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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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