Do Deficits Matter?

In the February 15, 2005 Weekly Standard article "Do Deficits Matter? ," Irwin M. Stelzer answers "It depends on where you sit--and on which type of deficit you're talking about."

WHEN DICK CHENEY SAID, "Deficits don't matter," economists took that as proof of the economic illiteracy of the Bush administration. But it turns out there is a case to be made that Cheney was onto something.

On the deepest level, the vice president was echoing, in slightly exaggerated form, an idea put forward a few years ago by Irving Kristol, the Godfather of the neoconservatives who have had such a wide-ranging effect on Bush administration policy. Kristol wrote then, and still believes, that "We should figure out what we want before we calculate what we can afford, not the reverse."

On the political level, treating deficits as a non-issue also proved a successful strategy. After all, despite the torrent of red ink that splashed across the national budgets during his first term, George W. Bush was reelected by a substantial margin. Among John Kerry's other failures was his attempt to saddle the president with the label "profligate."

Which brings us to the economic level. The deficits that Bush ran up in the years in which the country was teetering on the verge of a serious recession had the beneficial effect of righting the economy. In that sense, deficits not only didn't matter, but were a force for economic good.

But that was then, and this is now. The economy, growing at an annual rate of 3.5 percent to 4.0 percent, is hardly in need of further fiscal stimulus. Yet the budget that the president sent to Congress last week promises deficits as far ahead as the eye can see--if the eye is practiced in reading these massive documents.

The president claims that his $2.57 trillion budget is the first step on the road to fulfilling his campaign promise to halve the deficit by 2009, even if Congress agrees to make his tax cuts permanent and enacts still more reductions. That claim is completely unfounded. Indeed, if the White House team that drafted this budget were subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, criminal indictments would be flying.

Start with the fact that most of the spending reductions the president proposes will be rejected by Congress. The budget calls for the elimination or curtailment of some 150 programs. But last year the president proposed eliminating 65 programs for a savings of $4.8 billion--and Congress agreed to eliminate only four programs for a savings of less than $200 million. Although Congress is under some pressure to keep spending down, it is under even more pressure from the farm lobby, the business lobby, the veterans' lobby, the poverty lobby, and the oldies' lobby, to mention only a few groups that will fight Bush's cuts.

But even if the budget is adopted, it will not begin to cut into the federal deficit, for several reasons. First, spending on the largest items--Medicare, Social Security and the military--is scheduled to increase. Second, the budget does not include any money beyond this year's outlays for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Third, it does not include the trillions that will be required if the president succeeds in persuading Congress to allow some participants to divert to private accounts a portion of the money they are now paying into the Social Security system.

On the other hand--and in all fairness--we can't ignore the fact that previous Bush budgets were also pronounced DOA--and then adopted within the spending limits the president had proposed. Moreover, the projected budget deficit is not threateningly large, relative to GDP. Larry Lindsey, Bush's former chief economist, points out in his latest client advisory that "The projected 2006 budget deficit of 3.0 percent of GDP is reasonable if the economy continues to grow."

And grow it seems likely to do. The Institute for Supply Management reports that the manufacturing sector expanded in January for the twentieth consecutive month, due in part to renewed international competitiveness flowing from the lower dollar, and in part to a scramble to restock depleted inventories. My own tour of shopping malls from Phoenix to Chicago to Washington revealed that retailers had been caught by surprise by the strength of Christmas and post-Christmas sales. While not bare, the shelves have large empty spots.

The housing market remains strong; the unemployment rate is a low 5.2 percent; over two million new jobs have been created in the past year; the service sector is growing; inflation is low, as are long-term interest rates; and U.S. companies are increasingly optimistic, "bolstered by unprecedented cash flows," according to Goldman Sachs. The budget deficit may be larger than we would like, and Dick Cheney may have been overstating things a bit, but so far it hard to say that his view of budget deficits is clearly wrong.

The trade deficit is another matter. Alan Greenspan stopped in London last week to speak at Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown's latest entrepreneurship bash, and to assure one and all that the market is gradually taking care of that problem. The dollar has fallen, giving American manufacturers an edge over their European competitors and making some imports more expensive. Short-term interest rates in the United States are now above those in euroland and Japan. Added to the more rapid growth being experienced in America, this rate differential will make investment in America even more attractive than it has been. I am less certain than the Fed chairman that we have seen the end of the dollar decline, but it would be foolish to bet against a man who has got things right through years of international and domestic turmoil.

In short, all may not be for the best in a best of all possible worlds, but almost everything seems to be--unless you are a euroland exporter, caught between a falling dollar, China's refusal to allow the renminbi to rise, and the appalling regulatory and tax environment in much of Europe.

Irwin M. Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, a columnist for the Sunday Times (London), a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.

What Killed Off The GOP Deficit Hawks?

In his December 27, 2004 Business Week editorial "What Killed Off The GOP Deficit Hawks?," Robert Kuttner says "the Republicans are now the ones making excuses for big deficits."

Last month, I posed a rhetorical question: Whatever happened to fiscally prudent Republicans? The question deserves a proper answer. In the early 1990s the bipartisan, business-led Concord Coalition made the accumulated Reagan-Bush deficits a major public issue. George H.W. Bush had to break a pledge and raise taxes because of mounting concerns in financial markets. H. Ross Perot put the deficit center stage in the 1992 election, helping to defeat Bush I and elect Bill Clinton. He made fiscal responsibility his signature issue.

A decade later, Republican deficit hawks have all but vanished. "It's pretty astonishing," I was told by Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition. "We used to get a lot of Democrats saying: 'You're just a Republican front group.' Now it's almost the reverse. The change in the Republican Party has been astounding." Are we on the record? I asked. "Absolutely," he replied. "The Republicans are now the ones making excuses for big deficits."

The indefatigable Peter G. Peterson, a coalition mainstay, has become the remnant of an endangered species -- the fiscally responsible Republican. He has just a few allies in Congress, such as Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Olympia J. Snowe (R-Me.), and, on a good day, Finance Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa).

HOW DID THIS SHIFT HAPPEN? Conversations with more than a dozen senior business leaders, including board members of the Concord Coalition, point to this progression: Since Ronald Reagan, a majority of Republican politicians have gradually come to conclude, as Vice-President Dick Cheney famously told former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill, that "deficits don't matter." What's interesting and alarming, however, is that different Republican factions believe deficits don't matter for opposite and incompatible reasons.

Supply-siders believe deficits don't matter because tax cuts so boost investment and productivity that the economy grows its way out of debt. The opposite, "starve the beast" faction, epitomized by tax tactician Grover Norquist, hope tax cuts will indeed create deep deficits that will then force spending cuts. But both things can't be true.

Under George W. Bush, the merry ideology calls for tax cuts in all seasons for all reasons. Spending has increased faster than under Clinton, and deficits have ballooned, yet tax cutting marches on. This privately scares many Republican business leaders. But very few are speaking out, either because they don't want to burn bridges to the White House or because they are too pleased with their tax cuts.

There is one other group worth noting. A decade ago fiscally conservative Democrats, mostly Southern, often worked with Republicans to serve as a brake on fiscal excess. The near-extinction of Democrats in the mold of former senators Sam Nunn, Paul Tsongas, Fritz Hollings, and Representative Charles Stenholm, who was gerrymandered out of a job, has removed a crucial legislative counterweight to Republican recklessness. The days of bipartisan budget caps and pay-as-you-go rules are over. "Moments like the balanced-budget provision of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America were aberrational," says Steven Rattner, an influential Wall Street Democrat on the Concord Coalition board.

Inside the Administration, former deficit hawks have trimmed their views. Three senior economic officials are all men once well-known in private life as deficit critics. Stephen Friedman, who is stepping down as head of the President's economic council, was a Concord Coalition leader. Chief economist N. Gregory Mankiw, whose textbook correlates big deficits with higher interest rates, is leaving. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, who once spoke out against fiscal imbalances, is keeping his job, barely.

Two factors could provoke Republican opposition to fiscal irresponsibility. The first is the risk of a dollar crash, directly related to big deficits. The second is the White House plan to borrow an additional $2 trillion to finance Social Security privatization. The Administration story is that borrowing $2 trillion in the short run will save the system up to $11 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years. The problem is that the supposed shortfall is hypothetical, while $2 trillion of additional borrowing will affect real money markets now.

"I remain a Republican," Pete Peterson said, "but the Republicans have become a far more theological, faith-directed party, not troubling with evidence."


Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect (rkuttner@prospect.org).

In Defense of Deficits

In the May 11, 2004 National Review article "In Defense of Deficits," contributing editor Thomas E. Nugent says "They’re not so bad, and at times they’re necessary."

Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently criticized President Bush’s fiscal policy in an article called, “A Conservative Case for Voting Democratic.” Wrote Bandow, “So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis? Vote Democratic.”

We’re in a tight presidential election race — in a year when the liberal press portrays Americans as the bad guys in the Iraq war, and at a time when the Democratic contender for the White House resembles Neville Chamberlain. The last thing the Republican party needs is the reckless suggestion that conservatives vote Democratic.

In his article, Bandow echoed several free-market economists who today belong to the “almost all non-defense spending is bad” school. “Given the generally woeful record (on deficits) of Republican presidents,” Bandow wrote, “the best combination may be a Democratic chief executive and a Republican legislature. Thus, the only way we can realistically keep Congress and the President in separate political hands is to vote for John Kerry in November.”

The problem with advocating a vote for Kerry on the implied basis that a split-party government will mitigate any wayward deficit spending is that such advocacy reflects a misunderstanding of the role of fiscal policy — i.e., budget deficits — in maintaining a viable economy during times of crisis. (This is likely one of those times.)

The current federal budget deficit is about 5 percent of gross domestic product. The reason for this deficit is twofold. First, deficit spending supported economic activity as the U.S. transitioned from a “bubble” economy back to a normal economy. The “bubble” was inflated beyond capacity as companies of all sizes updated computers to handle the Y2K event. Once the threat of this electronic dislocation passed, demand for computers and related equipment dropped dramatically. This decline rippled through the economy.

The government’s first response to falling economic activity was to lower interest rates. The Federal Reserve reduced its policy rate to near record lows, expecting a quick pick-up in business borrowing. Yet the expectation of a recovery in business spending was not forthcoming — businesses didn’t want the money so it didn’t really matter what the interest rates were. Subsequently, after the expected nine-month waiting period, a sustainable rally in the stock market and the economy failed to materialize.

However, the real boost to economic recovery was the fiscal-policy stimulus of tax-rate cuts and increased spending, part of President Bush’s second fiscal-stimulus package in 2003.

Few economists recognize that the budget surplus inherited by President Bush was an albatross around his political neck. In fact, the faster he got rid of it, the better off he and the economy would be. Unfortunately, politicians were gleeful that budget surpluses could be used to eliminate the national debt. However, the problem with budget surpluses is that they collapse private-sector savings. Budget surpluses are a sign of excess taxation, and when the government sector saves, the private sector saves less.

This relationship is taught in basic economics. For example, when the government buys back debt, the macro effect can be described as follows: The government buys back bonds from the public by effectively raising taxes to pay for the bonds. At the end of the day, the individual has no savings in the form of the bonds, but has a higher tax bill. The public response is probably to spend less.

Budget surpluses are contractionary. They shrink the economy. Yet many conservative economists demand a return to budget surpluses even though deficits provide the stimulus to avoid deep recessions.

Not until the implementation of the president’s second stimulus package in the second quarter of 2003 did the stock market surge and the economy get back on a sustainable growth path. If the expected growth of 4 to 5 percent in real GDP is maintained, the budget deficit may not get any bigger. However, it may not get any smaller.

The second reason for a record budget deficit is higher defense spending. During the 1990s, President Clinton contracted defense spending and avoided confronting terrorism. Now that the U.S. is fighting a global terrorist threat, the government must increase spending on defense and on waging a new type of war. During World War II, the U.S. budget deficit as a percent of GDP jumped to 45 percent. Compare that with our 5 percent level today. Few economists would have advocated reducing the deficit in those days — when the very fabric of American life was threatened. We should be spending more, not less on defense.

Given that there are viable economic and political reasons for a large budget deficit, arguing that there is a need to reduce the deficit makes little sense in today’s economy. Rising economic growth and booming corporate profits should mitigate the growth in the deficit — not a tax increase for the rich as proposed by Sen. Kerry and the Democrats in general.

While anyone can correctly make the argument that there is much government spending that is wasteful, it is unlikely that a Democratic president and a Republican Congress would dramatically reduce pork-barrel spending, as Cato’s Bandow has proposed. Instead, this twosome might be less inclined to make the right choices that are necessary to keep the economy on a sustainable growth path.

Republicans should think twice about voting Democratic to reduce government spending. And both parties should simply think a little harder about budget deficits: Had we hung onto the surpluses of the late 1990s, we’d be in a world of economic hurt today. If that prognosis seems counterintuitive, take a look at what happened to the economy right after the big budget surpluses of the 1920s.

— Thomas E. Nugent is executive vice president and chief investment officer of PlanMember Advisors, Inc. and chief investment officer for Victoria Capital Management, Inc.

The Conservative Case for Voting Democratic

In the April 20, 2004 article "The Conservative Case for Voting Democratic," the Cato Institute's Doug Bandow argues against the fiscal irresponsibility of George W. Bush and the modern Republican Party.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He served as a special assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

Republicans have long claimed to be fiscal tightwads and railed against deficit spending. But this year big-spending George W. Bush and the GOP Congress turned a budget surplus into a $477 billion deficit. There are few programs at which they have not thrown money: massive farm subsidies, an expensive new Medicare drug benefit, thousands of pork-barrel projects, dubious homeland-security grants, expansion of Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, even new foreign-aid programs. Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that in 2003 "government spending exceeded $20,000 per household for the first time since World War II."

Complaints about Republican profligacy have led the White House to promise to mend its ways. But Bush's latest budget combines accounting flim-flam with unenforceable promises. So how do we put Uncle Sam on a sounder fiscal basis?

Vote Democratic.

Democrats obviously are no pikers when it comes to spending. But the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity. Give either party complete control of government, and the Treasury vaults are quickly emptied. Neither Congress nor the President wants to tell the other no. Both are desperate to prove they can "govern"—which means creating new programs and spending more money. But share power between parties, and out of principle or malice they check each other. Even if a President Kerry proposed more spending than would a President Bush, a GOP Congress would appropriate less. That's one reason the Founders believed in the separation of powers.

Consider the record. William Niskanen, former acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, has put together a fascinating analysis of government spending since 1953. Real federal outlays grew fastest, 4.8% annually, in the Kennedy-Johnson years, with Congress under Democratic control. The second-fastest rise, 4.4%, occurred with George W. Bush during Republican rule. The third-biggest spending explosion, 3.7%, was during the Carter administration, a time of Democratic control. In contrast, the greatest fiscal stringency, 0.4%, occurred during the Eisenhower years. The second-best period of fiscal restraint, 0.9%, was in the Clinton era. Next came the Nixon-Ford years, at 2.5%, and Ronald Reagan's presidency, at 3.3%. All were years of shared partisan control.

Bush officials argue that it is unfair to count military spending, but Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan also faced international challenges that impeded their domestic plans. Moreover, if you do strip out military spending and consider only the domestic record, GOP chief executives emerge in an even worse light. In terms of real domestic discretionary outlays, which are most easily controlled, the biggest spender in the past 40 years is George W. Bush, with expenditure racing ahead 8.2% annually, according to Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth. No. 2 on the list is Gerald Ford, at 8%. No. 3 is Richard Nixon. At least the latter two, in contrast to Bush, faced hostile Congresses.

Given the generally woeful record of Republican Presidents, the best combination may be a Democratic chief executive and Republican legislature. It may also be the only combination that's feasible, since in 2004 at least, it will be difficult to overturn Republican congressional control: Redistricting has encouraged electoral stasis in the House, while far more Democrats face reelection in the Senate. Thus, the only way we can realistically keep Congress and the President in separate political hands is to vote for John Kerry in November.

Returning to divided government would yield another benefit as well: Greater opportunity for reform, whether of the budget process, tort liability, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, or almost anything else. Niskanen has observed that the prospects for change "will be dependent on more bipartisan support than now seems likely in a united Republican government." He points out that tax reform occurred in 1986, and agriculture, telecommunications, and welfare reform a decade later, all under divided government.

The deficit can be cut in half if Congress "is willing to make tough choices," says President Bush. But GOP legislators are likely to make tough choices only if he is replaced by a Democrat. History teaches us that divided government equals fiscal probity, so vote Democratic for President if you want responsible budgeting in Washington.

This article originally appeared in Fortune on April 20, 2004.

Explaining Why People Oppose Policies That Would Benefit Them

In the January 12, 2003 New York Times editorial "The Triumph of Hope Over Self-Interest," David Brooks explains why the public supports so many policies that overwhelmingly benefit the rich.

NASHVILLE - Why don't people vote their own self-interest? Every few years the Republicans propose a tax cut, and every few years the Democrats pull out their income distribution charts to show that much of the benefits of the Republican plan go to the richest 1 percent of Americans or thereabouts. And yet every few years a Republican plan wends its way through the legislative process and, with some trims and amendments, passes.

The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which is explicitly for the mega-upper class. Al Gore, who ran a populist campaign, couldn't even win the votes of white males who didn't go to college, whose incomes have stagnated over the past decades and who were the explicit targets of his campaign. Why don't more Americans want to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves?

Well, as the academics would say, it's overdetermined. There are several reasons.

People vote their aspirations.

The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

It's not hard to see why they think this way. Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich.

Americans read magazines for people more affluent than they are (W, Cigar Aficionado, The New Yorker, Robb Report, Town and Country) because they think that someday they could be that guy with the tastefully appointed horse farm. Democratic politicians proposing to take from the rich are just bashing the dreams of our imminent selves.

Income resentment is not a strong emotion in much of America.

If you earn $125,000 a year and live in Manhattan, certainly, you are surrounded by things you cannot afford. You have to walk by those buildings on Central Park West with the 2,500-square-foot apartments that are empty three-quarters of the year because their evil owners are mostly living at their other houses in L.A.

But if you are a middle-class person in most of America, you are not brought into incessant contact with things you can't afford. There aren't Lexus dealerships on every corner. There are no snooty restaurants with water sommeliers to help you sort though the bottled eau selections. You can afford most of the things at Wal-Mart or Kohl's and the occasional meal at the Macaroni Grill. Moreover, it would be socially unacceptable for you to pull up to church in a Jaguar or to hire a caterer for your dinner party anyway. So you are not plagued by a nagging feeling of doing without.

Many Americans admire the rich.

They don't see society as a conflict zone between the rich and poor. It's taboo to say in a democratic culture, but do you think a nation that watches Katie Couric in the morning, Tom Hanks in the evening and Michael Jordan on weekends harbors deep animosity toward the affluent?

On the contrary. I'm writing this from Nashville, where one of the richest families, the Frists, is hugely admired for its entrepreneurial skill and community service. People don't want to tax the Frists - they want to elect them to the Senate. And they did.

Nor are Americans suffering from false consciousness. You go to a town where the factories have closed and people who once earned $14 an hour now work for $8 an hour. They've taken their hits. But odds are you will find their faith in hard work and self-reliance undiminished, and their suspicion of Washington unchanged.

Americans resent social inequality more than income inequality.

As the sociologist Jennifer Lopez has observed: "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm just, I'm just Jenny from the block." As long as rich people "stay real," in Ms. Lopez's formulation, they are admired. Meanwhile, middle-class journalists and academics who seem to look down on megachurches, suburbia and hunters are resented. If Americans see the tax debate as being waged between the economic elite, led by President Bush, and the cultural elite, led by Barbra Streisand, they are going to side with Mr. Bush, who could come to any suburban barbershop and fit right in.

Most Americans do not have Marxian categories in their heads.

This is the most important reason Americans resist wealth redistribution, the reason that subsumes all others. Americans do not see society as a layer cake, with the rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom. They see society as a high school cafeteria, with their community at one table and other communities at other tables. They are pretty sure that their community is the nicest, and filled with the best people, and they have a vague pity for all those poor souls who live in New York City or California and have a lot of money but no true neighbors and no free time.

All of this adds up to a terrain incredibly inhospitable to class-based politics. Every few years a group of millionaire Democratic presidential aspirants pretends to be the people's warriors against the overclass. They look inauthentic, combative rather than unifying. Worst of all, their basic message is not optimistic.

They haven't learned what Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt and even Bill Clinton knew: that you can run against rich people, but only those who have betrayed the ideal of fair competition. You have to be more hopeful and growth-oriented than your opponent, and you cannot imply that we are a nation tragically and permanently divided by income. In the gospel of America, there are no permanent conflicts.

David Brooks, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, is author of "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There.''

Philanthropy and Movements

In the July 15, 2002 American Prospect editorial "Philanthropy and Movements," Robert Kuttner outlines the relationships between "organized business, ideological conservatism, advocacy research, and the Republican Party."

Recently I was invited to be the token liberal at a major national conference of conservative foundations. The invitation was to debate Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard editor, TV pundit, and conservative grand strategist, as the after-dinner entertainment. Presumably, conservative donors wished to view the face of the enemy, close up. The better I did, the deeper they would dig into their ample pockets.

The dinner was held at one of New York's most elegant hotels, the Pierre. The sponsors put me up at the nearby Hotel Roosevelt, a spartan midtown hostelry one cut above fleabag. I gamely accepted this lesser billeting not as demeaning confirmation of the right's two-class vision for society, but as recognition of my esteem for FDR. But I digress.

The debate itself was good fun, but the real treat was the before-dinner event: a panel discussion of four presidents of major right-wing research factories, titled, "Philanthropy, Think Tanks, and the Importance of Ideas." The heads of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato, Manhattan, and American Enterprise institutes were there to tell their patrons what political gains a billion dollars had bought. This session I would have paid to attend.

The panel was chaired by none other than Roger Hertog, a mega-rich center-right philanthropist and new part-owner of The New Republic recently profiled in these pages as exemplar of a new kind of "velvet conservatism." But there was nothing velvet about the discussion that followed. Most foundations, Hertog began, spend their money on brick-and-mortar institutions -- museums, hospitals, symphonies, universities. These are all fine, Hertog continued, but the four panelists have achieved something far more consequential. They have changed the course of American politics, and they "only" cost, collectively, $70 million dollars a year. "You get huge leverage for your dollars," Hertog affirmed. The panelists smiled.

The first to present was Ed Crane, head of the Cato Institute. Crane complimented his patrons in the audience for recognizing that these battles of ideas take two or three decades. Cato has been pushing Social Security privatization since 1979, Crane noted. Cato allies such as the Federalist Society labored long years in the wilderness before they became powerful enough to literally pick the Bush's administration's federal judges.

Edwin Feulner of the Heritage Foundation emphasized his institution's strategic planning in building a conservative movement. He emphasized "the four M's": mission, money, management, and marketing. Heritage places hundreds of op-eds, all devoted to reinforcing the conservative message. On the money front, Feulner raises millions not just from conservative foundations, but from corporations and individuals. Like the Republican Party, the conservative think tanks use big money to raise small money. Heritage, for instance, gets contributions from 200,000 small donors.

Christopher DeMuth, president of the American Enterprise Institute, spoke of how the right-wing think tanks had reframed national debate by investing in and then promoting idea-mongers for the long term. The right has been investing in Robert Bork's challenge to antitrust since the 1970s. By the 1990s, his contention that antitrust enforcement often backfires had become conventional wisdom. Charles Murray's claim that welfare actually caused poverty was widely viewed as an outrage when Murray's 1985 book, Losing Ground, was first published. Though Murray's arithmetic was dubious and his timing backward (poverty came first), the message had a willing audience. The right-wing publicity machine turned the obscure Murray into a policy celebrity. Soon, said DeMuth, Democrats as well as Republicans were saying that Murray was right. Investment in ideas and ideological marketing changed the course of politics.

"There are three lessons," DeMuth told the conservative benefactors in the audience. "First, things take time. It takes at least 10 years for a radical new idea to emerge from obscurity." DeMuth pointed to school vouchers and Social Security privatization as still incomplete revolutions. But his funders got it, and were with him for the long haul.

"Second," DeMuth added. "Unintended consequences are not enough." For years, a staple of conservative ideology has been the claim that liberal social engineering backfires: Welfare makes people poorer, antitrust enforcement retards competition, safety regulations make people behave more carelessly, etc. "But nobody claims EPA makes the environment worse," DeMuth cautioned. So the conservative movement also needs affirmative ideas. It needs better ways, conservative ways, to achieve popular social goals.

"Third, all fundamental changes are bipartisan when they happen," DeMuth concluded. So the right makes great efforts to co-opt New Democrats. Right-wing think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies make sure their ventures include (safely conservative) Democrats. The bipartisan CSIS National Commission on Social Security Reform had no official standing, but with high-profile Democrats as well as Republicans it successfully masqueraded as a bona fide national commission, and received extensive press coverage.

The final panelist, Larry Mone of the Manhattan Institute, spoke of the importance of targeting opinion-elites. The Manhattan Institute underwrote Charles Murray's work, but the institute focuses mainly on New York City, as a lab to advance policies such as school vouchers and getting tough on crime. Mone claims credit for Mayor Rudy Giuliani's embrace of the George Kelling-James Q. Wilson "Broken Windows" thesis -- that a crackdown on minor lifestyle crimes would also reduce major crimes.

The Manhattan Institute is especially nimble at co-opting liberals, who are regularly invited to its events both as foils and potential converts. How much money, Mone pressed me, would conservatives need to put into city schools for liberals to support vouchers?

The Philanthropy Roundtable, which sponsored the conference, also likes to include a few token liberals. One observed that liberal funders would never speak a language of movement building. "We promote policies piecemeal," he said, "but we don't think of it as building a progressive movement."

What was impressively revealed here was precisely the right's movement consciousness. When I was young, the people who spoke of "the movement" and who used "radical" as an affirmative word were progressive. The movement, at first, referred to the civil-rights movement; by the mid-1960s, it referred to a generalized movement for social justice. "Movement people" boycotted nonunion grapes, worked on voter registration, opposed the war in Vietnam.

Today, one hears the phrase "movement conservatism." The right's think tanks and philanthropists alike understand that the enterprise is -- above all -- political. IRS rules for foundations and research institutes don't allow them to be partisan or primarily legislative, but don't mind if they are ideological or politically strategic. Heritage, which pushed the envelope about as far as one prudently can, got an extensive IRS audit in the 1990s, which Heritage claimed was politically motivated. Eventually, the IRS relented. The nonprofit right is also perfectly willing to use the Republican party as its vehicle, and let the lawyers worry about how to do it legally.

By contrast, mainstream foundations have a tradition of emphasizing research and reform. Often, the social-change goals are impeccably liberal -- empower the poor, clean up the environment, improve the welfare of children -- but the political dimension leaves many senior foundation executives uneasy. My tablemate was right: You would never hear senior officers of big mainstream foundations talking about building a movement. The enterprise is rather understood as philanthropic. If you research and model good policy, social change will somehow occur. This tradition harkens back to the Progressive Era conceit that social problems have technical solutions. By some alchemy, the research findings will lead to policy reforms through a messy political process whose ignition is somebody else's affair.

This propensity is also reinforced by the composition of mainstream foundation boards, which tend to be patrician and corporate. Activist grantees need to shade their purpose to reassure even liberal program officers, who find themselves looking over their shoulders at their presidents, who in turn must answer to their boards. It is anomalous, after all, that large private fortunes should be looked upon to underwrite progressive politics. On the right, by contrast, the advocates, strategists, and funders march to the same tune.

Lately, liberal funders have been more willing to acknowledge that their enterprise is necessarily political, and to underwrite core progressive infrastructure for the long term. The progressive counterparts of the big right-wing strategy groups -- such as the Economic Policy Institute, the Center for Law and Social Policy, or the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities -- no longer have to justify their existence de novo each time they apply for a grant. But the gold standard of grants -- long-term general-operating support -- is still hard to find on the liberal side, and the institutions that the big foundations support are far smaller and less numerous than their conservative counterparts to begin with.

Of course, intellectual energy and political energy feed on each other. And it has been a while since a progressive idea, per se, transformed politics. A generation ago, activists in the streets were energized by books such as Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and Mike Harrington's The Other America. These in turn transformed national policy. Earlier in the century, progressive foundation-sponsored reports, from the Flexner Report on medical education to Gunnar Myrdal's groundbreaking work on racial relations, An American Dilemma, led to changes in the national discussion and, eventually, policy.

Still, it was breathtaking to see the policy strategists of the other side preen for the edification of their steadfast funders -- the culmination of a 25-year strategic alliance between organized business, ideological conservatism, advocacy research, and the Republican Party. Hertog was right: $70 million a year is chump change to the American elite, but invested strategically in the battle of ideas, it yields a bountiful political harvest. On our side, though strategic foundation support would be most welcome, it may be that we need to rekindle the politics first.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There - David Brooks

In the Fall 2000 American Experiment Quarterly article "
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There," David Brooks characterizes the new generation of privilege as a combination of bourgeois and bohemian.

Ken Wilber - The Integral Vision at the Millennium

The Integral Vision at the Millennium
Ken Wilber

excerpts from Introduction to Volume Seven of the Collected Works

This excerpted version simply excludes a few sections (specifically, those dealing with critical theory, Boomeritis, and Wilber's Quadrants, Levels & Lines) in order to provide a more approachable introduction to Wilber's explanation of Spiral Dynamics, an important aspect of the integral vision of consciousness. The original text and all footnotes can be found HERE.

We live in an extraordinary time: all of the world's cultures, past and present, are to some degree available to us, either in historical records or as living entities. In the history of the planet earth, this has never happened before.

It seems hard to imagine, but for humanity's entire stay on this planet—for some million years up to the present—a person was born into a culture that knew virtually nothing about any other. You were, for example, born a Chinese, raised a Chinese, married a Chinese, and followed a Chinese religion—often living in the same hut for your entire life, on a spot of land that your ancestors settled for centuries. From isolated tribes and bands, to small farming villages, to ancient nations, to conquering feudal empires, to international corporate states, to global village: the extraordinary growth toward an integral village that seems humanity's destiny.

So it is that the leading edge of consciousness evolution stands today on the brink of an integral millennium—or at least the possibility of an integral millennium, where the sum total of extant human knowledge, wisdom, and technology is available to all. But there are several obstacles to that integral embrace, even in the most developed populations. Moreover, there is the more typical or average mode of consciousness, which is far from integral anything, and is in desperate need of its own tending. Both of those pressing issues (the integral vision as it relates to the most developed and the least developed populations) are related directly to the contents of this volume of the Collected Works.



THE WAVES OF EXISTENCE

One of the striking things about the present state of developmental studies is how similar, in broad outline, most of its models are. Indeed, in Integral Psychology I assembled the conclusions of over one hundred different researchers, and, as one of them summarized the situation, "The stage sequences [of all of these theorists] can be aligned across a common developmental space. The harmony of alignment shown suggests a possible reconciliation of [these] theories..." [2]

From Clare Graves to Abraham Maslow; from Deirdre Kramer to Jan Sinnott; from Jurgen Habermas to Cheryl Armon; from Kurt Fischer to Jenny Wade; from Robert Kegan to Susanne Cook-Greuter, there emerges a remarkably consistent story of the evolution of consciousness. Of course there are dozens of disagreements and hundreds of conflicting details. But they all tell a generally similar tale of the growth and development of consciousness from—to use Jean Gebser's particular version—archaic to magic to mythic to rational to integral. Most of the more sophisticated of these cartographies give around six to ten waves of development from birth to what I call the centaur level. (Beyond the centaur, into the more transpersonal waves of consciousness unfolding, agreement tapers off. I will return to this point later.)

Few of these developmental schemes are the rigid, linear, clunk-and-grind models portrayed by their critics. Development is a not a linear ladder but a fluid and flowing affair, with spirals, swirls, streams, and waves—and what appear to be an almost infinite number of multiple modalities (there appear to be as many different dimensions or modalities of consciousness as there are different situations in life—i.e., endless). Most of today's sophisticated developmental theories take all of that into account, and—more important—back it with substantial research (as we will see).

I have, in numerous previous publications (especially Integral Psychology) given the details of many of those researchers. Here I will simply use one of them as an example. The model is called Spiral Dynamics, based on the pioneering work of Clare Graves. Graves proposed a profound and elegant system of human development, which subsequent research has refined and validated, not refuted. "Briefly, what I am proposing is that the psychology of the mature human being is an unfolding, emergent, oscillating spiralling process marked by progressive subordination of older, lower-order behavior systems to newer, higher-order systems as an individual's existential problems change. Each successive stage, wave, or level of existence is a state through which people pass on their way to other states of being. When the human is centralized in one state of existence" —as I would put it, when the self's center of gravity hovers around a particular wave of consciousness— "he or she has a psychology which is particular to that state. His or her feelings, motivations, ethics and values, biochemistry, degree of neurological activation, learning system, belief systems, conception of mental health, ideas as to what mental illness is and how it should be treated, conceptions of and preferences for management, education, economics, and political theory and practice are all appropriate to that state." [3]

Graves outlined around eight major "levels or waves of human existence," ranging from autistic, magical, and animistic, through sociocentric and conventional, to individualistic and integrated. As is usually the case with Western researchers, he recognized no higher (transpersonal) levels, but the contributions he made to the prepersonal and personal realms were profound.

It should be remembered that virtually all of these stage conceptions—from Abraham Maslow to Jane Loevinger to Robert Kegan to Clare Graves—are based on extensive amounts of research and data. These are not simply conceptual ideas and pet theories, but are grounded at every point in a considerable amount of carefully checked evidence. Many of the stage theorists have had their models checked in first-, second-, and third world countries. The same is true with Graves's model; to date, it has been tested in over fifty thousand people from around the world, and there have been no major exceptions found to his general scheme. [4]

Of course, this does not mean that any of these schemes give the whole story, or even most of it . They are all simply partial snapshots of the great River of Life, and they are all useful when looking at the River from that particular angle. This does not prevent other pictures from being equally useful, nor does it mean that these pictures cannot be refined with further study. What it does mean is that any psychological model that does not include these pictures is not a very integral model.

Graves's work has been carried forward and refined by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, in an approach they call Spiral Dynamics. Far from being mere armchair analysts, Beck and Cowan were participants in the discussions that lead to the end of apartheid in South Africa. The principles of Spiral Dynamics have been fruitfully used to reorganize businesses, revitalize townships, overhaul education systems, and defuse inner-city tensions.

The situation in South Africa is a good example of why the idea of developmental stages (each with its own worldview, values, and needs) can actually reduce and even alleviate social tensions, not exacerbate them (as critics often charge). Spiral Dynamics (following Graves) sees human development as proceeding through eight general "value memes" or deep structures: instinctive (archaic-uroboric), magical/animistic (typhonic-magic), power gods (magic-mythic), absolutist-religious (mythic), individualistic-achiever (rational-egoic), relativistic (early vision-logic), systematic-integrative (middle vision-logic), and global-holistic (late vision-logic), each of which will be outlined in a moment. These are not rigid levels, but fluid and flowing waves, with much overlap and interweaving, resulting in a meshwork or dynamic spiral of consciousness unfolding.

The typical, well-meaning liberal approach to solving social tensions is to treat every value as equal, and then try to force a levelling or redistribution of resources (money, rights, goods, land) while leaving the values untouched. The typical conservative approach is take it's particular values and try to foist them on everybody else. The developmental approach is to realize that there are many different values and worldviews; that some are more complex than others; that many of the problems at one stage of development can only be defused by evolving to a higher level; and that only by recognizing and facilitating this evolution can social justice be finally served. Moreover, by seeing that each and every individual has all of these memes potentially available to them , the lines of social tension are redrawn: not based on skin color, economic class, or political clout, but on the type of worldview from which a person, group of persons, clan, tribe, business, government, educational system, or nation is operating. As Beck puts it, "The focus is not on types of people, but types in people." This removes skin color from the game and focuses on some of the truly underlying factors (developmental values and worldviews) that generate social tensions.

We return now to Spiral Dynamics for a brief overview of one version of the many waves of consciousness unfolding. Remember that this is simply one series of photos of the great River of Life. In my own system, there are actually numerous different modules or streams proceeding relatively independently through the basic levels or waves; individuals can be at a relatively high level of development in some modules; medium in others; and low in still others--there is nothing linear about overall development! Moreover, an individual can have an altered state or a peak experience at virtually any stage of development, so the notion that spiritual experiences are available only at the higher stages is incorrect (see Integral Psychology for a full discussion of these topics). Spiral Dynamics does not include states of consciousness, nor does it cover the higher, transpersonal waves of consciousness. [5] But for the ground it covers, it gives one very useful and elegant model of the self and its journey through what Clare Graves called the "waves of existence."

Beck and Cowan (who have remained quite faithful to Graves's system) use various names and colors to refer to these different memes or levels of existence. The use of colors (e.g., purple for magic, blue for mythic, green for ecological sensitivity, etc.) almost always puts people off, at first. [6] But Beck and Cowan often work in racially charged areas, and they have found that it helps to take peoples' minds off of skin color and focus on the "color of the meme" instead of the "color of the skin." Likewise in other situations: a green environmentalist might switch from "all big businesses are bad" to "Orange can be uncaring." Moreover, as much research has continued to confirm, since these are levels or memes that everybody has potentially available to them, the lines of tension are completely redrawn. In a particular situation it is no longer "black versus white," but perhaps blue versus purple, or orange versus green, and so on; and while skin color cannot be changed, consciousness can.

The important point is that these various waves of existence (or stages of development) are not just passing phases in the self's unfolding; they are permanently available capacities and coping strategies that can, once they have emerged, be activated under the appropriate life conditions (e.g., survival instincts can be activated in emergency situations; bonding capacities are activated in close human relationships, and so on). We can be red in one context, green in another, turquoise in yet another. Moreover, as Beck puts it, "The Spiral is messy, not symmetrical, with multiple admixtures rather than pure types. These are mosaics, meshes, and blends." [7]

The first six levels are "subsistence levels" marked by "first-tier thinking." Then there occurs a revolutionary shift in consciousness: the emergence of "being levels" and "second-tier thinking," of which there are two major waves. Here is a brief description of all eight waves, the percentage of the world population at each wave, and the percentage of social power held by each. [8] Remember, these are all variations on archaic to magic to mythic to rational to integral, which is the common "developmental space" revealed by most research.

1. Beige: Archaic-Instinctual. The level of basic survival; food, water, warmth, sex, and safety have priority. Uses habits and instincts just to survive. Distinct self is barely awakened or sustained. Forms into survival bands to perpetuate life.

Where seen: First human societies, newborn infants, senile elderly, late-stage Alzheimer's victims, mentally ill street people, starving masses, shell shock. 0.1% of the adult population, 0% power.

2. Purple: Magical-Animistic. Thinking is animistic; magical spirits, good and bad, swarm the earth leaving blessings, curses, and spells that determine events. Forms into ethnic tribes. The spirits exist in ancestors and bond the tribe. Kinship and lineage establish political links. Sounds "holistic" but is actually atomistic: "there is a name for each bend in the river but no name for the river."

Where seen: Belief in voodoo-like curses, blood oaths, ancient grudges, good luck charms, family rituals, magical ethnic beliefs and superstitions; strong in Third-World settings, gangs, athletic teams, and corporate "tribes." 10% of the population, 1% of the power.

3. Red: Power Gods. First emergence of a self distinct from the tribe; powerful, impulsive, egocentric, heroic. Mythic spirits, dragons, beasts, and powerful people. Feudal lords protect underlings in exchange for obedience and labor. The basis of feudal empires—power and glory. The world is a jungle full of threats and predators. Conquers, out-foxes, and dominates; enjoys self to the fullest without regret or remorse.

Where seen: The "terrible twos," rebellious youth, frontier mentalities, feudal kingdoms, epic heroes, James Bond villains, soldiers of fortune, wild rock stars, Atilla the Hun, Lord of the Flies. 20% of the population, 5% of the power.

4. Blue: Conformist Rule. Life has meaning, direction, and purpose, with outcomes determined by an all-powerful Other or Order. This righteous Order enforces a code of conduct based on absolutist and unvarying principles of "right" and "wrong." Violating the code or rules has severe, perhaps everlasting repercussions. Following the code yields rewards for the faithful. Basis of ancient nations . Rigid social hierarchies; paternalistic; one right way and only one right way to think about everything. Law and order; impulsivity controlled through guilt; concrete-literal and fundamentalist belief; obedience to the rule of Order. Often "religious" [in the mythic-membership sense; Graves and Beck refer to it as the "saintly/absolutistic" level], but can be secular or atheistic Order or Mission.

Where seen: Puritan America, Confucian China, Dickensian England, Singapore discipline, codes of chivalry and honor, charitable good deeds, religious fundamentalism (e.g., Christian and Islamic), Boy and Girl Scouts, "moral majority," patriotism. 40% of the population, 30% of the power.

5. Orange: Scientific Achievement. At this wave, the self "escapes" from the "herd mentality" of blue, and seeks truth and meaning in individualistic terms—hypothetico-deductive, experimental, objective, mechanistic, operational— "scientific" in the typical sense. The world is a rational and well-oiled machine with natural laws that can be learned, mastered, and manipulated for one's own purposes. Highly achievement oriented, especially (in America) toward materialistic gains. The laws of science rule politics, the economy, and human events. The world is a chess-board on which games are played as winners gain pre-eminence and perks over losers. Marketplace alliances; manipulate earth's resources for one's strategic gains. Basis of corporate states .

Where seen: The Enlightenment, Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Wall Street, emerging middle classes around the world, cosmetics industry, trophy hunting, colonialism, the Cold War, fashion industry, materialism, liberal self-interest. 30% of the population, 50% of the power.

6. Green: The Sensitive Self. Communitarian, human bonding, ecological sensitivity, networking. The human spirit must be freed from greed, dogma, and divisiveness; feelings and caring supersede cold rationality; cherishing of the earth, Gaia, life. Against hierarchy; establishes lateral bonding and linking. Permeable self, relational self, group intermeshing. Emphasis on dialogue, relationships. Basis of values communes (i.e., freely chosen affiliations based on shared sentiments). Reaches decisions through reconciliation and consensus (downside: interminable "processing" and incapacity to reach decisions). Refresh spirituality, bring harmony, enrich human potential. Strongly egalitarian, anti-hierarchy, pluralistic values, social construction of reality, diversity, multiculturalism, relativistic value systems; this worldview is often called pluralistic relativism . Subjective, non-linear thinking; shows a greater degree of affective warmth, sensitivity, and caring, for earth and all its inhabitants.

Where seen: Deep ecology, postmodernism, Netherlands idealism, Rogerian counseling, Canadian health care, humanistic psychology, liberation theology, cooperative inquiry, World Council of Churches, Greenpeace, animal rights, ecofeminism, post-colonialism, Foucault/Derrida, politically correct, diversity movements, human rights issues, ecopsychology. 10% of the population, 15% of the power.

With the completion of the green meme, human consciousness is poised for a quantum jump into "second-tier thinking." Clare Graves referred to this as a "momentous leap," where "a chasm of unbelievable depth of meaning is crossed." In essence, with second-tier consciousness, one can think both vertically and horizontally, using both hierarchies and heterarchies. One can, for the first time, vividly grasp the entire spectrum of interior development, and thus see that each level, each meme, each wave is crucially important for the health of the overall spiral.

As I would word it, since each wave is "transcend and include," each wave is a fundamental ingredient of all subsequent waves, and thus each is to be cherished and embraced. Moreover, each wave can itself be activated or reactivated as life circumstances warrant. [9] In emergency situations, we can activate red power drives; in response to chaos, we might need to activate blue order; in looking for a new job, we might need orange achievement drives; in marriage and with friends, close green bonding.

But what none of those memes can do, on their own, is fully appreciate the existence of the other memes. Each of those first-tier memes thinks that its worldview is the correct or best perspective. It reacts negatively if challenged; it lashes out, using its own tools, whenever it is threatened. Blue order is very uncomfortable with both red impulsiveness and orange individualism. Orange individualism thinks blue order is for suckers and green egalitarianism is weak and woo-woo. Green egalitarianism cannot easily abide excellence and value rankings, big pictures, hierarchies, or anything that appears authoritarian, and thus green reacts strongly to blue, orange, and anything post-green.

All of that begins to change with second-tier thinking. Because second-tier consciousness is fully aware of the interior stages of development—even if it cannot articulate them in a technical fashion—it steps back and grasps the big picture, and thus second-tier thinking appreciates the necessary role that all of the various memes play. Using what we would recognize as mature vision-logic, second-tier awareness thinks in terms of the overall spiral of existence, and not merely in the terms of any one level.

Where the green meme uses early or beginning vision-logic in order to grasp the numerous different systems and pluralistic contexts that exist in different cultures (which is why it is indeed the sensitive self, i.e., sensitive to the marginalization of others), second-tier thinking goes one step further. It looks for the rich contexts that link and join these pluralistic systems, and thus it takes these separate systems and begins to embrace, include, and integrate them into holistic spirals and holarchies (Beck and Cowan themselves refer to second-tier thinking as operating with "holons"). These holarchies include both interior (consciousness) and exterior (material) waves of development, in both vertical and horizontal dimensions (i.e., hierarchical and heterarchical), resulting in a multi-leveled, multi-dimensional, multi-modal, richly holarchical view. Second-tier thinking, in other words, is instrumental in moving from pluralistic relativism to universal integralism.

The extensive research of Graves, Beck, and Cowan indicates that there are two major waves to this second-tier consciousness (corresponding to what we would recognize as middle and late vision-logic):

7. Yellow: Integrative. Life is a kaleidoscope of natural hierarchies [holarchies], systems, and forms. Flexibility, spontaneity, and functionality have the highest priority. Differences and pluralities can be integrated into interdependent, natural flows. Egalitarianism is complemented with natural degrees of excellence where appropriate. Knowledge and competency should supersede rank, power, status, or group. The prevailing world order is the result of the existence of different levels of reality (memes) and the inevitable patterns of movement up and down the dynamic spiral. Good governance facilitates the emergence of entities through the levels of increasing complexity (nested hierarchy).

8. Turquoise: Holistic. Universal holistic system, holons/waves of integrative energies; unites feeling with knowledge [centaur]; multiple levels interwoven into one conscious system. Universal order, but in a living, conscious fashion, not based on external rules (blue) or group bonds (green). A "grand unification" is possible, in theory and in actuality. Sometimes involves the emergence of a new spirituality as a meshwork of all existence. Turquoise thinking uses the entire spiral; sees multiple levels of interaction; detects harmonics, the mystical forces, and the pervasive flow-states that permeate any organization.

Second-tier thinking: 1% of the population, 5% of the power.

With only 1 percent of the population at second-tier thinking (and only 0.1 percent at turquoise), second-tier consciousness is relatively rare because it is now the "leading-edge" of collective human evolution.



THE JUMP TO SECOND-TIER CONSCIOUSNESS

As Beck and Cowan have pointed out, second-tier thinking has to emerge in the face of much resistance from first-tier thinking. In fact, a version of the postmodern green meme, with its pluralism and relativism, has actively fought the emergence of more integrative and holarchical thinking. (It has also made developmental studies, which depend on second-tier thinking, virtually anathema at both conventional and alternative universities.) And yet without second-tier thinking, as Graves, Beck, and Cowan point out, humanity is destined to remain victims of a global "auto-immune disease," where various memes turn on each other in an attempt to establish supremacy.

This is why developmental studies in general indicate that many philosophical debates are not really a matter of the better objective argument, but of the subjective level of those debating. No amount of orange scientific evidence will convince blue mythic believers; no amount of green bonding will impress orange aggressiveness; no amount of turquoise holarchy will dislodge green hostility—unless the individual is ready to develop forward through the dynamic spiral of consciousness unfolding. This is why "cross-level" debates are rarely resolved, and all parties usually feel unheard and unappreciated.

As we were saying, first-tier memes generally resist the emergence of second-tier memes. Scientific materialism (orange) is aggressively reductionistic toward second-tier constructs, attempting to reduce all interior stages to objectivistic neuronal fireworks. Mythic fundamentalism (blue) is often outraged at what it sees as attempts to unseat its given Order. Egocentrism (red) ignores second-tier altogether. Magic (purple) puts a hex on it. Green accuses second-tier consciousness of being authoritarian, rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal, marginalizing, oppressive, racist, and sexist.

Green has been in charge of cultural studies for the past three decades. On the one hand, the pluralistic relativism of green has nobly enlarged the canon of cultural studies to include many previously marginalized peoples, ideas, and narratives. It has acted with sensitivity and care in attempting to redress social imbalances and avoid exclusionary practices. It has been responsible for basic initiatives in civil rights and environmental protection. It has developed strong and often convincing critiques of the philosophies, metaphysics, and social practices of the conventional religious (blue) and scientific (orange) memes, with their often exclusionary, patriarchal, sexist, and colonialistic agendas.

On the other hand, as effective as these critiques of pre-green stages have been, green has attempted to turn its guns on all post-green stages as well, with the most unfortunate results. In honorably fighting many rigid social hierarchies, green has condemned all second-tier holarchies—which has made it very difficult, and often impossible, for green to move forward into more holistic, integral-aperspectival constructions.

Most sophisticated developmental studies describe a movement from mythic absolutism (blue) and rational formalism (orange), through stages of pluralism and relativism (green), to stages of integralism and holism (yellow and turquoise). The green meme, effectively challenging the absolutisms of blue and orange, then mistook all universals and all holarchies as being of the same order, and this often locked it into first-tier thinking.

Nonetheless—and this is especially significant—it from the healthy green ranks that second-tier emerges, as Spiral Dynamics points out, so most of my comments in those three books (SES, BH, ES) were directed specifically toward green, as were the polemical nudges, in an attempt to get green to look at its own premises more expansively. These jabs have not, in general, endeared me to greens, but it has jolted the conversation in ways that politeness consistently failed to do.



THE INTEGRAL EMBRACE

It appears, then, that approximately 1-2 percent of the population is at an integral, second-tier stance, but that around 20 percent are at green, poised for that possible transformation.

In order for green go one step further and make the jump into integral-aperspectival consciousness, the following factors might be considered:

(1) All systems are context-bound, according to green pluralism, so let us fully carry forward that agenda: all relativities and all pluralities are therefore also context-bound: they themselves have wider and deeper contexts that bind them together into even larger systems.

(2) Therefore, let us acknowledge these even larger contexts, and then begin to outline the universal-integral networks binding them all together. Let us begin to move from pluralistic relativism to universal integralism.

(3) The only way to arrive at such an integral stance is to include both hierarchies and heterarchies (and thus arrive at holarchies). Let us, then, relax our morbid fear of all hierarchies, stages of development, levels of reality, critical judgments, qualitative distinctions, degrees, excellence, grades, and rankings. Not all of them are bad, and we use them anyway, never so much as when we deny them, so let us use them in a healthy, conscious, fair, and judicious fashion.

(4) Once we include both hierarchies and heterarchies—both ranking and linking—we can develop a more integral vision that is "all-level, all-quadrant" (see below), a vision that includes the I and the We and the It domains—or self, culture, and nature—as they all unfold in matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit, spanning the entire spectrum of consciousness in all its radiant dimensions. This includes multiple modalities, waves, streams, states, and realms, all woven together into a global holism or universal integralism.

(5) Many of the waves and streams of the spectrum of consciousness are indeed local, culturally specific, and not universal. But research has consistently confirmed that many of these patterns of richly interwoven textures are common to humanity as a whole; others are common to large areas of humanity or to various epochs; and some are merely local and idiosyncratic, varying from culture to culture and individual to individual. [18] Acknowledging and honoring the common and crosscultural patterns in consciousness is not necessarily a marginalizing, oppressive endeavor; in its non-marginalizing form, it is in fact the basis of universal integralism. Let us therefore attempt to include both the universally common patterns of consciousness as well as the local, specific, and pluralistic features, and thus continue to move from pluralistic relativism to universal holism.

(6) This multidimensional Kosmos is therefore not just a final state, but a flow state. Not just holographic, but holodynamic. Not just given, but ceaselessly unfolding, in multiple waves and streams of existence, flowing and evolving in endless displays of Spirit's own self-blossoming. Therefore, let us honor and include these unfolding, developing, evolving currents as the Kosmos flowers in all its domains.

(7) Once that happens, the important contributions of green can be taken up, embraced and included, in the ongoing unfolding of consciousness. Green is not lost or denied, but included and enriched, as a more genuinely integral vision emerges.



THE PRIME DIRECTIVE

The holonic model that I suggesting is an attempt to opt for the latter option. The applications of this model—in education, spiritual practice, politics, business, health care, and so on—will be explored in the Introduction to volume 8 of the Collected Works . In the meantime, let us return to our major points—the impact of an integral vision on both the leading edge and the average mode--and note the following:

One of the main conclusions of an all-level, all-quadrant approach is that each meme—each level of consciousness and wave of existence—is, in its healthy form, an absolutely necessary and desirable element of the overall spiral, of the overall spectrum of consciousness. Even if every society on earth were established fully at the turquoise meme, nonetheless every infant born in that society still has to start at level 1, at beige, at sensorimotor instincts and perceptions, and then must grow and evolve through purple magic, red and blue myth, orange rationalism, green sensitivity, and into yellow and turquoise vision-logic (on the way to the transpersonal). All of those waves have important tasks and functions; all of them are taken up and included in subsequent waves; none of them can be bypassed; and none of them can be demeaned without grave consequences to self and society. The health of the entire spiral is the prime directive, not preferential treatment for any one level.



A MORE MEASURED GREATNESS

Because the health of the entire spectrum of consciousness is paramount, and not any particular level, this means that a genuinely universal integralism would measure more carefully its actual impact. I have long maintained that the real revolutions facing today's world involve, not a glorious collective move into transpersonal domains, but the simple, fundamental changes that can be brought to the magic, mythic, and rational waves of existence.

Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to... perhaps integral, and perhaps from there into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic. The spiral of existence is a great unending flow, stretching from body to mind to soul to spirit, with millions upon millions constantly flowing through that great river from source to ocean. No society will ever simply be at an integral level, because the flow is unceasing (although the center of gravity of a culture can indeed drift upward, as it has over history—see Up from Eden) . But the major problem remains: not, how can we get everybody to the integral wave or higher, but how can we arrange the health of the overall spiral, as billions of humans continue to pass through it, from one end to the other, year in and year out?

In other words, most of the work that needs to done is work to make the lower (and foundational) waves more healthy in their own terms. The major reforms do not involve how to get a handful of boomers into second-tier, but how to feed the starving millions at the most basic waves; how to house the homeless millions at the simplest of levels; how to bring healthcare to the millions who do not possess it. An integral vision is one of the least pressing issues on the face of the planet.



THE INTEGRAL VISION IN THE WORLD AT LARGE

Let me drive this point home using calculations done by Dr. Phillip Harter of Stanford University School of Medicine. If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of only 100 people, it would look something like this:

There would be—
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 North and South Americans
8 Africans
30 white
70 nonwhite
6 people would possess 59% of the world's wealth
and all 6 would be from the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer malnutrition
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer

Thus, as I suggested, an integral vision is one of the least pressing issues on the face of the planet. The health of the entire spiral, and particularly its earlier waves, screams out to us as the major ethical demand.

Nonetheless, the advantage of second-tier vision-logic awareness is that it more creatively helps with the solutions to those pressing problems. In grasping big pictures, it can help suggest more cogent solutions. It is our governing bodies, then, that stand in dire need of a more integral approach. It is our educational institutions, overcome with deconstructive postmodernism, that are desperate for a more integral vision. It is our healthcare facilities that could greatly benefit from the tender mercies of an integral touch. It is the leadership of the developing nations that might appreciate a more comprehensive vision of their own possibilities. In all these ways and more, we could indeed use "an integral vision for a world gone slightly mad" —and that is the central topic of the books in this present volume.

Click here to read more about Ken Wilber and Integral Theory.

Conservatives, Liberals, and the Constitution - MARTIN DIAMOND

In the Fall 1965 National Affairs article "Conservatives, Liberals, and the Constitution," Martin Diamond argues that conservatives and liberals misinterpret the U.S. Constitution.

Click the link above for a pdf version of the somewhat lengthy article.

What is neoliberalism?

The Corpwatch.org article "What is Neoliberalism?" provides "A Brief Definition for Activists." According to the article:

by Elizabeth Martinez and Arnoldo Garcia, National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

"Neo-liberalism" is a set of economic policies that have become widespread during the last 25 years or so. Although the word is rarely heard in the United States, you can clearly see the effects of neo-liberalism here as the rich grow richer and the poor grow poorer.

"Liberalism" can refer to political, economic, or even religious ideas. In the U.S. political liberalism has been a strategy to prevent social conflict. It is presented to poor and working people as progressive compared to conservative or Rightwing. Economic liberalism is different. Conservative politicians who say they hate "liberals" -- meaning the political type -- have no real problem with economic liberalism, including neoliberalism.

"Neo" means we are talking about a new kind of liberalism. So what was the old kind? The liberal school of economics became famous in Europe when Adam Smith, an Scottish economist, published a book in 1776 called THE WEALTH OF NATIONS. He and others advocated the abolition of government intervention in economic matters. No restrictions on manufacturing, no barriers to commerce, no tariffs, he said; free trade was the best way for a nation's economy to develop. Such ideas were "liberal" in the sense of no controls. This application of individualism encouraged "free" enterprise," "free" competition -- which came to mean, free for the capitalists to make huge profits as they wished.

Economic liberalism prevailed in the United States through the 1800s and early 1900s. Then the Great Depression of the 1930s led an economist named John Maynard Keynes to a theory that challenged liberalism as the best policy for capitalists. He said, in essence, that full employment is necessary for capitalism to grow and it can be achieved only if governments and central banks intervene to increase employment. These ideas had much influence on President Roosevelt's New Deal -- which did improve life for many people. The belief that government should advance the common good became widely accepted.

But the capitalist crisis over the last 25 years, with its shrinking profit rates, inspired the corporate elite to revive economic liberalism. That's what makes it "neo" or new. Now, with the rapid globalization of the capitalist economy, we are seeing neo-liberalism on a global scale.

A memorable definition of this process came from Subcomandante Marcos at the Zapatista-sponsored Encuentro Intercontinental por la Humanidad y contra el Neo-liberalismo (Inter-continental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism) of August 1996 in Chiapas when he said: "what the Right offers is to turn the world into one big mall where they can buy Indians here, women there ...." and he might have added, children, immigrants, workers or even a whole country like Mexico."

The main points of neo-liberalism include:

THE RULE OF THE MARKET. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes. Greater openness to international trade and investment, as in NAFTA. Reduce wages by de-unionizing workers and eliminating workers' rights that had been won over many years of struggle. No more price controls. All in all, total freedom of movement for capital, goods and services. To convince us this is good for us, they say "an unregulated market is the best way to increase economic growth, which will ultimately benefit everyone." It's like Reagan's "supply-side" and "trickle-down" economics -- but somehow the wealth didn't trickle down very much.

CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES like education and health care. REDUCING THE SAFETY-NET FOR THE POOR, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply -- again in the name of reducing government's role. Of course, they don't oppose government subsidies and tax benefits for business.

DEREGULATION. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminsh profits, including protecting the environmentand safety on the job.

PRIVATIZATION. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water. Although usually done in the name of greater efficiency, which is often needed, privatization has mainly had the effect of concentrating wealth even more in a few hands and making the public pay even more for its needs.

ELIMINATING THE CONCEPT OF "THE PUBLIC GOOD" or "COMMUNITY" and replacing it with "individual responsibility." Pressuring the poorest people in a society to find solutions to their lack of health care, education and social security all by themselves -- then blaming them, if they fail, as "lazy."

Around the world, neo-liberalism has been imposed by powerful financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. It is raging all over Latin America. The first clear example of neo-liberalism at work came in Chile (with thanks to University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman), after the CIA-supported coup against the popularly elected Allende regime in 1973. Other countries followed, with some of the worst effects in Mexico where wages declined 40 to 50% in the first year of NAFTA while the cost of living rose by 80%. Over 20,000 small and medium businesses have failed and more than 1,000 state-owned enterprises have been privatized in Mexico. As one scholar said, "Neoliberalism means the neo-colonization of Latin America."

In the United States neo-liberalism is destroying welfare programs; attacking the rights of labor (including all immigrant workers); and cutbacking social programs. The Republican "Contract" on America is pure neo-liberalism. Its supporters are working hard to deny protection to children, youth, women, the planet itself -- and trying to trick us into acceptance by saying this will "get government off my back." The beneficiaries of neo-liberalism are a minority of the world's people. For the vast majority it brings even more suffering than before: suffering without the small, hard-won gains of the last 60 years, suffering without end.

Elizabeth Martinez is a longtime civil rights activist and author of several books, including "500 Years of Chicano History in Photographs."

Arnoldo Garcia is a member of the Oakland-based Comite Emiliano Zapata, affiliated to the National Commission for Democracy in Mexico.

Both writers attended the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and against Neoliberalism, held July 27 - August 3, 1996, in La Realidad, Chiapas.

How Conservative Philanthropies and Think Tanks Transform US Policy

In the Winter 1998 Covert Action Quarterly article "How Conservative Philanthropies and Think Tanks Transform US Policy," Sally Covington outlines how conservative foundations are changing the national discourse.

Speaking truth to power is all well and good, but applying the dictum, "money talks, " conservative foundations have long been bankrolling like-minded thin tanks and advocacy groups. Together, they have effected far-reaching changes in US social, political, and economic policy.

Proclaiming their movement a war of ideas, conservatives began to mobilize resources for battle in the 1960s. They built new institutional bastions; recruited, trained, and equipped their intellectual warriors; forged new weapons as cable television, the Internet, and other communications technologies evolved; and threw their resources into policy and political battles. By 1984, moderate Republican John Saloma warned of a "major new presence in American politics." If left unchecked, he accurately predicted, "the new conservative labyrinth" would pull the nation's political center sharply to the right.'

Today, that labyrinth is larger, more sophisticated, and increasingly able to influence what gets on-and what stays off- the public policy agenda. From the decision to abandon the federal guarantee of cash assistance to the poor, to changes in the federal tax structure, to interest in medical savings accounts and the privatization of Social Security, conservative policy ideas and rhetoric have come to dominate the nations political conversation, reflecting what political scientist WaIter Dean Burnham has called a "hegemony of market theology"

Spearheading the assault has been a core group of 12 conservative foundations: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Carthage Foundation, the Earhart Foundation, the Charles G. Koch, David H. Koch and Claude R. Lambe charitable foundations, the Phillip M. McKenna Foundation, the JM Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation, the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. In 1994, they controlled more than $1.1 billion in assets; from 1992-94, they awarded $300 million in grants, and targeted $210 million to support a wide array of projects and institutions.

Over the last two decades, the 12 have mounted an impressively coherent and concerted effort to shape public policy by undermining-and ultimately redirecting-what they regard as the institutional strongholds of modern American liberalism: academia, Congress, the judiciary, executive branch agencies, major media, religious institutions, and philanthropy itself. They channeled some $80 million to right-wing policy institutions actively promoting an anti-government, unregulated markets agenda. Another $89 million supported conservative scholars and academic programs, with $27 million targeted to recruit and train the next generation of right-wing leaders in conservative legal principles, free-market economics, political journalism and policy analysis. And $41.5 million was invested to build a conservative media apparatus, support pro-market legal organizations, fund state-level think tanks and advocacy organizations, and mobilize new philanthropic resources for conservative policy change.

The strong role that conservative foundations have played in shaping national and state policy debates reflects not only impressive cash reserves, but also a sophisticated funding strategy:

* Their grants are overtly and unabashedly political. They single out and support aggressive and entrepreneurial organizations committed to government rollback through the privatization of government services, deregulation of industry and the environment, devolution of authority from the federal to state and local governments, and deep cuts in federal anti-poverty spending.

* They work to build strong institutions by providing general operating support rather than project-specific funding. This unrestricted money allows groups considerable flexibility to attract, train, and keep talented people, launch special projects, and develop their databases and skills.

* They recognize that national budget and policy priorities significantly impact what happens on the state, local and even neighborhood levels, and fund accordingly.

* They emphasize marketing and communications techniques, funding grant recipients to flood the media and political marketplace with conservative policy ideas and to communicate with and mobilize their constituency base on behalf of these ideas.

* They emphasize networking with other groups around a common reform agenda. n They invest in the recruitment, training, placement, and media visibility of conservative public intellectuals and policy leadership.

* They fund across the institutional spectrum, recognizing that institutions or programs that support conservative scholarship, rapid-fire research and advocacy, lobbying, strategic litigation, leadership development and constituency mobilization are all important components of an effective policy movement.

* They have made long-term funding commitments, providing large grants over a multi-year and, in some cases, multi-decade period Long-term funding has financially anchored conservative institutions and enabled them to take the political offensive on key social, economic, and regulatory policy issues.

* They concentrate their grants, with 18 percent of the grantees getting more than 75 percent of the funding.

A significant portion of the conservative foundations' largess has flowed to a small group of think tanks that according to a sociologist "were particularly critical in the shift of the economic debate to the right [and] provided much of the groundwork for the radical change in policy taking place from 1978 through 1981." Well endowed with the financial and human resources to market their policy ideas, these institutions have effectively repositioned the boundaries of national policy discussion, redefining key concepts, molding public opinion, and pushing for a variety of specific policy reforms. Through the constant repetition and dissemination of conservative policy ideas, they have provided a philosophical underpinning for many of the most important fiscal and social policies developed and implemented over the past 16 years. And in the end, they have succeeded in making "positive government action in social welfare and economic development policy seem off limits and inappropriate."

Supply Side Swipe

The ramifications of conservative funding streams have been profound. In terms of political process, the existence of powerful and well-funded conservative "counter-institutions" raises the specter of what some have called "supply-side' politics. Political scientist Samuel Kernell has suggested that when aggressive marketing is linked to modern means of communication, consumer marketplace irrespective of existing demand. This "supply-side politics, he contends, is "so psychologically powerful as to determine what voters will think they want.

One of the most impressive supply-side successes has been shaping national economic policy As Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, conservatives saw and seized their opening. Four private institutions-the National Bureau of Economic Research, Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, American Enterprise Institute, and Center for the Study of American Business-led the push for "trickledown" policies. Large tax cuts-they argued, using everything from sound bites to scholarly journals-would generate revenues by stimulating the national economy

Supply-side economic theory laid the basis for what became the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, a piece of legislation that reduced federal income tax rates by 25 percent over a three-year period. This deep and sweeping tax cut not only meant a cumulative loss of $1 trillion to the Treasury Department by 1987, it also helped to create unprecedented federal deficits during the 1980s. The federal deficit was then used politically to justify "a frontal assault on the revenue base of the modem welfare state" by creating a zero-sum legislative environment, pitting individual programs against each other in the fight for revenues while rendering an expansion of federal social policy extremely difficult.

James Galbraith was one of many who tried in vain to debunk trickle-down theory as "reactionary and deeply implausible," saying that "it springs from a never-never land of abstract theory concocted over 25 years by the disciples of , Milton Friedman and `, purveyed." But with few research and advocacy institutions having the money and clout to focus policy attention on such matters as wage stagnation, rising inequality, real and hidden unemployment, and poverty, the "conservative fiscal consensus" triumphed. The government's main economic management task devolved to balancing the budget, with debate centering on how many years that goal should take. There is "a common ground on economic policy," lamented Galbraith, "that now stretches with differences only of degree from the radical right to Bill Clinton.'

This conservative victory established a strategy model, set the stage for some of the most aggressively anti-poor legislation in a century, and ushered in a right-wing revolution likely to dominate both policy forums and the popular debate for years to come.

The War on the Poor

As conservative grantees hammered home on the revenue side of national fiscal policy, they did not neglect the expenditure side. Indeed, it is in the particular area of federal anti-poverty programs that conservative grantees have launched their most sustained and vitriolic attacks. In the early 1980s, the Manhattan Institute sponsored and heavily promoted two publications that urged the elimination of federal anti-poverty programs. George Gilder's book, Wealth and Poverty, contended that poverty was the result of personal irresponsibility coupled with government programs that rewarded and encouraged it; Charles Murray's Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 extended the argument, stating that AFDC and other anti-poverty programs reduced marriage incentives, discouraged workers from accepting low-wage jobs, and encouraged out-of-wedlock births among low income teenage and adult women. These books were followed by Lawrence Mead's Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship, which blamed governments for perpetuating poverty by failing to require welfare recipients to work.

Other conservative grantees have used their funds for more than a decade to capitalize on and extend the works by Gilder, Murray, and Mead, spreading conservative political rhetoric and policy opinion through major media and conservative controlled print and broadcast outlets. They have redefined the problem by arguing that poverty is a relative concept, that the poor are significantly better off than is popularly understood, that moral failure causes the poor to be poor, and that government action has perpetuated rather than alleviated poverty by coddling the poor and entrapping them in a system that debases and clientizes them.

The 15-year conservative campaign to demonize the poor and eviscerate the government programs that minimally support them culminated in the passage of welfare "reform" in 1996. That legislation dismantled the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, eliminating the only federal program guaranteeing cash assistance to poor women and their children. The antipoor crusade also led to significant cuts in federal anti-poverty spending, with programs serving the poor absorbing a full 93 percent of the 1995 and 1996 budget cuts, even though those programs constituted only 24 percent of all entitlement spending.

The conservative attacks on poor people, affirmative action, and government programs serving low-income constituencies-and their constant reaffirmation of market efficiencies without recognizing market inequities or failure-has not only led to an array of specific policies, but has also inhibited the development of alternative policies to address growing concentrations of poverty and inner-city decline, the social costs of which are astronomical.

Despite recently reported gains in the incomes of poor Americans last year, the nation remains an economically and racially divided one, with more than 40 million Americans lacking health insurance, an appalling 20 percent child poverty rate, a rising prison population, the disappearance of jobs in inner city neighborhoods, and sharp and continuing inequities in education and educational opportunity Although such economic inequities and social divisions might be expected to raise serious questions about the nations political ethic, the current institutional forces during federal and state policy debates almost guarantee that these will not even be asked.

Marketing the Product

The proliferation and continued heavy funding of policy institutions such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Heritage Foundation threatens to tilt the debate even further to the right on key policy issues and options. These groups flood the media with hundreds of opinion editorials. Their top staff appear as political pundits and policy experts on dozens of television and radio shows across the country And their lobbyists work the legislative arenas, distributing policy proposals, briefing papers, and position statements.

Given the growing political importance of the media, conservative policy institutions have clearly stated the need for strong marketing and communications. "I make no bones about marketing," said AEl's former president, William Baroody: we pay as much attention to the dissemination of the product as we do to the content. we're probably the first major think tank to get into the electronic media. We hire ghost writers for scholars to produce op-ed articles that are sent to the one hundred and one cooperating newspapers-three pieces every two weeks

In the late 1980s, the Heritage Foundation made the same point in an article advising others how to start and run an effective think tank:

The easy part is getting your message right. The real test is getting your message out. .. Everything you do, every day, must involve marketing in as many as six dimensions Market your policy recommendations, market the principles and values behind them, market the tangible publications and events your organization is producing, market the think tank concept itself, then market your specific organizations, and never stop marketing yourself and the other key individuals who personify the organization. "

A decade later, the marketing strategies of conservative institutions are even more sophisticated and aggressive. The Hoover Institutions public affairs office, for example, links to 900 media centers across the US and 450 abroad. The Reason Foundation, a national public policy research organization that also serves as a national clearinghouse on privatization, had 359 television and radio appearances in 1995 and more than 1,500 citations in national newspapers and magazines. The Manhattan Institute has held more than 600 forums or briefings for journalists and policy makers on multiple public policy issues and concerns, from tort reform to federal welfare policy And the National Center for Policy Analysis reports that "NCPA ideas" have been discussed in 573 nationally syndicated columns and 184 wire stories over the 12 years of its existence

Relying not just on the mainstream media to disseminate their ideas, conservative institutions have created a ', variety of conservative-controlled media outlets and projects, newsletters and policy journals, web sites, and television and radio broad casting networks. The Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy for example, launched a strategic venture in 1995 to co-publish with William F Buckley's National Review, the National Review West, that goes out to 80,000 political conservatives in the Western states. The Free Congress Foundation, in addition to its National Empowerment Television, is publishing NetNewsNow, a broadcast fax letter sent around the country to more than 400 radio producers and news editors, and the Heartland Institute's PolicyFax, which makes a variety of easy-to-read policy reports available free to journalists and legislators.

Conservative foundations also provided $2,734,263 to four right-of-center magazines between 1990 and 1993, including the The National Interest, The Public Interest, The New Criterion, and The American Spectator. Over the same time period, however, four left-of-center publications- The Nation, The Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones-received only $269,500 from foundations. Based on such funding disparities, one journalist concluded: "America's conservative philanthropies eagerly fund the enterprise of shaping opinion and defining policy debates, while similar efforts by progressive philanthropies are, by comparison, sporadic and half-hearted.

"Think tank" journals also fit nicely into the conservatives' broader communications strategy by providing publishing opportunities for conservative thinkers and policy advocates. These in-house publications, as journalist Lawrence Soley has noted, "bear names that closely resemble those of [more] legitimate journals, " masking the "academic anemia" of think tank staff while giving them apparently impressive publications records. AEl's William Schneider, for example, published 16 articles in the Institute's Public Opinion-but not a single article in Public Opinion Quarterly, a respected journal of social science published since 1937. Yet, Schneider became one of the most "sought-after" political pundits, appearing 72 times on network news programs between 1987 and 1989, and serving as a regular political commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition'

Meanwhile, as conservatives decried the media's left bias, they saw their institutions mentioned in various media almost 8,000 times in 1995, while liberal or progressive think tanks received only 1,152 citations. The consequence-as true today as it was when journalist Karen Rothmyer wrote 16 years ago-is that "Layer upon layer of seminars, studies, conferences, and interviews [can] do much to push along, if not create, the issues, which then become the national agenda of debate.... By multiplying the authorities to whom the media are prepared to give a friendly hearing, [conservative donors] have helped to create an illusion of diversity where none exists. The result could be an increasing number of one-sided debates in which the challengers are far outnumbered, if indeed they are heard from at all."

Conservative Resource Mobilization

Complementing the strong marketing and communications focus of groups such as AEI and the Heritage Foundation are a variety of conservative foundation strategies to mobilize or redirect philanthropic resources in ways consistent with their policy agenda. In fact, the contemporary origins of the conservative funding movement go back to the early 1970s, when William F Simon former treasury secretary under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and other prominent conservatives, began to urge donors to align their philanthropy with their presumed political and public policy interests.

For Simon, who became president of the John M. Olin Foundation in 1977 and still holds that title, one key element of that alignment involved funding public intellectuals who could provide a sound defense of free-market policies and government rollback that were so ardently desired by new right enthusiasts. In Time for Truth, Simon wrote: "Funds generated by business must rush by the multimillions to the aid of liberty ... to funnel desperately needed funds to scholars, social scientists, writers, and journalists who understand the relationship between political and economic liberty" He called on the business community to "cease the mindless subsidizing of colleges and universities whose departments of economy, government, politics, and history are hostile to capitalism," and to move funds from "the media which serve as megaphones for anti-capitalist opinion" to those more "pro-freedom" and "pro-business."

Since then, a variety of investigative reporters and scholars have documented the hundreds of millions of dollars that conservative donors have invested to reshape the nation's political conversation and policy priorities. One such report, published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in the early 1980s, documented the millions of dollars that Richard Mellon Scaife, heir to the Mellon oil fortune and chair of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, alone has invested in right-wing policy institutions. Dubbed the "financier of the right," Scaife was found to have made substantial investments over the 1970s and early 1980s in more than 100 ``ideological organizations."

A more scholarly analysis of right-wing funding found that 10 conservative institutions received a total of $88 million between 1977 and 1986 to finance their policy activities. Sociologist Michael Patrick Allen found that the 12 "sustaining" foundations increased their support of these ten policy institutions by over 330 percent during the 10-year period studied. These and other data demonstrate a long-term pattern of politically motivated investment by conservative donors.

The role that conservative foundations have played in reinvigorating the intellectual, institutional and leadership base of US conservatism does not have a significant parallel in the philanthropic mainstream. While conservative donors see themselves as part of a larger movement to defeat "big government liberalism," and fund accordingly, mainstream foundations operate within a tradition of American pragmatism by adopting a problem-oriented, field-specific approach to social improvement. The ideological commitments of conservative foundations and the caution of mainstream one have exacerbated, if not created, a gap in the resources available to multi-issue public policy institutions working on the right and left of the policy spectrum. Consider, for example, that the combined revenue base of such conservative multi-issue policy institutions as the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Citizens for a Sound Economy exceeded $77 million in 1995.

In strong contrast, the roughly equivalent progressive (e.g., multi-issue, left-of-center groups whose work focuses on domestic policies at the national level)-the Institute for Policy Studies, the Economic Policy Institute, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities-had only $9 million at their collective disposal in 1995. Adding the Twentieth Century Fund, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, OMB Watch, and the Center for Community Change would push the combined 1995 budgets of these eight organizations to $18.6 million, still less than a quarter of the top five conservative groups. While revenue base may be only one factor underlying (or contributing to) organizational capacity and effectiveness, surely it is a critical one.

Reshaping the Institutional Landscape

The long-term investments that conservative foundations have made in building a "counter-establishment" of research, advocacy, media, legal, philanthropic, and religious sector organizations have paid off handsomely These donors have altered the mix of organizations actively seeking to influence public policy in Washington, DC, and in state capitals. In doing so, they have reshaped _ the institutional landscape of US politics and policymaking profoundly. Their long-term support of policy institutions has occurred at a time of significant change in American politics-change that has facilitated the emergence of groups like the Heritage Foundation as particularly influential policy actors.

Among the most important of these changes are the long-term decline in electoral participation, the deepening class skew to US voting patterns, the transformation of political parties into top-down fundraising vehicles, the growing role of money in politics, the rising political importance of the media, and the decline of institutions (such as unions and political parties) that once played a stronger balancing role in setting national, state, and local priorities. Over time, these changes interacted in a way that reduced opportunities for low income people to exercise influence while enlarging such opportunities for upper-income constituencies. Philanthropic money thus converged with political opportunity in a way that has not only pushed the debate to the right but also exacerbated America's "participatory inequality .

Beyond the groups previously mentioned, the institutional actors receiving significant support over the 1992-1994 period include media groups, legal organizations, state-level advocates, and religious sector organizations. The following list represents a sampling of grantee institutions and activities.

Media Organizations:

* American Spectator Educational Foundation received grants totaling $1.7 million with more than $600,000 to expand editonal staff and reporting at The American Spectator, $515,000 in flexible general operating support, and $485,000 in special project funding. lts subscription base lunged from 38,000 in 1992 to 335,000 today

* National Affairs is the funding vehicle which handled grants for The Public lnterest and The National Interest ($ 1.9 million), and the Foundation for Cultural Review for The New Criterion ($1.6 million).

* Commentary magazine got a tidy $1 million.

* American Studies Center. Grants worth $410,000 helped ASC spread "Radio America" to 2,000 radio stations across the country, produce conservative programming, and support two conservative daily radio shows-the "Alan Keyes Show" and "Dateline Washington."

* Firing Line (William F Buckley), Think Tank: (Ben Wattenberg), Peggy Noonan on Values, and other conservative public television public affairs programs, got $3.2 million.

* Center for the Study of Popular Culture (CSPC), Accuracy in Media, the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the Center for Science, Technology and Media, the Media Research Center, the Media Institute, and others were granted $5.2 million "to perpetuate the myth of a liberal bias in mainstream media reportage, with particular criticism leveled against the Public Broadcasting Service. With seed money from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, CSPC launched the Media Integrity Project in 1987 to attack PBS for "left-wing bias." Other critics, including Laurence Jarvik, a former Bradley Research Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and a current fellow at the Capital Research Center, have called for cutting funds or privatizing PBS. Accuracy in Media criticized PBS for "blatantly pro-Communist propaganda.

The efforts of these media grantees have made right-wing issues and views increasingly respectable and have pressured major media to become more responsive. Through scandal-mongering and issue emphasis, conservative media outlets help to shape the news agenda for more established media while organized attacks on public television have pushed PBS to augment already substantial conservative public affairs programming. The result is an even further narrowing of viewpoint. As the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, Ben Bagdikian observes, "what gets reported enters the public agenda. What is not reported may not be lost forever, but it may be lost at a time when it is most needed."

Legal Organizations:

* The Institute for Justice (IJ), the top grant recipient, received $2.9 million in 24 separate grants to support litigation, training, and outreach activities focused on four areas: private property rights, economic liberty, school choice, and the First Amendment. The IJ's budget increased to more than $1 million less than a year after it was founded in 1991 and is presently $2.3 million.

* The Center for Individual Rights and the Washington Legal Foundation were also heavily funded to reverse affirmative action programs of the federal government and in higher education.

These foundations not only emphasized litigation, but worked to nurture and coordinate a growing network of like-minded law students, alumni, and attorneys. The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, founded by two Yale law school students in the early 1980s, received $1.6 million in grants to support its efforts to transform the legal profession, which it sees as "currently dominated by a form of liberal orthodoxy "advocating] a centralized and uniform society" According to the Federalist Society's 1995 annual report, its Student Division has more than 4,900 law student members in more than 140 law schools across the country, up from 2,137 members in 1989. Its Lawyers Division boasts more than 15,000 attorneys and legal professionals and more than 50 active chapters. The Society also publishes The Federalist (circulation 57,000), and other legal monographs and reports, and sponsors a Continuing Legal Education program.

State/Regional Think Tanks I; Advocacy Groups:

* The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, heavily funded since its inception by the Bradley Foundation, has pushed to shape state education and welfare policy in accordance with key conservative principles.

* The Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research aggressively worked for California's Proposition 209, the ballot initiative to eliminate that state's affirmative action program.

* The Heartland Institute publishes Intellectual Ammunition, a glossy 25-page journal featuring condensed versions of policy statements and position papers of most of the think tanks and advocacy organizations to which the 12 foundations directed grants between 1992 and 1994. The May/June 1996 issue introduced Policy Fax, a regular insert described by Illinois state senator Chris Lauzen as:

a revolutionary public policy fax-on-demand research service that enables you to receive, by fax, the full text of thousands of documents from more than one hundred of the nations leading think tanks, publications, and trade associations. PolicyFax is easy to use, and its free for elected officials and journalists.

The 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week service features topics from crime to the economy to welfare, including South Carolinians Have Nothing to Worry about from Concealed Handguns; Four Steps to Reforming Superfund, Medical Savings Accounts: The Right Way to Reform Health Care: Benefits of the Flat Tax; and Effective Compassion.

* The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the newer State Policy Network. Provide technical assistance, develop model legislation, and report about communications activities and conferences. ALEC, well-funded by private family foundations and corporate contributors, is a powerful and growing membership organization, with almost 26,000 state legislators-more than one-third of the nation's total. The organization, which has a staff of 30, responds to 700 information requests each month, and has developed more than 150 pieces of model legislation ranging from education to tax policy It maintains legislative task forces on every important state policy issue, including education, health care, tax and fiscal policy, and criminal justice.

Religious Sector Organizations:

The Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), founded in 1982, believes that "the National and World Councils of churches are theologically and politically flawed." Its early focus was international, supporting US foreign policy in Central America during the Reagan years. Today, IRD publishes Faith and Freedom and monitors "mainliners and other Christian groups that often claim to speak for millions but really represent only an extreme few."

The Institute on Religion and Public Life and the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty both seek to influence the religious community through seminars, colloquia, sponsored research, book projects, newsletters, and journals. They work to instill a stronger appreciation of the morality of capitalism in the US and around the world. To counter "the clergy's disturbing bias against the business community and free enterprise," the Acton Institute runs three-day conferences for seminarians and divinity students to "introduce them to the moral and ethical basis of free market economies." In 1995, it also launched a national welfare reform initiative to help shape national policy debates, believing that "churches and private individuals and organizations, not the government, can best help change people's lives."

Other national think tanks, both large and small, have decried the national moral decay and blamed teenage pregnancy, single-parent families, crime, and drugs on ceaseless expansion of the Leviathan state. This linkage between morality, poverty, and government spending-consistently propagated by a wide range of conservative grantees-has contributed to the movement's overall political coherence, helping unite religious right activists and the often more secular fiscal conservatives. When moral failure is invoked to explain the plight of the poor, both can unite around a policy agenda stressing market discipline and the replacement of government social programs with personal responsibility. As James Morone noted, "Once the lines are drawn [between a righteous us and a malevolent them], one can forget about social justice, progressive thinking, or universal programs. Instead the overarching policy question becomes, "How do we protect ourselves and our children? Never mind health care- build more jails."

Integrated Strategy

Conservative foundations bring to their grant making programs a clear vision and strong political intention, funding to promote a social and public policy agenda fundamentally based on unregulated markets and limited government. They have created and anchored key institutions, concentrating their resources to sustain and expand a critical mass of advocacy, litigation and public policy groups working on the right of US politics and culture. The results have been cumulative and impressive. Scholars develop the intellectual basis for conservative social perspectives and policy views. Conservative think tanks and advocacy organizations produce hundreds of policy reports, briefings, action alerts, monographs and analyses on matters both broad and specific, from national fiscal policy to regulatory reform. Business sponsored law firms pursue strategic litigation to advance conservative legal principles. Conservative media outlets profile policy approaches and proposals to inform and mobilize opinion while attacking the political and journalistic mainstream. And fellowships, internships, and leadership training programs create an effective pipeline for moving young conservatives into the fields of law, economics, government and journalism.

Further leveraging their investments, the 12 foundations have targeted their grants to support activities and projects intended to bring conservative scholars, policy analysts, grassroots leaders, and public officials into frequent contact with each other. Think tank leaders attend meetings to learn how to use new information and communication technologies for greater public opinion and policy impact. Grassroots activists are linked by satellite to training conferences focusing on how best to frame issues for public consumption. Students are subsidized to participate in public policy programs that teach them the essentials of free market economics and place them in think tanks, advocacy organizations, law firms and media outlets for further training. And organizations and projects are supported to build linkages and communication between grant making institutions and grant recipients.

In funding a policy movement rather than specific program areas, these 12 foundations distinguish themselves from the philanthropic mainstream, which has long maintained a pragmatic, non-ideological and field-specific approach to the grant making enterprise. The success of conservative foundation grantees in developing and marketing both general principles and specific policy proposals has also been enhanced by the institutional weaknesses of those who would place alternative policies on the table for political debate.

The political implications and policy consequences of this imbalance have been profound. First, the heavy investments that conservative foundations have made in New Right policy and advocacy institutions have helped to create a supply-side version of American politics in which certain policy ideas find their way into the political marketplace regardless of existing citizen demand. Second, the multiplication of institutional voices marketing conservative policies and policy approaches has resulted in policy decisions with disastrous and disproportionate consequences for low income constituencies.

The strategic grant making of the 12 foundations offers valuable lessons for those grant makers and others interested in national and state public policy matters. Seven stand out in particular. They include:

* Understanding the importance of ideology and overarching frameworks;

* Building strong institutions by providing ample general operating support and awarding large, multi-year grants;

* Maintaining a national policy focus;

* Recognizing the importance of marketing, media, and persuasive communications;

* Creating and cultivating public intellectuals and policy leaders;

* Funding comprehensively for social transformation and policy change by awarding grants across sectors, blending research and advocacy, supporting litigation, and encouraging the public participation of core constituencies; and

* Taking a long-haul approach.

While each of these lessons alone has funding power and significance, it is the combination that has given conservative philanthropy its vast clout.

Sally Covington is the Director of the Democracy and Philanthropy Project of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy. This article was adapted from Moving a Public Policy Agenda: The Strategic Philanthropy of Conservative Foundations, prepared for the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, 2001 S Street, NW, Suite 620, Washington, DC 20009, 202/387-9177. It covers the three-year period from 1992-94.