Tanks for Nothing | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's note: This article appeared on John Hood's daily column in the Carolina Journal, which, because of Author / Publisher Hood, is linked to the John Locke Foundation.

    RALEIGH — Early next year, the John Locke Foundation will be celebrating our 25th anniversary. I've been with the organization since it opened its doors — earlier than that, actually, as I helped draft its founding documents and recruit its initial board of directors.

    If I didn't believe that think tanks played a constructive role in fashioning public policy, I wouldn't have spent most of my career working for them. For the most part, it's been a pleasure. That includes the time I've spent sparring with think tankers with other philosophical views and policy priorities.

    But I must say that the dialogue took a notable change for the worse changed several years ago when liberal groups and left-wing donors around the country altered their strategy in response to the growing effectiveness of free-market think tanks in state capitals. During the initial rise of these conservative institutes in the 1990s, liberal grantmakers such as the Ford Foundation, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and the North Carolina-based Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation responded by increasing their own donations to liberal think tanks and setting up new ones in dozens of states (such as the North Carolina Budget & Tax Center as a project of the N.C. Justice Center).

    The result of this initial wave of liberal investment was more eyeballs scrutinizing government documents, more voices expressing their views on government policy, and more information generated for public consumption about government actions. I could disagree with their opinions and still see the presence of these new liberal outlets as a net plus for the public discourse and the political process.

    About a decade later, however, left-wing donors and their political allies in Washington and state capitals came to the conclusion that setting up competing think tanks to espouse liberal ideas was inadequate. Rather than view conservative ideas as simply wrongheaded or misinformed, they came to view conservative ideas — and the organizations producing them — as illegitimate and immoral.

    These donors began to fund projects to reshape the very language of political debate, facilitate greater cooperation between think tanks and partisan activists, and hamper the ability of conservative organizations to conduct business. Their tactics included vilifying conservative donors (think the Koch brothers nationally and the Pope Foundation locally), running false-flag operations, stealing documents, and contacting reporters, editors, and producers to demand that they stop giving media coverage to conservative think tanks.

    For the most part, the effects were either negligible or laughable. Presumably the goal of vilifying conservative donors was either to pressure them into inaction or to saddle the organizations they funded with major public-relations problems. Neither happened. Conservatives (and liberals) who make major contributions to public-policy groups do so out of sincere belief and commitment to principle. They aren't going to be cowed by potty-mouth invective on obscure websites or pathetically ineffective boycotts.

    Pressuring journalists not to quote or run content submitted by conservative think tanks didn't work, either. The John Locke Foundation and its peers in other states garner much more media attention now than they did six years ago. Even journalists sympathetic to the Left tend to resent such obvious pressure tactics, particularly when they note the absence of similar campaigns by conservatives to smear liberal analysts and discourage reporters from quoting them.

    What the Left's new strategy did accomplish, however, was to poison the well. Where groups across the political spectrum might once have cooperated on issues of mutual interest, today it is virtually impossible to get conservative-minded and liberal-minded donors in the same room, much less on the same page.

    Do you think I exaggerate what the Left has been trying to do here? Then check out this report of what happened at the Netroots Nation conference in Detroit last month. During a session given the title "Stink Tanks in Your State" (perhaps by a gaggle of giggling schoolchildren), the head of ProgressNow, Arshad Hasan, talked about his movement's efforts not just to compete with conservative think tanks but to destroy them. "The next step for us is to take down this network of institutions that are state-based in each and every one of our states," he said. Then he added this unintentionally hilarious gem:

• "Our folks are very straight-forward," he asserted. "They're like, 'we are academics and we're going to do some rigorous research. Lobbying is just not part of our work and public perception is just not something we're concerned with. We're really just concerned about the research.' That's cool, that's great, and that's a big difference between what they do and what we do."

    Well, then I was like, "No way, like, that's not how it is, like, at all."

    Okay, seriously: compare JLF's work with that of the ProgressNow affiliate in our state, Progress NC. See the difference? Here's another difference — I don't think there's anything illegitimate about Progress NC. I spend no time whatsoever ruminating about how best to destroy it. That would be pointless and silly. And I, at least, have better things to do.