Liberal Policy's Weak Foundations

Compared with philanthropic behemoths like the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee is a small-time player. It has only five program officers and annually gives out less money than Ford spends in a month. Yet in the past decade, the Bradley Foundation has emerged as a major force in the world of conservative policy research and advocacy. It underwrites think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, in addition to supporting publications such as The American Spectator and The Public Interest. Bradley's president, Michael Joyce, has established himself as a key figure among conservative intellectuals and political strategists.

With its starkly ideological agenda, Bradley is one of a halfdozen or so small conservative foundations that play a highly focused game of intellectual entrepreneurship. Along with such philanthropies as the John M. Olin Foundation and the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation's giving is underpinned by a strong belief in the power of ideas. The money that Bradley and these other foundations spend on ideas may be paltry next to the ocean of special-interest money that pumps through the US. political system, but by strategically leveraging their resources, conservative foundations have engineered the rise of a right-wing intelligentsia that has come to wield enormous influence in national policy debates.

The role of foundations is, of course, only one part of the story behind a turnaround that has put right-wing think tanks at the center of American politics, and books by the likes of Charles Murray on the best-seller lists. But it is a part of the story that illuminates much about the changing tactics employed by the right and the left to advance their agendas.

At the same time that conservative foundations began investing heavily in intellectual elites during the 1970s and 1980s, foundations on the left were moving in the opposite direction. Reflecting a widespread belief among progressives that more attention should be focused on the grass roots, they placed a new emphasis on community programs and sought greater diversity in their grant recipients. They poured money into activist groups, often seeking to moderate the agenda of those groups in the process (a story that has been well told elsewhere). They continued to fund policy research, but they didn't expand that funding to match growing spending on the right. Nor, for the most part, did they invest their funds as part of a strategic plan for winning national policy debates. Historically progressive organizations like the Institute for Policy Studies have problems raising money from foundations, but so do more mainstream liberal think tanks like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The results of this starvation diet are now apparent. The left is handicapped in the war of ideas because its policy intellectuals do not have generous patrons. Today's lopsided debate over national policy stems in part from a shortage of liberal and left thinkers who can work full time to develop and sell ideas. The point is not that the side with the most policy wonks wins but that any ideological movement is in deep trouble if it fails to cultivate an energetic corps of professional thinkers.

The stance of major liberal foundations differs from that of their conservative counterparts in two key respects. First, institutions like Ford, MacArthur, Rockefeller and Carnegie were established by industrialists, and while they may now be committed to a variety of progressive causes, their leaders avoid confessions of their political orientation. These foundations are not liberal in the way that places like Bradley and Olin are explicitly conservative. MacArthur Foundation president Adele Simmons, for example, insists that she presides over a nonpartisan and nonideological institution. The annual reports of Ford and Rockefeller artfully sidestep the political implications of the work that is detailed in their pages. Even as conservatives in Congress seek to demolish much of what liberal foundations have worked for over the past three decades, leaders of those institutions are hesitant to engage in an overtly ideological debate about how to respond to changes in national politics. "In two decades of raising money from liberal foundations I can't remember ever having a discussion of strategic ideology, of how to shift the debate to the left, at a major foundation:" says Jeff Faux, president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. "That's not the kind of discussion you have. They're focused on solving problems, not moving the debate."

For liberal foundations that want to downplay their politics - perhaps to keep a centrist board happy, perhaps out of concern for their tax-exempt status - funding liberal policy work can pose a problem. Supporting policy intellectuals who loudly declare their ideology is tantamount to acknowledging one's own leanings. Supporting policy research by academic researchers or centrist think tanks is a safer bet. As a result of these cautious spending choices, liberal foundations may sometimes get good social science for their money. What they are not getting is a strong network of policy intellectuals who know how to advertise this research, to incorporate it into a larger story about American life and, ultimately, to use it to win national debates.

A second problem that liberal foundations have with policy research is that many see it as an elitist enterprise. Conservative philanthropists don't mind bankrolling conservative intellectual elites who openly play top-down politics. Nor do they make apologies for giving money to organizations composed mainly of white men. But the outlook now dominant in liberal philanthropy - as well as among progressives generally - is that lasting change occurs from the bottom up. In foundations permeated by such thinking, program officers may feel either uncomfortable or uninterested in pushing grant proposals by liberal and left policy intellectuals. As one policy researcher put it, "There is no easier way to guilt-trip a foundation program officer than to play to their feeling that they have a cushy desk job and are throwing money at their own social class."

To be sure, liberal foundations still fund policy research. The Ford Foundation annually gives hundreds of thousands of dollars to think tanks to the left of the mainstream, and even a place like the Institute for Policy Studies, long politically marginalized, was able to land a three-year grant of $ 650,000 from MacArthur in 1993. But if one excludes grants to people in academia and to centrist think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the amount of funding for liberal and left policy work is low, especially relative to that of conservative foundations. A recent study by the Center for Policy Alternatives found that in the years 1992-93, two of the major conservative think tanks in Washington - the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute - received ninety-seven grants from foundations totaling about $ 10 million. In contrast, four leading liberal think tanks - C.P.A., the Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities - received only twenty-six grants totaling $ 4.3 million. Outside the Beltway, conservative foundations are also bankrolling the $ 18-million-a-year Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the $ 5-million-a-year Manhattan Institute in New York City, the $ 10-million-a-year Hudson Institute in Indianapolis and some eighty state-level policy centers. Add to this the conservative foundation support for dozens of college newspapers, thousands of graduate students and a phalanx of journals, and one gets a fuller picture of just how much money is being invested in right-wing intellectuals. This spending, moreover, is not just a passing fad. It's been growing steadily since the 1970s and shows no signs of abating. "We're in for the long haul:" says the Bradley Foundation's Michael Joyce.

Given their substantial resources - Ford and MacArthur alone have nearly $ 10 billion in combined assets - liberal foundations don't have to abandon their grass-roots focus to take on the conservative policy research juggernaut, but they do have to temper it. They need to strike a better balance between funding progressive programs and supporting intellectuals who can defend the premises behind these programs in national debate. Like it or not, liberal foundations are at the center of an ideological struggle in this country, and nurturing ideas is as important as anything else they do. The stakes are at their highest in the fight over what role government should play in combating poverty. The money that foundations have for dealing with social ills is paltry compared with that of government. Historically, liberal foundations have funded demonstration projects in the hope that they can be models for major government programs. However, as the right continues to win its war on the public sector and the notion of activist government becomes endangered, funding for both new and existing antipoverty efforts is fast dwindling. Better social science research and demonstration projects will not alter this trend; the ideological argument driving it must be attacked directly. To adapt a metaphor, it makes little sense for liberal foundations to labor away deep in the forest, nurturing new types of saplings and combating soil erosion, while doing little to oppose the growing power of clearcutting maniacs. "The irony is that all the do-good programs are going down the tubes for lack of intellectual ammunition to defend them," says Robert Kuttner, a columnist and co-founder, along with Paul Starr, of The American Prospect.

The story of The American Prospect, in fact, is a perfect example of Kuttner's point. While conservative foundations gave more than $ 1 million to The New Criterion between 1990 and 1993, and $ 554,000 to The American Spectator during the same period, Kuttner and Starr have had to run The American Prospect on a lean budget since beginning the liberal quarterly in 1989. They have received some support from foundations, including a large grant from the Schumann Foundation. However, the more typical response from liberal foundations has been that they don't give money to magazines. The self-defeating nature of this stance is not hard to see: The American Prospect is one of the few forums where the kind of programs that liberal foundations fund are discussed in depth, subjected to friendly criticism and related to a broader story about American politics.

The consequences of failing to invest in policy intellectuals have never been more apparent than in recent months, as underfunded liberal think tanks have scrambled to stem a flash flood of specious argumentation in Washington. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has been deeply involved in the budget battles, and its lack of resources well illustrates the strategic incompetence of liberal foundations. Since its founding in 1981, the center has earned a reputation as one of the most effective liberal think tanks in Washington, respected for both its high-quality policy analysis and its political savvy. Yet it has never been particularly well-funded, with an annual budget of less than $ 5 million. In 1993, it received $ 3.1 million. Ford deserves credit for giving C.B.P.P. $ 750,000 in 1993, but other liberal foundations were not nearly as generous (the MacArthur foundation contributed only $ 100,000). Meanwhile, during the same period, the American Enterprise Institute raked in sixty-five grants amounting to $ 4.8 million. Not surprisingly, when the scorched-earth budget blitzkrieg began this January, the center's staff found itself hopelessly overextended.

As government social policy spending heads into a steep dive over the next few years, all foundations will be under enormous pressure to fill the resulting vacuum in services at the community level. These new expenditures should not be allowed to push funding for policy work even further to the margins of the liberal philanthropic agenda. On the contrary, the unpleasant lessons of the recent past should inform a larger effort in this area. Lasting progressive change in the United States cannot be built on an archipelago of grass-roots initiatives and demonstration projects unconnected to a national ideological vision, nor can the outlines of such a vision be taken for granted. Michael Joyce is not entirely mistaken when he says that "liberal thinking is somewhat fossilized" and that liberals have been complacent in believing that "all the great questions were settled." Liberal foundations have focused so much on implementation over the past twenty years precisely because of their conviction that liberals knew what to do and just had to get busy doing it.

The enormous antipathy of much of the American public to progressive ideas suggests that the problem is a lot more complicated. Liberalism is in crisis not simply because its advocates are outgunned by a conservative propaganda machine; it is in crisis because it hasn't responded adequately to changes in American life and acknowledged its past failures. Throwing more money at liberal and left intellectuals will not contribute to a turnaround in national politics unless such thinkers become more adept at grappling with problems like the limits of activist government, the stagnation of American wages in a global economy and the problem of welfare dependency. The liberal grand story created during the middle part of this century has become dated; a new one must be formulated.

Thirty years ago, in the wake of Barry Goldwater's defeat, conservatives wandered in a political wilderness from which some observers predicted they would never emerge. They did, of course, and well-funded intellectuals were instrumental in leading the conservative movement onto the prairie of power. Today, liberal foundations should insure that policy thinkers on the left have everything they need to undertake a similar task.