Think-Tank Confidential

THINK-TANK CONFIDENTIAL
[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Christopher Demuth, American Enterprise Institute]
[Commentary] A "kiss and tell" from AEI's president who is stepping down. Think tanks are identified in the public mind as agents of a particular political viewpoint. It is sometimes suggested that this compromises the integrity of their work. Yet their real secret is not that they take orders from, or give orders to, the Bush administration or anyone else. Rather, they have discovered new methods for organizing intellectual activity -- superior in many respects (by no means all) to those of traditional research universities. To be sure, think tanks -- at least those on the right -- do not attempt to disguise their political affinities in the manner of the (invariably left-leaning) universities. Think tanks aim to produce good research not only for its own sake but to improve the world. And they pay careful attention to the craft of good speaking and writing. By the measures of participation in political debate and generation of influential policy ideas and proposals, the right-of-center think tanks have been stupendous successes. They appear in the national media, liberal as well as conservative, well out of proportion to their numbers and output. AEI essays appear more frequently than those from other think thanks of all persuasions, not only in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal but also those of the New York Times and Washington Post. Every one of the right-of-center think tanks was founded in a spirit of opposition to the established order of things. Opposition is the natural proclivity of the intellectual, and is of course prerequisite to criticism and devotion to reform. And for conservatives, opposition lasted a very long time -- in domestic policy, from the New Deal through 1980.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119206742349355601.html?mod=todays_us_op...
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