handed around amongst conservative funders and had a huge impact. They pulled back on their funding of these firms, and years later what I call the “second generation” of conservative firms appealed to foundations precisely on the basis of having learned the lessons of the Horowitz Report. Those firms include the Institute for Justice and the Center for Individual Rights, which are covered in detail in my book. This is one example of where conservatives succeeded not because of brilliant planning–too much planning got them the first generation firms!–but because of effective structures for feedback and learning.

This goes back to the point I made way at the start, in response to your first question/point. The more you try to influence policy “from the inside” (based on actual expertise and cultural capital) the more you are going to be attacked by those on the “outside” as a sell-out who just wants to get invited to the right parties.

But I think that the problem of expertise is a big issue for conservatives. In order to really have an influence on academic disciplines and technical policy areas, you have to be willing to really bear down for a long slow slog. But the presence of conservative policy organizations in some cases has meant that instead of having to go through that slow slog, you can just jump right into punditry without having to spend all those years learning the ropes. I think that has really hurt conservatives, and made them tend to attack expertise rather than engage with it.

The interesting thing about law and economics is that it actually did have a constituency, in its relatively early years–large conglomerates in danger of being broken up by the federal government.

When I interviewed Henry Manne, who was the major “entrepreneur” of law and economics (he created the programs that educated federal judges and law professors in economics, and held regular conferences that pushed the field ahead into new areas), he emphasized that because law and econ had really started out as a critique of anti-trust enforcement, that he had a ready pitch in selling it to businessmen–if they didn’t support law and economics, they wouldn’t have the intellectual ammunition to stop the forward march of anti-trust.

So in that sense, law and econ did have a constituency, albeit one that had to be sold on its importance.

On the larger question, I think there are plenty of people in academia doing things that liberals could benefit from. But in many cases what liberals really need are good studies of conservatives, in order to understand them, draw lessons from them, and compete with them. But that’s where academia has really let down liberals outside its walls–historians have done pretty well (and liberal movement people I know of have read Perlstein’s Before the Storm and McGirr’s Suburban Warriors very closely), but political scientists, who should have been really down in the weeds studying conservative organization, have not done a good job.

Aha. The academic bubble. One of the reasons why I have never liked school.

But let us not forget that there’s a very powerful rightwing academy: U. of Chicago. And Obama is a product of it.

The liberal legal victories of the sixties and seventies assumed that court victories would eventually translate into changed laws and policies. That assumption is no longer valid. Progressives and Main Street Americans face a startlingly well-organized effort to shift this country to the right, in what amounts to a legal war of attrition.

Victory even at the Supreme Court merely shifts the fight to the legislative or executive branches. Congress and state legislatures attempt to overrule more liberal than conservative opinions. Congress attempts to intimidate judges and constrict their jurisdiction, most recently with veiled threats of violence and the MCA.

The executive branch responds with signing statements (to legislative acts) and political and bureaucratic appointees who have spent a lifetime and earned huge rewards for gutting the effectiveness of the agencies they have been named to head. A court victory over workplace conditions doesn’t go far when the executive does such things as appoint Mr. Scalia’s son to the Dept. of Labor and he successfully aborts gestating ergonomics rules that favor his “former” corporate clients.

Neocons, of course, also focused enormous resources on remaking the courts themselves, most glaringly with the the Roberts and Alito appointments at the Supreme Court. They have instituted a full court press on the appointments process for federal judgeships, paying special attention to taking control of key circuits, the DC and Fourth Circuits, for example, that frequently feed cases to the Supreme Court. They have also made inroads to weaken, but not topple, liberal voices in the Second and Ninth Circuits.

They have aggressively established a farm team system, seeking out potential future conservative leaders like Rachel Paulose. They sponsor their college and law school admissions and help them pay for their training. Having been named to the nomenklatura, these potential future leaders are found jobs in law firms, government agencies and courts. That elicits enormous dependence and loyalty.

The right has successfully rewritten Shakespeare’s formula. Instead of “kill all the lawyers” as a way to consolidate the fruits of rebellion, the right has chosen to recruit them. The unceasing increases in college and law school tuition, for example, makes the right’s farm team strategy all the more effective, while gutting the left’s unfocused efforts to combat that strategy.

The right’s strategy has worked; they are likely to continue it. What can we expect from the left in response?

They had to hide from the draft somewhere.

Regent and Liberty (and Ave Maria, for that matter, or Patrick Henry College at the undergraduate level) represent a very different strategy to the one I describe in my book. The conservatives that I studied really wanted to get a foothold inside liberal institutions, to compete with them on an even playing field. These other institutions represent a judgment that conservatives will never really be effective inside liberal institutions, so it is necessary to create entirely parallel institutions where conservatives won’t have to make the same kinds of compromises that they need to make in order to influence mainstream, generally liberal schools.

I think that has really hurt conservatives, and made them tend to attack expertise rather than engage with it.

I agree with the latter part of that sentence, and have often observed that conservatives counter left opinions with disdain or snark rather than with cogent arguments. But I haven’t observed that has hurt them. Can you cite some examples?

Am joining late and will catch up. FWIW, though, didn’t the conservatives study hard the history of Ralph Nader and use that to undo some of Nader’s actual legacy? Maybe this has been mentioned. If so, sorry.

U of Chicago has a long history, both long before and long after the draft.

Thanks for your comment. But I have to say that I think this reflects a partisan way of viewing the world that is pretty distant from my own. First, liberals have long had their own “farm team” of lawyers. They still do. Most legal clinics in law schools are organized around fields that have a lot of interest to liberals, and not much to conservatives–consequently, liberals have opportunities to train and develop networks in public interest law that conservatives, for the most part, don’t. Because of the disproportionate number of liberals on law school faculties, liberal students are generally going to get better advice and direction in getting clerkships and jobs in Democratic administrations than conservative students will. These networks are precisely why conservatives had to develop parallel networks of their own. So the idea that conservatives are doing something creepy and undemocratic is just hard to take seriously. To understand conservatives, again, you have to try to imagine why they are doing what they are doing.

The far right institutions of higher ed have an even worse problem at making their case than the more mainstream ones which are dominated by the left. Every time someone from Liberty or Regent or their ilk opens their mouth, they makes fools of themselves. Their incompetence at doing the actual job of governance (like their influence in W’s DoJ) was legion.

I can understand why conservatives are doing what they’re doing. I’d do the same in their shoes. What couple or three things make them so successful at it?

But because so few studies of conservatism get that close, we have generated among liberals what I call the “myth of diabolical competence”–the impression that conservatives are mad geniuses who had infinite resources and intelligence. That’s just not true–they made a huge number of important mistakes.

This mystification really applies to conservative and not conservative “economists” in this country. The Fed Reserve, included. The “myth of competence” proven diabolical, unwittingly or willfully.

Thanks for joining us! What is interesting is that the first generation of conservatives sort of thought they knew what Nader was doing, but didn’t really understand how his network of organizations operated. They didn’t realize that the strength of the Nader operation was that there were all these discrete organizations that had the capacity to amass an enormous amount of specialized knowledge in their area, along with networks with the media and government, that allowed them to gain a lot of influence simply by showing up and being part of particular issue networks. Because they didn’t understand this, conservatives made lots of mistakes in trying to replicate the Nader organizations (see my discussion above). Conservatives did much better when they started to attract a generation of people who had either been in Nader organizations or had studied them closely. So Mike Greve, who founded the Center for Individual Rights, wrote an entire dissertation on the environmental movements of the US and Germany–he had really dug into the strategies of the Naderites, and therefore understood that staying relatively small, and focusing on a few issue areas, was the way to go. Because he was close enough to liberals to understand their strategies from the inside, he was able to learn from them and recognize what lessons could and couldn’t be drawn from what they were doing.

I should just note that I think I’m already developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Will Jane Hamsher pay for my rehab? Isn’t this somehow required by OSHA?

The Federalist Society, again, came into being largely as a response to the absence of conservatives in the university, in this case the legal academy. The Society was designed to provide a “parallel curriculum” to what was being presented in universities. Eventually it expanded to take on other functions, but in my judgment this is still its core mission. Liberals don’t have the problem that consevatives have, and consequently creating organizations that mimic the Federalist Society’s structure doesn’t make sense.

With very little editing, what you have to say about conservatives and the law would fit several other fields of endeavor: Science (especially biology), social services, politics, just to name a few.

As Stephen Colbert says, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

I should just note that I think I’m already developing carpal tunnel syndrome. Will Jane Hamsher pay for my rehab? Isn’t this somehow required by OSHA?

Hit her up for some voice-recognition software!

Another good question. I go through the lessons of conservative mobilization in the law in the conclusion of my book. Here’s a couple of the lessons I drew:
1) Spread betting combined with feedback and learning, rather than planning. Conservatives were not “diabolically competent,” as I noted before. They did not all meet in the Mayflower over a weekend in the late 1970s and plan everything out (this is why I hate stories of the right that use the “Powell memo” like it was the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) . The experience of conservatives in the law shows a huge number of mistakes, strategic errors, failed investments, etc. What is most important is to have a movement capable of recognizing and correcting its errors, rather than being stuck with the institutional remnants of past mistakes.

Haven’t the more recent Federalist Society dominated judges, blocked a lot of the repetitive stress injury lawsuits and such? :})

I believe at FDL, the medical insurance for the guests is a proportion of what the guests get paid. *g*

A voice activated computer for you?

Thanks for this great-sounding book, what an important addition to our understanding of how “the other side” operates. And thank you for chatting with us today!

Although in response to #66, it should be noted that some of the organizations in the Nader camp are largely notional (I am thinking of one person I know who in that complex who ‘is’ effectively any and all of several organizations at once, depending on which funding opportunities are most prominent at the moment.

Hi eCAHN,

The use of the flag and the bible and the media to shove it down our throats 24/7 hasn’t hurt them much.

I think “reality has a well-known liberal bias” is an awfully comforting thing for liberals to think about their own ideas. I am uncomfortable with any idea that flatters myself. I think that the relative disproportion of liberals in the academy has something to do with the habits and tendencies that liberals tend to have. But there is also, as good liberals should recognize, the fact of power. Liberals have generally had control over large parts of the academy over the last 30-40 years. In the process of having that power, they have encoded into the disciplines their understanding of what is important to study, and what is not, and how things ought to be studied. This generally tends to marginalize conservatives, who were not part of the process when the definition of the disciplines came into being. Also, I think, as I suggested above, that conservatives’ limited success in the academy is the perverse consequence of their success in building a parallel set of institutions–why take a relatively crummy job out in the sticks and work your way up for 5-10 years until you get to a prominent institution? Why not take a job in a think tank in DC where you can have influence right away? So I’d say that there are institutional and other reasons why conservatives are unrepresented, not just that liberals are smart and conservatives are dumb.

Excellent point. That’s why I’m depending on Hamsher’s mercy, not the likelihood that she’ll be threatened by the probability of a law suit.

A lot of the Nader organizations also aren’t what they used to be. If you look at the people they attracted to work for nothing in cramped unhealthful offices in the 1970s, it’s just remarkable. People thought they were going to DC to do the Lord’s work back then, and were willing to take a lot of suffering to do it. Also, DC was a cheap city to live in back then, in a way it isn’t today, and the overhang of student debt wasn’t so crushing.

*waving hello*

Yes, great observation about patriotism, religion and control of the media. Steve or Henry: how much of a head start does that give conservatives? Progressives generally espouse change, which can be scarey. Doesn’t that mean that the left starts with a handicap?

Any thoughts about the conservative takeover of media? I know it’s not your area, but any observations would be appreciated. The conventional wisdom here is that it’s a function of the corporatization of media.

excellant discussion and sorry I came late to this thread, I just have one problem with the way the introduction , is framed;

Steve Teles’ book provides a great, readable analysis of how pro-market conservatives organized themselves against a legal profession and legal academy that they perceived as biased against them, and succeeded in changing it.

we fall into their game when we use their discriptions of themselves, discriptions that are oposite reality

these “concervatives” are NOT “pro market” they are pro profit for the highest in their percieved food change, they are ANTI market

and second, they do not have a “percieved” bias against them, what they have is a marketing strategy that they want to use so we vote against ourselves

this pretty much began with the koch brothers, creating the cato institute and other “think (less) tanks”, they then get their corporate media compatriots to trott these “think tankers” to go on the TEEvee and tell us their “opinion” which is devoid of fact but they repeat these falsehoods as though fact

You’re welcome! And it is a great book! :-)

Power has a decided right-wing bias (except in the post-WWII academy).

Thanks for such a thoughtful response re Nader. It seems like we on left have put him to pasture and he could be of help today. The same way I feel what is Krugman doing not working for the administration and the Wall Street enablers are.

Sorry about the carpal tunnel! (Will buy your book as compensation.. promise.)

Do you take on the “corporate media” and their myopia in terms of recognizing and advancing the truly competent from the bloviators or is that afield of your focus? Or are liberals blaming media too much and not doing their own homework. FDL is certainly a homework-doing site, though.

Also, Bush’s successful saturation of the lower courts with conservative judges, not to mention SC. Can you speak to that?

steven, most liberals base their opinion and idiology around the facts they have gathered

concervatives set out with an agenda, to create more power and money for themselves, they then gather information to support an agenda

this is why “facts” have a liberal bias

correctamundo, see my 84

I think there’s a difference between partisan analysis and descriptions of partisan activities.

I think your description overstates the organization behind liberal causes, long past their peak, and understates the relative organization of those behind the neocon causes. I also think that the neocons have focused on narrower goals. The forces behind the recent victory for intelligent design [sic] at the Texas schoolboard is a case in point.

What do you think of the split between the hard left and the “pragmatic progressives”. Isn’t this hurting the rate of “righting” the country? It sounds like you want organic bipartisan working together between left and right, but I think hard left has gotten short shrift from Obama and the pragmatics.

“this pretty much began with the koch brothers, creating the cato institute and other “think (less) tanks”, they then get their corporate media compatriots to trott these “think tankers” to go on the TEEvee and tell us their “opinion” which is devoid of fact but they repeat these falsehoods as though fact.”

Sorry, but no. The relationship between Koch and the development of the libertarian network is really complex, and I haven’t really gotten to the bottom of it. But the idea that the Koch people just dreamed all this up and hired minions to do their bidding is ridiculous. If anyone told a story about liberals that looked like that, we’d all fall over laughing. In my book, based on a lot of inside information, the relationship between conservative/libertarian funders and organizations is more that the funders rarely initiate strategies and approaches. That’s much more characteristic of liberal foundations, who tend to figure out what they want and then put out RFPs to people to go out and produce it. The conservative foundations generally tended to respond to initiatives from out in the field. So for example, the Institute for Justice got a ton of money from Koch–in fact, Koch gave them a large start-up grant. But the idea for IJ had been germinating in the head of Chip Mellor (who is now its president) for almost a decade. In fact, almost the only project that I came across where the funders were really proactive were the Olin law and econ programs at elite law schools. But in almost all the other cases, various different people came up with ideas for organizations, and then convinced the foundations to support them.

Again, I don’t want to get in a position of defending conservatives here, because I consider myself a liberal. But I just have to push back against statements like, “steven, most liberals base their opinion and idiology around the facts they have gathered. concervatives set out with an agenda, to create more power and money for themselves, they then gather information to support an agenda.” This shows what I consider to be one of the most debilitating tendencies of people on the left, which is to assume that they act out of virtuous motives, while those on the other side act out of malevolent motives. You’re not going to get anywhere if that’s how you see the world. There are plenty of hacks who just carry water for powerful interests on either side. And I know of a great number of conservatives whose ideological principles come out of hard experience with the real world, who have sacrificed positions that would have given them power and money in order to serve goals that they think are right. Until you make at least some effort to imagine why those on the other side would act out of motives as decent as your own, it’ll be hard for you to learn either from or about them. You’ll just be projecting your own biases onto them, which isn’t a way to learn.

The word play is funny and Stephen Colbert has made a career out of it. Informed viewers appreciate the sarcasm and irony, but not everyone has the focus, time or resources for that; they just catch the surface.

As you point out, the issue isn’t “bias” at all. Facts haven’t any, but a good lawyer can argue them six ways from Sunday, depending on which perspectives promote the interests of the client paying her. In Europe, “ergonomics”, as with labor laws generally, are respected parts of the legal and business system. Here, the junior Mr. Scalia was able to treat ergonomics as witchdoctory so completely it will be some time before labor recovers from his efforts. That’s not question of facts, but of political advocacy masquerading as responsible agency.

THAT is a theme that is put forth here all the time. (the demonization of not only the right but of Obama because he isn’t “progressive” enough.

This connects to something I was wondering. A big part of the Steven’s analysis revolves around the point that conservatives were a minority in the academy. So I’m wondering if its possible for liberals to use their lessons while being in the majority. That is, might we need some smaller group of people – those further on the left – to take the lead, as they could develop this kind of oppositional culture in a way that middle of the road liberals could not. Or am I focusing too much on an element of the conservative movement that is not relevant for liberals today?

Steven: Touché!

Then again, there are conservatives (who are now independents) and then there are the falangists who have dominated the Republican Party ever since they kicked the Rockefeller faction to the curb in the 1970s. It’s amazing to realize that George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara used to be big supporters of Planned Parenthood. That got stopped with the conservative takeover. It’s so bad that now even Nancy Reagan, the widow of arguably the most politically successful conservative Republican president of the 20th century, is anathema to the conservatives because she backs stem cell research.

Steve- on 88 – is this one of the places where the left might learn from the right? Should left wing funders be more prepared to let others come to them with interesting ideas (which may succeed or fail) rather than trying to set the agenda by coming up with big ideas themselves and looking for people to fund them?

Also, and sort of related – when I think of left wing funders, many of them (Soros being the obvious exception) hew at least to some nominal version of impartiality – that is, even if their funding is implicitly leftwing, they don’t describe themselves in explicitly left wing terms. In what ways is this a benefit? In what ways a disadvantage?

I am talking the “demonization” of the hard left by the “progressives”. You are talking the opposite direction. Hmmmmm.

sorry that should be ‘coming up with big ideas themselves and looking for people to implement them.’

The “conservative takeover of the media” is probably an article of faith in certain parts of the left, but I think it overstates matters considerably. I actually deal with some of this in the book. If you go back to the 1970s, conservatives were genuinely around the bend on how much they hated the “liberal media.” They tried lots of different ways to attack it, including lawsuits (including the Westmoreland suit against CBS, which I cover in the book), and other ways to “shame” the media into being “neutral.” None of it worked. As a consequence, they focused on creating a parallel media, starting with small magazines and eventually including places like Fox News. They also created an impressive structure for criticizing the mainstream press, which had the effect of causing them (I think–I’m no expert) to pull in their claws a bit. But it is worth thinking a bit about all the areas of media where conservatives are still pretty ineffective. As Conor Friedsdorf has argued, conservatives have too many talking heads and not enough journalists capable of doing really serious reporting. Liberals still have a huge advantage where substantive journalism is concerned. I think this is a real problem for conservatives, and one that they’re not going to solve any time soon.

I am so guilty of this. We all tend to abstract the thought of others down to something we can defeat easily. Why do conservatives do what they do? I don’t understand it so it must be wrong. This is an attitude I must shift.

nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong

Yes, I think it is VERY important for movements to have a variety of people with different kinds of incentives. There will always be movement pragmatists who are close to the action and are concerned with moving the ball forward on a day to day basis. That is important work, and it is important to have respect for those who have to make compromises that others of us don’t have to. That’s my feeling about the Obama administration–it’s very easy to sit in Paul Krugman’s chair and stipulate what ought to be done. It’s another to have the actual short-term burden of decision-making, where there’s a chance that a mistake will cause you to lose power to people who will almost certainly do far worse than you. But movements also need people who can think far beyond tomorrow and the next day, and who can think about whether what movement actors are doing today actually makes change far in the future more or less likely. So I’d divide things up not so much on the basis of ideological intensity as on the basis of time horizon. Movements need people with long and short time horizons, but activists need to have some respect for the fact that both functions are important–one or the other side are not sell-outs or airy-headed dreamers.

Well said.

Also, well said!

Great question, Henry. I do think there’s a big difference between funders on the left and the right. Many (but not all) of the places that liberals get money from have an older progressive sense of themselves as somehow “neutral.” So liberal organizations have to describe what they want to do in terms of “helping children and families,” when in fact what they really mean is that they want to correct some serious power imbalance. In fact (as I argue in Chapter Two of the book) the irony of the growth of liberalism in the 1960s and 1970s is that liberals got power by insinuating themselves into and controlling establishment, professional institutions. But in the process, liberalism also became professionalized–liberals had to explain their goals in professional terms. To use an example that many of your readers will recognize, liberals described their desire for affirmative action in terms of “diversity” (that is, what was good for their institutions) as opposed to reparative justice, which I think was most liberals real reason for supporting AA. I think this has hamstrung liberals in terms of thinking strategically (including in foundations) and, frankly, just in terms of thinking straight.

Touché again!

There’s this thing called balance. The only reason why I’m a liberal in economics is that the balance is so drastically in favor of the bosses that the economy doesn’t work. Were the power balance in the opposite direction, i.e., labor ruled supreme, I would favor the corporations. (Not that I have concern myself with that extreme in my lifetime.)

it was actually the Buffalo Springfield!

Obama’s economic team’s decisions are not bothered by short vs. long term issues. They are determined by bailing out the ideology that caused the problem to begin with.

Responding to Henry’s other point…I do think that many liberal funders do too much planning. They tend to come up with initiatives and projects and requests for proposals. This then massively distorts the incentives of liberal organizations, because they have to do somersaults to square their own objectives with those of the funders. To put it in a way that my wife has suggested to me, liberal foundations giving so much money through narrow project funding puts the “control of capital” outside of liberal organizations. And there is no way to manage an organization where the control of capital comes from the outside, rather than from the organization’s leaders. So I do think that liberal foundations ought to follow conservatives on this point with great precision–Olin and most of the other conservative foundations gave general support. They found organizations where they trusted the leadership, thought they would be good stewards of their resources, and then they let them distribute those funds as they saw fit. As a consequence, conservatives were able to build real organizations because their leaders could actually MANAGE–which they couldn’t if all their resources came from the priorities of outside foundations.

I have made the effort you ask, here is my observation;

constituents who follow “their party” are usually on the right, it’s “them against us and we have to protect our own”

reagan even made it a republican theme, chastising any republican who critisizes another

on the other hand, as we see with obama and a HOST of “democrats”, those on the left do not defend those “in our party”, we champion industry agenda with people agendan pretty much inspite of party, not because of it

Could you be referring the Ds’ circular firing squad? *g*

I just wanted to flag this point. The tendency to attribute virtue to ones compatriots and irrational, vicious motivations to one’s opponents is pretty deeply rooted in human psychology. It requires a great deal of mental discipline to overcome it. But it is precisely this tendency that causes a huge number of mistakes in politics, including in social movements. I would also note that it is the tendency that causes countries to get into wars they shouldn’t fight, and then to lose them when they do. I teach a class on “Policy Disasters,” and one of the basic lessons is that most of them were caused by “confirmation bias”–the tendency to seek out and assimilate data that confirms one’s existing beliefs. The most powerful mechanism for confirmation bias is ideology–and that applies to OUR ideology, not just theirs.

Is your reading list on Policy Disasters accessable to us?

Look, I’m certainly not saying that liberals and those on the left shouldn’t criticize the Obama administration. They absolutely should. The only thing I’m saying is that it is essential, if one’s criticism is going to be effective, to be able to distinguish between disagreements that come from differing institutional positions and incentives, and those that come from differences of fundamental opinion. How one makes the criticism depends almost entirely on which it is.

#103 is nicely put.

On the broader question of how liberals should think about conservatives – I think Rick Perlstein is an interesting case in point. His first book, “Before the Storm,” is very respectful to conservatives – he sees them (despite completely disagreeing with them) as heroic figures trying to disrupt a lazy and faintly corrupt consensus. And his book got a lot of praise from conservatives. But he now challenges conservatives for having effectively sold out on their own values and having become what they claimed to hate at the outset. Do you think this criticism has legs from your own experiences researching this stuff?

And is it a danger that liberals and lefties face too when and if they begin to compromise with power (in ways that go beyond the kinds of necessary pragmatic compromises that you describe above).

This is probably a mistake and way too long to paste into this conversation, but here you go (just the readings part of the last time I taught Policy Disasters–it will be different this coming Fall–this was from a year ago):

(I)
Introduction

January 30

Ernest May and Richard Neustadt, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers,
(Free Press, 1988) Selections.

(II)
Classical Theories of Unintended Consequences

February 6

Michael Oakeshott, “Rationalism in Politics” in Rationalism in Politics (Liberty Press)

Friedrich Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, 1945

Robert Merton, “The Unintended Consequences of Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review, December 1936.

(III)
The Psychology of Decision-Making Error

February 13

JK Esser, “Alive and Well after 25 Years: A Review of Groupthink Research,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 1998

Raymond Nickerson, “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,” Review of General Psychology, 1998

Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth, “Behavioral Decision Theory: Processes of Judgment and Choice,” in Decision Making: ed. David Bell, Howard Raiffa and Amos Tversky (Cambridge, 1988)

Arthur Denzau and Douglass North, “Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions,” Kyklos, 1994, pp. 3-31
(IV)
Development Disasters

February 20

(*) James Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1998), Chapters 1-3, 6-10

February 27

Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford 1990), Chapters 5-8, 13.

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Anchor, 2000), pp. 249-261.

William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden (Penguin, 2006), Chapter 1.

Amartya Sen, “The Man Without a Plan,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

(IV)
Policy Mistakes in Parliamentary Systems: The Case of the Poll Tax

March 5

(*) David Butler, Andrew Adonis and Tony Travers, Failure in British Government: The Politics of the Poll Tax (Oxford, 1995)

(V)
US Domestic Policy Mistakes

March 12

(*) Jeffrey Pressman and Aaron Wildavsky, Implementation (California, 1984)

Recommended:

Martha Derthick, New Towns In Town: Why a Federal Program Failed (Brookings, 1972)

March 19: NO CLASS

March 26

(*) Mark Rom, Public Spirit in the Thrift Tragedy (Pittsburgh, 1996)

Edmund Andrews, “Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread,” New York Times, 12/18/07 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12…..nted=print

Recommended

Roberta Romano, “The Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Making of Quack Corporate Governance,” 114 Yale Law Journal 1521 (2005)

April 2

(*) Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision (Chicago, 1996)

Recommended

Charles Perrow, Normal Disasters: Living with High Risk Technologies (Princeton)

Matthys Levy, Mario Salvadori and Kevin Woest, Why Buildings Fall Down (WW Norton, 1994)

April 9

Dan Baum, “Deluged: When Katrina Hit, Where Were the Police?” New Yorker, January 9, 2006 and “The Lost Year: The Failure to Rebuild,” New Yorker, August 21, 2006

Martha Derthick, “Katrina and Federalism,” Public Administration Review, Forthcoming.

Vicki Bier, “Hurricane Katrina as Bureaucratic Nightmare,” and Kenneth Foster and Robert Giegengack, “Planning for a City on the Brink,” in Ron Daniels, Donald Kettl and Donald Kunreuther, On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (Penn, 2006)

Selections from Spike Lee, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Film)

(VIII)
Failures of Market-Making

April 16

Richard O’Neill and Udi Helman, “Regulatory Reform of the U.S. Wholesale Electricity Markets” and Alan Jacobs and Steven Teles, “The Perils of Market-Making: The Case of British Pension Reform,” in Landy, Levin and Shapiro, eds., Creating Competitive Markets (Brookings 2007).

Thomas Oliver, Phillip Lee, and Helene Lipton, “A Political History of Prescription Drug Coverage,” Milbank Quarterly, 2004

Martha Derthick, “Going Federal: The Launch of Medicare Part D Compared With SSI,” Publius, 2007.

(VII)
Foreign Policy Mistakes

April 23

Robert Jervis, “Hypotheses on Misperception,” World Politics, April 1968, pp. 454-479

Roberta Wohlstetter, Cuba and Pearl Harbor: Hindsight and Foresight (RAND, 1965)

Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Houghton-Mifflin, 1983), pp. 2-47 (on the Bay of Pigs)

Recommended

Roberta Wohlstetter, Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (Stanford, 1962)

Robert Jervis, Perception and Misperception in International Politics (Princeton, 1976)

April 30

(*) Amy Zegart, Spying Blind: The CIA, The FBI and the Origins of 9/11 (Princeton, 2007)

Recommended:

Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

May 7

(*) Thomas Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (Penguin, 2006)

James Fallows, “Blind Into Baghdad” (January/February 2004)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran , “Ties to GOP Trumped Know-How Among Staff Sent to Rebuild Iraq: Early U.S. Missteps in the Green Zone,” Washington Post, Sept. 17, 2006.

Peter Boyer, “How Don Rumsfeld Reformed the Army and Lost Iraq,” New Yorker, Nov. 20, 2006.

Recommended

Ali Allawi, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale, 2007)

Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 (NYRB, 2006)

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (Knopf)

As we come to the end of this great Book Salon,

Steve, Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon
with us discussing your new book.

Henry, Thank you very much for Hosting this Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought Steve’s book yet, here is a link.

Thanks all.

They found organizations where they trusted the leadership, thought they would be good stewards of their resources, and then they let them distribute those funds as they saw fit.

Liberal temperaments … too much herding cats? Or money not as abundant among liberals to be entrusted without as many strings?

This is probably the last question. I think that there is a great deal of truth to the criticism that many conservative organizations were corrupted by their proximity to power. I think those that were not, avoided it by institutionalizing debate and argument and disagreement. This is very much the case with the Federalist Society, whose structure is based on debate (most of its activities are debates between conservatives and liberals, and in many cases between varieties of conservatives). A movement that maintains a focus on internal conflict and disagreement, while also institutionalizing a recognition of why others of honor could disagree, can often develop mechanism for avoiding corruption at the hands of power.

Yes, thank you so much. These were GREAT questions, and I really appreciate everyone spending the time with me here.

Thank you for the consciousness raising!

ditto

And thanks!

OMgoodness. That is just wonderful. Thank you so much.

I’ve read many on the foreign policy area, but haven’t gotten to Emerald City yet, or Algeria (own both).

Particularly interested in doing more reading on law of unintended outcome. It’s a big problem in economics so I’m quite familiar with it, but have never read anything theoretical (or even applied) on it.

What juicy titles! Thank you, Steven. Time to do some liberal “homework”.

steven, it’s not equal, certain types of people migrate toward a certain ideology

I myself have been republican, have been liberal, have been democrat, have been hawk and dove

as I’ve learned new information my idiology changes

power corupts, as the democrats gain power they WILL be corrupted and unless we can keep them honest I WILL switch parties again

it is not a party thing for most liberals, it’s an agenda thing

I heartedly disagree with your point, differant types of people migrate to differant parties and my obersvation tells me those that migrate toward the republican party are authoritarian in nature, they for the most part are followers, not individualistic with their ideology, they think we must have father figures and leaders, the reverse is true for most liberals

it’s not equal, us vs them, not one bit when it comes to political affiliation

If you want to know more on unintended consequences, definitely check out the article that I wrote with Alan Jacobs on the disaster that was British pensions privatization. It’s in the syllabus I pasted above, but here’s the cite: Alan Jacobs and Steven Teles, “The Perils of Market-Making: The Case of British Pension Reform,” in Landy, Levin and Shapiro, eds., Creating Competitive Markets (Brookings 2007).

Also, if you read my book (which you should!) and want to know more, you might check out my forthcoming article in Studies in American Political Development on the Reagan Department of Justice. Here’s the abstract, which has a link to the article (for those who have access to the journal electronically): http://journals.cambridge.org/…..X09000030.

For those who don’t, here’s a pre-publication version, but it’s likely to be taken down soon: http://www.newamerica.net/publ…..cracy_9823

agree, power does corrupt… if the patriarchal power and competition mode prevails … need a humanist paradigm shift to partnership and cooperation. Is that a brand for Obama or an underlying ideology. I’m thinking the former, sadly.

a note on “unintended consequences, as this article demonstrates

when you torture to get “information” you get less information, you don’t prevent events you cause them, you don’t frighten the oposition you invigortate them and justify their cause

on the other hand, the cheney/rumsfeld purpose for their policies of torture were not to gain information, they knew there were better, more accurate and actionable methods, their purpose was perpetuating unrest for uneding war

a smidge off topic but I had to do it