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Notes -
Ideological Institutions
The other day I was explaining my understanding of think tanks to a younger friend. They had a reaction of "no way!? Is that really how they work". This is the most common reaction, followed by "yeah of course that's how they work, why are you telling me this like I'm stupid?"
The purpose of ideological Institutions is two-fold:
These may sound like they are at cross purposes, but they are not. A successful think tank does both very well.
Some of you here might have the immediate complaint somewhat along the lines:
Universities can also be ideological Institutions but they don't have their people paying a tax on their beliefs. But this isn't true on two dimensions:
I think the existence of these ideological Institutions has had an overall negative effect on American politics. Similar to news organizations they benefit from ongoing political conflict.
But they are also a necessary set of institutions for balancing out democracy. They act as a way for people who care and hold strong beliefs to feel like they have more of an impact on politics than their single vote would normally allow.
Mark me down for reaction two.
Political coordinators are necessary in any political system. Otherwise, incumbent authorities exercise power by default. Political conflict has a cost, but so does a lack of political conflict. It's not just allowing motivated people to exercise more influence in politics; it's making it possible for people to concentrate their political power in a way that allows them to achieve goals. Think tanks are just one example of this, of course. Political parties serve similar role in different contexts, as do community organizers, church leaders, etc...
I'd also concur with Gillitrut re: think tanks in particular having a major role in operationalizing political beliefs.
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There is another reason:
This works by ensuring that the people you want to be available to serve in government have a job waiting for them at think tanks or lobbying firms when they get out -- arranging the proverbial revolving door such that their total expected compensation over one full revolution is not too far below what they could earn
This is really not a joke -- if you are advocating in favor of and you want to advance it with moderately-competent people, you are are competing against a market clearing price for that competence. You can ignore that and get the kind of competence the Civil Service is gonna pay for and you're gonna get the amount of actual movement that entails.
And for the folks in the (2) of the above, this is a reasonable way to spend money. Want to get folks reporting to the Director of the FTC whose FMV compensation is more than $150K (lol, this is half a baby lawyer's salary at BigLaw or anyone doing any kind of strategy or execution at an F500 firm) -- pony up. Money well spent, a couple of cracked operators int he right spot can do more than armies of mediocrities.
I'd definitely include that in what I said above about "having a standing army" for a political ideology. Good elaboration on the point though.
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This is the way I have heard it described by think-tankers: Democratic shadow governments reside in universities, Republican shadow governments reside in think tanks (which are really just right-wing counter-institutions to the left-wing dominated universities in the first place).
Nah. Both of the shadow governments reside in K street where they work for a firm lobbying their former agency.
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I think this is too cynical. The way I view most think tanks is doing the hard work of translating abstract ideological principles into actual policy. If I have a belief like "the criminal justice system treats wealthy people better than poor people to an unjust degree" I can't just go pass a law that says "the criminal justice system shall treat people more justly with respect to wealth disparities." Someone has to do the hard work of figuring out how my complaint actually manifests in the system (cash bail) and what policies could alleviate it (getting rid of cash bail). Viewed this way, the work of think tanks is necessary in our modern government. No legislator can be a domain expert on every area they are called to legislate on. Think tanks help that by synthesizing a legislators ideological commitments with domain expertise to produce palatable and effective policy.
I thought it was cynical too before I worked in a think tank. After working in one, and interacting with others in it. Their response is somewhere along the lines of "not cynical enough". Some of them don't even think of the first one as a point of think tanks. They just see think tanks purely as extractive entities from rich people that don't know what to do with their money.
What you describe is happening to some degree. I just think it is a minority of the resource spending and allocation. If it is more than 10% you have a rock solid institution. Average is closer to 1%. And bad ones are some negative percentage, in that they spend resources from their ideology only to actively hurt and confuse the cause they care about. PETA is an example of that.
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They’re largely propaganda machines in my opinion. They exist to create consensus around an idea and to craft legislation to turn that consensus into law. The “ideological tax” you speak of is how those groups get the money to get the job done.
It seems to go in stages with the propaganda stage going first. Issue comes up. Think tanks find research to support the ideological agenda the think tank has. Then they issue white papers that summarize that research and debunk the opposition narrative. At the same time they issue the talking points that get injected into the media by aligned media outlets and politicians. At that point they start talking about legislation to fix the issue or blocking bad legislation.
I don’t think you can get rid of them entirely. They’re a big part of how the elites control culture. If you weaken or destroy that system another will be created or co-opted. Power is power.
I think you are espousing the normal take.
My main counter to that take is that they are just not effective. The good ones give the appearance of effectiveness because that is how you get more money and resources.
There is no need to get rid of them. Something can be negative, but the costs of dealing with it are far higher than just leaving it alone. I think that is the case with think tanks.
I think organs of consensus building are inherent to any group human activity much like a dominance hierarchy is. If you smash the current ones, you will find others taking their place. Think tanks are probably more effective than they look to us normal serfs on the outside of the power structure. Most of their work is laundered through the organs of consensus aimed at us — mostly media, political talking points, and influencers.
I don’t think you fight most of these things by destroying the think tanks that already exist. You do so, much like other institutions that build consensus, by building alternatives. The greatest enemy of the public schools are home schools as they effectively remove certain children from the early indoctrination curriculum that schooling is meant to provide. The greatest threat to universities are trade schools and children skipping college to go into trades. Current media and social media are best countered by alternatives. If I can watch media with a different perspective, or news slanted in a different direction, or listen to music that doesn’t line up with Consensus, then the Consensus loses control.
But didn't he just say he wasn't interested in doing that in the parent comment?
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Home schools aren't much of a threat because they're very limited in application. They allow small pockets of the less-indoctrinated (or otherwise-indoctrinated) but can't supplant the public schools. Vouchers and reasonably inexpensive private schools would be a real threat, but they keep getting killed or nerfed.
Trades aren't a threat to universities. What would be is if employers stopped requiring degree for many high-status occupations, but they aren't going to... and if they tried, the governments would step in to require degrees, as they have for many licensed professions.
You’re right about the inherently small scaling. But small pockets of un-indoctrinated people can form nucleation points for larger groups. It’s a threat to them even if it’s never going to be a big thing.
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A slightly less critical read could add the point:
They help politicians to design and pass actual policies that advance a given ideological agenda.
That is, if your think tank is focused in on immigration reform, and you've got some friendly politicians in office, and one of said politicians' staff calls you and says "Because of [event] immigration reform is now a major concern and we have a window to get some bills passed. Give us some moderate reform policies that we can present to the legislature."
Then the think tank pulls up its archives and can send over a 'package' of proposed legislation language, talking points, and research/studies they've conducted or collected in favor of the given policy, and can join in the campaign towards getting it passed.
This avoids the need for a politician to work too hard at becoming an expert on the topic at hand and designing bills from scratch.
Of course if the think tank ecosystem becomes too crowded, it probably makes it LESS likely for any legislation to get passed since every think tank is pushing their own favored issued or their own favored policy solution to a given issue, and politicians now are faced with deciding which ones they want to appease and which they want to anger, and are less likely to decide at all, I'd guess.
So think tanks are also probably constantly jockeying for status so they can get more funding and attention from pols so they can get more funding so they can get more attention... round and round it goes.
THAT is when they really become a grift, if you ask me. When they exist solely to convert money into public attention into more money (Hi there, Project 2025) without any real chance of getting a good policy agenda passed.
Not just the package, an actual set of personnel that can pass it without getting stuck or outmaneuvered.
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I was recently thinking that many university departments are essentially left-wing think tanks. They have explicitly activist aims, produce low-quality research with conclusions that are at least directionally predetermined, and only hire people with certain ideologies. The main difference is that they're funded, or at least subsidized, by taxpayers.
Am I wrong in thinking that many think tanks, especially foreign policy ones, are also taxpayer-funded? I guess the Institute for the Study of War only lists a bunch of retired Pentagon folks as directors and donations from defense contractors (so maybe only slightly indirectly?). RAND and MITRE get some combination of public and private funds. Some of those aren't exactly known for being leftist peaceniks.
I'm not sure. I was thinking of the more ideological think tanks, like Heritage and the EPI.
Apparently Rand does get government funding, though I'm not sure whether it's contracting for specific research or open-ended grants.
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The "tax" imposed by the think tanks is entirely voluntarily, and the wealthy people pay it because they support the goals and methods of the think tanks. The universities and other nominally-neutral but actually ideologically captured institutions are much more effective because they can obtain their funds either from governments (thus real live taxation) or from ideological neutrals and opponents as well as the aligned (in the case of universities gatekeeping careers, for instance, or professional organizations like the American Bar Association or American Medical Association)
I think the inside view for a lot of these people paying the tax is that it feels about as "voluntary" as actual taxes. Many of them have a sense that their political opponents pose a credible threat and danger to them and theirs.
I think ideologically capturing professions is short term gain for long term cost. These institutions will cost off their reputation for a time, and then everyone will learn to discount their value as neutral organizations. And their funding sources will start drying up.
We're in the long term, and this didn't happen. The strategy was to capture so many institutions that they can support each other's reputation. The media, the universities, the bureaucracy, the "scientific community", etc. It worked. There's no check against ground truth because that's too hard to do and too easy for the institutions to explain away.
I think they are starting to suffer. but I doubt you are satisfied with how much suffering and how fast it is happening.
A bunch of people did not trust the results of a major election in 2020. I'd say that is largely a trust issue brought about by the fact that many important institutions are clearly captured.
State legislatures have started banning DEI at universities. Next step is for them to give up entirely and start just cutting funding to them.
Many social sciences have reputations in the gutter because they spent too many years ideology focused rather than rigor focused. Psych, Sociology, etc.
Climate science is not trusted.
News orgs are hated.
The next step is actually to put political appointees in charge of everything at public universities and revoke tenure from everybody.
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And the captured institutions settled that argument decisively with the argumentum ad baculum.
We won't get there. The academic bureaucracy will resist by calling DEI something else and lying, while Federal bureaucracy works on correcting the problem by requiring DEI for Federal funding.
People still believe their results. And they've been nonsense for even longer than they've been ideologically captured!
Climate science is absolutely trusted. There are dissidents, but pushing decarbonization and that sort of thing is still a win for the Democrats because people trust climate science.
Hated, yes. Utterly trusted, also yes. COVID proved that. And they're still considered (by normies) to be ideologically neutral even given their blatant editorializing in news stories.
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From a certain point of view, think tanks are merely a constituent part of American politics, and their effects can't or shouldn't be calculated out to a one dimensional reduction.
From a certain point of view, Scott Alexander's blog is a think tank. For that matter, from a certain point of view, Scott Alexander's link roundup is a prestigious journal, but without the systemic wokeness which cripples academia.
After all, I think the reason many of us here is that Scott Alexander was willing to stand up to the social justice warriors before it was cool. The influence of Scott extends to the woke-skeptical like Paul Graham and others who spoke up in defense of Scott during the NYT's perfidious bullying.
I know I'm not the only one staggered by the left's insane hysteria in response to Trump. Without Scott Alexander to act as a beacon, it would be a lot harder to keep my sanity. Scott Alexander's ideology is a corrective force which reduces the damage the left can do.
Groups of citizens discussing and forwarding an ideological agenda is the very essence of democracy. You seem to have an atomized view of citizens, but democracy works under principles of reasonable conversation driven by informed authoritarian sources.
We're lucky to have the institutions we have built for ourselves, but more to the point, there isn't any other way it could be.
I believe it is a race to the bottom type of situation. If the other side has ideological Institutions then you need their own to counter them. Wokeness came from ideological universities, and a bunch of orgs had to pop up to defend against it.
My point about these organizations being bad is that the woke fight might not have happened at all. There was a lack of things for leftist organizations to gather on. So they invented one.
As cynical as I am of institutional capture by wokes, I don't begrudge them their right to an opinion, their right to advance an agenda.
You want to live in a world where the woke fight never happened by wishing away intellectual collaboration in the service of a political ideology? That seems opposed to freedom of speech.
I have had to cut contact with woke people in my life but as much as it is straightforward that their ideology is destructive incoherence and irrationality, there still exists a point of view, an attempt to fight oppression no matter how imagined that oppression is.
These ideologies will surface and resurface because people aren't going to change. Bemoaning the necessity of the fight isn't winning the fight. The struggle is perpetual and the wokes must be defeated over and over again.
To be clear, I wouldn't wish them away if it was an option. Something can be negative but the overall correct solution is to just do nothing about it.
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