Think Tanked

Epistemic Closure: A Closing of the Conservative Mind?

Today, The New York Times captured an argument among conservatives as to whether or not they're having enough arguments.

The outrage has stemmed from a series of blog posts from libertarian Cato Institute Research Fellow, Julian Sanchez (you can read a couple of those posts here and here), who says conservatives are suffering from "epistemic closure." 

What's epistemic closure and why has it gotten so many conservatives up in arms?

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history.

Some of the conservative responses in the NYT piece are predictable (Jonah Goldberg wants to deflect the argument toward liberals and Richard Lowry insists everything's just fine).

One of the more critical views came from Bruce Bartlett, who may be one of the casualties of epistemic closure after having been let go from the National Center for Policy Analysis for being critical of the George W. Bush administration:

“Every intellectual movement needs to constantly question itself; otherwise it becomes stale. But conservatives have sort of reached a position of intellectual closure. They don’t think there are any new ideas of particular interest to them. Their philosophy is fully formed. The only question is how best to implement conservative ideas in the political debate.”

David Frum is another prominent conservative figure who shares Bartlett's views and, coincidentally, was released from his duties at the American Enterprise Institute when his criticism crossed the line. But it may well be the case that Julian Sanchez, firmly in the libertarian camp at Cato, is out of striking distance while still being able to push the buttons of conservatives. 

h/t: Laura Rozen

Jim Jones Jewish Joke Saga

Last Wednesday while speaking at the prominent pro-Israel think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Obama National Security Adviser General Jim Jones told a joke that a week later has drawn some criticism.

At the time, the joke--about a Taliban member and a Jewish merchant--caused quite a bit of laughter (captured in the video below) and Laura Rozen at Politico noted that Jones received a standing ovation before and after his speech. 

Nonetheless, Jones apologized for his "off the cuff" joke after some blistering criticism.

For their part, the Washington Institute received no complaints and executive director Robert Satloff wrote:

The tempest in a teapot about Gen. James L. Jones's opening joke in his address to The Washington Institute's twenty-fifth anniversary symposium last week diverted attention from the truly newsworthy aspects of the national security advisor's remarks. On five key issues, he made important, substantive, and at times innovative statements of policy. Given the political and strategic timing of his remarks, they should be viewed as one of the most significant statements of administration policy on Middle East issues this year.

For anybody who's interested in the actual substance of Jones' speech, you can read Jones' full remarks (joke omitted) here.

Harper's: Lexington Inst. an 'Ad Firm for Defense Industry'

Ken Silverstein delivered a blistering account of the Lexington Institute in this month's Harper's magazine ("Mad Men: Introducing the defense industry's pay-to-play ad agency"). As one of the magazine's annotations (available to subscribers only), Silverstein uses a Lexington policy brief to talk about all the ways he can think of in a two-page spread in which Lexington acts as a public relations agency for its donor. But this is the gist:

Despite casting itself as an intellectual clearing house, it is in fact an advertising firm on retainer for the defense industry.

And the pay seems to reflect that rather than a non-profit, as Bruce Bartlett recently pointed out in his Forbes column.

Not surprisingly, the executives of such organizations are paid more like lobbyists than academics. According to the information posted at www.guidestar.com, the top two officials at Lexington were paid $360,000 each in 2008.

What that salary requires, according to Silverstein, is some risky decision-making. Loren Thompson, the chief operating officer at Lexington, "played a supporting role" in the 2003 fiasco surrounding Boeing's attempt to acquire a lease-to-buy contract with the Air Force for refueling tankers.

The contract--which at $24 billion would have cost the Air Force significantly more than simply buying a new fleet outright--was canceled when Senator John McCain discovered that an Air Force procurement official had fixed the deal for Boeing while negotiating a job for herself with the company. McCain also unearthed emails showing that the Air Force had used Thompson to sell the deal to the press. As a senior aiude to Air Force Secretary James Roche put it in one of the messages: "We've got Loren doing the Lord's work again. '3rd Party' support at its best."

That was in 2003. The tankers saga, of course, still isn't resolved and Thompson is still writing about it at Lexington. 

Silverstein also pointed out that Thompson runs Source Associates, a for-profit defense consulting firm, with clients like Lockheed Martin--a company that figures favorably in Lexington's analyses. 

Thompson, for his part, offered Silverstein this defense:

"I'm not going to work on a project unless somebody, somewhere, is willing to pay. This is a business, he told me. "My bottom line is that if what I write and say is true, it doesn't really matter what my motives are."

Killing Think Tanks

In his weekly Forbes column, former Treasury Department economist (and former Heritage Foundation and National Center for Policy Analysis scholar) Bruce Bartlett eulogized think tanks ("The End of the Think Tank"), because they are "becoming so political that they are more like lobbyists than academic institutions."

Once university-styled academics in the days when the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations and, eventually, the American Enterprise Institute were alone in the world of think tanks, Bartlett seems to simultaneously have admiration for and blame Heritage Foundation President, Ed Feulner.

From Feulner's vision the Heritage Foundation was established in 1973. Rather than fill its staff with aging Ph.D.s, he hired people with master's degrees who had perhaps studied with the small number of conservatives in academia. Their job wasn't to do original research, but to take the research that had already been done by conservative academics, summarize it and apply it to the specific legislative issues Congress was considering. Instead of writing books of several hundred pages, Heritage studies were typically 10 pages or less.

You may only see the contempt Bartlett has, but he also must certainly see the magnitude of the relevance Heritage gave think tanks by speeding up the game. Indeed, this kind of rapid-response policy literature pushed by Heritage, as Bartlett points out, was emulated by other think tanks by the 1990s.

And then the money started rolling in as corporations saw the impact think tank reports could have on legislation.

Unfortunately, the additional money brought increased donor pressure to produce bottom line results--getting bills passed or defeated--and had a corrupting effect on the think tanks. New ones came into existence that were little more lobbying operations with tax-exempt status.

Then Bartlett offered this striking recollection:

I recall one conversation I had with a very rich contributor to a think tank where I was working. He told me that the money he contributed to the organization came from the same pot of money he budgeted for political contributions.

This statement came as a revelation to me. Because think tanks, generally speaking, are 501(c)(3) organizations for which contributions are tax-exempt, I had always assumed that the principal competitors for donor dollars were other tax-exempt organizations such as universities, hospitals and museums. But if a think tank's real competitors are the National Republican Congressional Committee, the organization that raises money for all Republican House candidates, and like organizations, then it is operating in a completely different universe than I thought.

For Bartlett, money--combined with congressional reliance on think tank reports--resulted in the conformance of think tanks whose scholars knew when to self-censor because "it was part of the corporate culture that was simply understood."

Bartlett points to David Frum's dismissal from the American Enterprise Institute as the newest casualty of not applying self-censorship. Bartlett was reportedly fired from the National Center for Policy Analysis for being critical of the Bush administration.