How to Win the War of Ideas: Lessons from the Gramscian Right

...Heritage, the collective brain behind Reagan and George Bush, was founded in 1973, spends a third of its $18 million annual budget on marketing, and produces some two hundred documents a year...

...Donors can make the leap of faith from projects to institutional and intellectual movement building...

...The Heritage Foundation is the best known think tank because of its close association with Ronald Reagan...

...Sustained endeavors like books are (at least for me) impossible when time is constantly broken up with fund-raising activities...

...Progressive donors have sent out vanloads of rejections in response to proposals for intellectual work...

...Even in the early 1970s, William Simon, then and still president of the Olin Foundation, was exhorting his business associates to support "scholars, social scientists, writers and journalists" and to give "grants, grants and more grants in exchange for books, books and more books...

...Assuming that this proposal is somehow recognized and acted upon, I have several subsidiary recommendations...

...Donors should set aside a respectable portion of their disposable funds to endow worthwhile institutions...

...Literally hundreds of millions of dollars are spent every year on purchasing present and future right-wing intellectual clout...

...This fund could not, however, cover all the needs of a growing movement, which sought other financial backers early on...

...magazines with a national audience (the Nation the Progressive, In These Times, and Mother Jones) were given ten times less over the same period...

...In 1960, it added an economic program to its cold war vocation...

...SUMMER • 1997 • 53...

...Neoliberals want "market law" to become the sovereign judge of the rights of persons and of societies as a whole...

...Those who refuse to act on the knowledge that ideas have consequences end up suffering them...

...As the Foundation's director puts it, "We're in this for the long haul...

...In the early days of the neoliberal renaissance, such ideas may have seemed utopian, since they were antagonistic to the spirit of the New Deal and the welfare state...

...One conservative scholar sums up the doctrine thus: "Individual freedom is the ultimate social ideal...

...Their recommendations were duly distributed throughout the new administration...

...magazines received $2.7 million from different foundations (National Review, the Public Interest, the New Criterion, and the American Spectator...

...In Spanish they say no protestas sin propuestas or, freely translated, quit complaining if you don't have anything to offer...

...today Americans speak of neoconservatism, Europeans of neoliberalism, and the French of "la pensée unique" (the dominant or single mindset...

...Americans at the first Mount Pelerin Society meeting traveled to Switzerland on Volker money...

...Recent history, if we are attentive, might still teach us that a society can go from law based on the equality of persons to the laws of the market...

...Without intellectual ammunition to defend them and to create the context in which they can flourish, worthy projects and programs collapse...

...One of the most important think tanks has no fixed address...

...If Bill Buckley were to come out of Yale today, nobody would pay much attention to 50 • DISSENT The War of Ideas him...

...In the 1920s and 1930s, the great Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci took the concept further, using it to explain how one class could establish its leadership over others through ideological dominance...

...For at least a quarter-century, many conservative American family foundations have poured money into the production and dissemination of their ideas...

...Vainly, because they have failed to understand that their projects and programs exist in an ideological context that systematically frustrates their aims...

...Financing Ideology Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent over the past fifty years to keep these and many other neoliberal institutions alive and well...

...The Bradley Foundation spends nearly all its annual income ($28 million in 1994) on promoting neoliberal causes, including major gifts to Heritage, AEI, and conservative magazines and journals...

...Funders should accept a division of labor and trust the intellectual workers they choose to support without trying to define their agendas...

...When I was fund-raising for the Transnational Institute (on "projects," naturally, since no other approach would have been accepted in the donor community) I published only short pieces...

...Defining, sustaining, and controlling culture is crucial: get into people's heads and you will acquire their hearts, their hands, and their destinies...

...Alas, progressives can't seem to tell a hegemonic project from a hedgehog...

...Consequently, idea-producing institutions that are only allowed to spend for items specified in the project budget (with a modest overhead) can't afford translations, can't develop a "Features Service" for a network of newspapers and magazines in many countries, can't turn articles into radio programs, books into television films, and so on...

...If some ideas are to become more fashionable than others, they must be financed: it takes money to build intellectual infrastructures and to promote a worldview...

...Precious little...

...the antistatist Institute of Economic Affairs...

...To be free is to be free from the state...

...Many public and private institutions that genuinely believe they are working for a more equitable world have contributed to the triumph of neoliberalism or have passively allowed this triumph to occur...

...President Reagan himself launched a major Heritage fund-raising drive, telling the audience, "Ideas do have consequences: rhetoric is politics and words are action...

...Today, few would deny that we live under the virtually undisputed rule of the market-dominated, ultracompetitive, globalized society with its cortege of manifold iniquities and everyday violence...

...Or at least of Gramscians...

...The neoliberals' onslaught continues and their intellectual hegemony is almost complete...

...In the 1990s, the annual budget has dropped to around $8 to $10 million, but AEI still produces a steady stream of books, pamphlets, and legislative recommendations, and its pundits are frequently heard from in the mass media...

...Clearly, ideas have consequences—after all, Margaret Thatcher proudly proclaimed her allegiance to the ideas of Hayek, and most economics students who go on to occupy policy positions have been trained in the neoliberal curricula...

...The doctrines of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are indistinguishable from those of the neoliberal credo...

...Grants for institution building are also important because they allow progressive researchers and writers to prepare for the future and keep up the momentum...

...Just in Case...

...I assume readers know or have guessed I have one, since I am a professional researcher, writer, . and, when I can manage it, thinker...

...But for that person, this process can be counterproductive, preventing him or her from getting on with the intellectual work...

...Practical Implications and the Plague of the Project So far, I've not bothered to declare an interest...

...governmental power, while necessary, must be limited and decentralized...

...It has remained an international club for neoliberal thinkers ever since...

...In 1988, Allan Bloom, director of the University of Chicago's Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy ($3.6 million grant from Olin) invites a State Department official to give a paper...

...According to the Foundation's literature, the Bradley brothers believed that "over time, the consequences of ideas [are] more decisive than the force of political or economic movements...

...An earlier version of this doctrine was called "laissez-faire...

...Its Annual Guide lists fifteen hundred neoliberal public policy experts in seventy different areas—the harried journalist need only telephone to get a quote...

...Neoliberals don't mind financing white men if white men happen to be best at delivering the intellectual goods...

...Who's Who, and What...

...The task of the progressive thinker is to be outside the mainstream, to foresee developments that will become crucial in the future...

...Between 1990 and 1993, four neoliberal U.S...

...They cannot exist in a vacuum...

...The point is not private disappointment, but mass denial...

...Neoliberals pretend to follow these illustrious predecessors, but in fact betray their spirit and ignore their moral and social teachings...

...They should sit at the feet of the neoliberals who have proved they know how the game works: let us learn from the masters...

...In General Pinochet's Chile, Chicago-trained economists were the first to apply el tratamiento de chock (shock treatment) based on freedom for business but repression for labor...

...The Age of Exclusion engenders myriad social ills with which various humanitarian and charitable agencies, established in an earlier era, vainly attempt to cope...

...It has no place for the growing numbers of people who contribute little or nothing to production or consumption...

...I have witnessed this again and again, for instance when I first tried to attract financing for work on third world debt...

...We have a tremendous amount of conservative opinion but this creates a problem for those who are interested in a career in journalism...

...But they are also funding a great many women, African-Americans, and other minority thinkers and writers...

...bought and paid for by a closely knit fraternity (they mostly are men) who stand to gain from its rule...

...I think we have, and by "we" I mean the progressive movement, or what's left of it...

...An anecdote recounted by Wiener illustrates how the ideological self-promotion system works...

...Formulas providing guarantees and flexibility to both donor and recipient could be readily negotiated...

...from relative social justice to deep and chronic inequalities within a few short years...

...Their occupants are carefully chosen, in the words of critic Jon Wiener, to "strengthen the economic, political and cultural institutions upon which . . . private enterprise is based...

...Why can we not see, for example, that the destruction of welfare in the United States or the threats to trade union achievements in Europe would have been impossible without the creation of an intellectual climate making such onslaughts appear not morally repugnant but natural and inevitable...

...Why not...

...Reaganism, Thatcherism, and the Fall of the Wall are often credited (or blamed) for this state of affairs and they have, indeed, made neoliberals more arrogant, but there is much more to the story than that...

...the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, founded in 1978 by William Casey, who later became director of the Central Intelligence Agency, specializes in the critique of government incomeredistribution programs...

...We used to laugh at the idea that market mechanisms could solve 52 • DISSENT The War of Ideas social problems: such things are now said every day with a straight face...

...the remaining third not deserving of the same rights, except when arbitrarily granted...

...Remarkable institutions and individuals deserve long-term support that alone can allow them to do their best work...

...and the Adam Smith Institute, which has probably done more to promote privatization than any other institution anywhere...

...The Heritage Foundation spends fully a third of its comfortable budget on outreach, yet few progressive funders want to pay for spreading the word...

...The Cato Institute in Washington is libertarian, advocating minimalist government and specializing in studies on privatization...

...In the war of ideas, any movement is in trouble if it cannot renew its ranks of professional researchers, thinkers, and writers...

...Press, radio, and television can be guided to follow the lead of the more specialized or erudite media...

...Its few champions preached to each other or in the desert—everyone else was a Keynesian, a social/Christian democrat or some shade of Marxist...

...Olin has spent over $55 million on these efforts and the list of its grantees reads like a Who's Who of the academic right...

...Where does the money come from...

...London houses the Centre for Policy Studies...

...The market's job is not to provide jobs, much less social cohesion...

...Exclusion and Ideology The late twentieth century could be dubbed the Age of Exclusion...

...The first may be a bit hard to swallow, so I may as well say it straight out: funders are not the best judges of the work that progressive intellectuals ought to be doing...

...Membership in the society is by invitation and members' names are not disclosed...

...Weaver's conservative writings were published by the University of Chicago Press, as were the works of exiled Austrian philosopher-economist Friedrich von Hayek and the brilliant young economist Milton Friedman...

...Because they are likely to be attracted to issues that have already reached the mainstream...

...Interventionism is baneful and dangerous...

...What if we lived in a society in which the system of justice rested on the postulate that only two-thirds of its members were fully human...

...I shall use SUMMER • 1997 • 47 The War of Ideas "neoliberalism," bearing in mind that the modern version of the doctrine is far removed from that of such great "liberal" political economists as Adam Smith or David Ricardo...

...Not only do progressive institutions appear complacent as to their side's intellectual superiority, but they've been cruising along as if there were no need to justify their positions, nor even to worry about the nearly hegemonic intellectual hold of the right...

...The left remained complacent until, suddenly, it was too late...

...In the early days, the William Volker Fund saved the shaky magazines, financed the books published at Chicago, paid the bills for the influential Foundation for Economic Education and funded meetings at U.S...

...If we recognize that a marketdominated, iniquitous world is neither natural nor inevitable, then it should be possible to build a counter-project for a different kind of world...

...The editor of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review appears to find this almost unseemly: Journalism today is very different from what it was 10 to 20 years ago...

...Well, obviously I propose that progressive foundations and any other financing sources begin to devote large amounts of money to regaining our lost intellectual initiative...

...I have no reason to doubt that the goals of these donors are social equity, poverty alleviation, human rights, conflict resolution, and sustainable development...

...Funders should give up the "project" approach in favor of institution building...

...It's now clear that the "free market," which increasingly determines political and social as well as economic priorities, cannot embrace everyone...

...In contrast, four progressive U.S...

...They know, too, that these infrastructures will largely determine the intellectual superstructure: this is what Gramsci meant by capitalism's "hegemonic project...

...The market operates for the benefit of a minority...

...Economic freedom, that is, capitalism, is an indispensable condition for political liberty...

...Smaller think tanks include the venerable Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford University in California in 1919 to study communism...

...The Mount Pelerin Society...

...The "angels" have, rather, seen their task as funding projects and programs for the poor and disadvantaged...

...Kristol simultaneously publishes "responses" to the paper: one by himself...

...Today, op-ed pages are dominated by conservatives...

...Hegel claimed that the only thing history teaches us is that nobody ever learns anything from history...

...The speaker proclaims total victory for the West and for neoliberal values in the cold war...

...Has it spent its time and money promoting the ideas it believes in...

...Neoliberals understood, however, that to transform the economic, political, and social landscape they first had to change the intellectual and psychological one...

...They can identify institutions and individuals in both North and South who are producing original and distinguished work and whose record shows they can be trusted—and then trust them...

...one by Bloom, one by Samuel Huntington ($1.4 million for the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard...

...It was then too early, although five or ten years later, numerous organizations were falling over each other to work on the issue...

...It has, rather, been carefully nurtured over decades, through thought, action, and propaganda...

...Why, I'm driven to ask, do progressive funders devote so much of their time and money to "projects" and so little to intellectual infrastructure and institution building...

...A good progressive intellectual worker produces subversive knowledge...

...Although smaller than philanthropic elephants like Ford, these funders use their money strategically...

...founded in 1947 by Friedrich von Hayek, first brought American and European conservatives together in a village near Lausanne...

...Today the "Chicago School" is famous: its economic, social, and political views have spread throughout the world...

...that in order to prevail, ideas require material infrastructures...

...focusing on the grass roots, enhancing "community empowerment...

...He would not be that unusual . . . because there are probably hundreds of people with those ideas and they have already got syndicated columns...

...Smart, dedicated, idealistic young people often want to work for progressive organizations and are willing to make material sacrifices to do so, but the core funds to employ them simply aren't there...

...So yes: I have all too often heard or read the dread phrase: "Your proposal is very interesting but we don't fund research and writing...

...Today everyone has heard of Francis Fukuyama and The End of History, a best-seller in several languages...

...Imperceptibly, nearly everyone will come to feel that certain ideas are normal, natural, part of the air we breathe...

...The American founding fathers of neoliberalism thus held few cards at the outset, but they believed in a crucial principle: Ideas Have Consequences—the title of a 1948 book by Richard Weaver that was to have a long and fruitful career...

...Foundations like Coors (brewery), Scaife or Mellon (steel), and especially Olin (chemicals, munitions) finance chairs in some of America's most prestigious universities...

...But this is good...

...A somewhat astonishing conclusion can be drawn from all this: the right is a hot-bed of Marxists...

...He showed how, once ideological authority—or "cultural hegemony"— is established, the use of violence to impose change can become superfluous...

...Obviously I don't deny the impact of economic forces or of political events like the end of the cold war in shaping our lives and our societies, but here I intend to concentrate on the war of ideas that has been tragically neglected by the "side of the angels...

...Researchers, writers, and speakers who have to cater to this mentality in order to get any work done at all are prevented from devoting their energies to research, writing, and speaking, and from renewing their own arsenal of ideas...

...Donors should fund not just the intellectual work itself but the means for making sure it will be widely used...

...Or when public funds for health, education, housing, transport, the environment, and so on dry up...

...And Finally...

...This completely artificial, engineered "debate" is then picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine...

...This grant opened doors to other institutional funders...

...If there are three kinds of people—those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who never knew what hit them—neoliberals belong to the first category and most progressives to the latter two...

...universities...

...Such a society would spontaneously and instantly—at least in the West—be called unjust...

...The individual is entirely responsible for his economic and social fate...

...Drafting several project proposals, defending them separately, in different countries, before different audiences, following up with correspondence, additional information, progress reports, accounts—all this is hugely time consuming...

...They know full well that we are not born with our ideas and must somehow acquire them...

...Have we got the hegemony we deserve...

...Laudable goals all—but what happens when government subscribes, instead, to structural adjustment that utterly devastates the lives of the poor in the South, or passes antiwelfare, antiworker legislation in the North...

...There is a dangerous semantic slippage from "law" to "laws of the market...

...Milton Friedman says that "Mount Pelerin SUMMER • 1997 • 49 The War of Ideas showed us that we were not alone" and served as a "rallying point," inspiring friendships, networks, and joint projects...

...Outside the United States, the neoliberal network is less formal but no less effective...

...it can promote personal notoriety and ready access to decision makers and to the media for selected neoliberal spokespersons...

...This knowledge, by definition, will be unwelcome to the Establishment and to the mainstream...

...A week after his electoral victory, Heritage's director handed Reagan's staff a thousand-page document of policy advice, called Mandate for Leadership, the fruit of the labors of 250 neoliberal experts...

...it can also define which areas deserve study and which do not...

...The Adam Smith Institute brags that over two hundred measures developed in its "Omega Project" were put into practice by Thatcher...

...Otherwise, they will inadvertently prevent those workers from doing their job...

...Donors, understandably, want to discuss the substance and the politics of a project with the person who will be carrying it out...

...its four-hundred strong membership met most recently in Vienna in 1996...

...In the 1980s, AEI's average budget was $14 million...

...Project funding, as opposed to institution building, offers no hope for an end to the cycle of low productivity...

...What happens when the World Trade Organization has more to say about community survival than the communities themselves...

...most became law...

...A Half Century of History The victory of neoliberalism is the result of fifty years of intellectual work, now widely reflected in the media, politics, and the programs of international organizations...

...Why have we not learned from the singlemindedness of the right...

...it employed some 150 people...

...If this judgment sounds harsh, positive conclusions may still be drawn from it...

...For ideas to become part of the daily life of people and society, they must be propagated through books, magazines, journals, conferences, professional associations, and so on...

...Its experts have also advised the World Bank extensively on privatization programs in the bank's client countries...

...Fifty years ago, in the wake of World War II, neoliberalism had no place in the mainstream political debate...

...48 • DISSENT The War of Ideas Manufacturing Ideology The neoliberals thus conceived their strategy, recruiting and rewarding thinkers and writers, raising funds to found and to sustain a broad range of institutions at the forefront of the "conservative revolution...

...Issues we used to take for granted, including the third world itself, have almost vanished from the debate...

...Heritage's success has inspired the creation of thirty-seven mini-Heritages across the United States, creating synergy, an illusion of diversity, and the impression that experts quoted actually represent a broad spectrum of views...

...This revolution began in the United States but, like the rest of American culture, has spread across the world...

...When these foundations have been carefully laid and built upon, views that once seemed minoritarian, elitist, even morally repugnant will gradually become predominant, especially among decision makers...

...The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) was founded in 1943 by a group of anti-New Deal businessmen...

...One of its most successful fund-raising campaigns was launched by the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon dining room...

...this implies that disparities will necessarily exist...

...A revolving door between government and conservative think tanks allowed former Nixon or Reagan/Bush staffers to find homes outside of government during the Carter and Clinton presidencies (although one wonders why they needed to move: Clinton's position on welfare is virtually indistinguishable from that of the neoliberal think tanks, constituting another victory for them...

...The Rule of the Right is the result of a concerted, long-term ideological effort on the part of identifiable actors...

...as well as dozens of college newspapers, thousands of graduate students, and a small armada of journals...

...The now-dominant economic doctrine, of which widespread exclusion is a necessary element, did not descend from heaven...

...Yet someone does have to pay for the months or years of work before the books come out before the "hot topics" are recognized and the "subversive knowledge" becomes part of the debate...

...Traditionally, the term was reserved for states...

...For them, such "guarantees" are nothing but chains...

...By focusing almost exclusively on projects, progressive funders have helped to ensure rightwing dominance of the debate...

...Neoliberals reject the notion that individual freedom might depend on democracy and the rule of law, guaranteed by the state...

...Here are some capsule profiles of some of the most influential intellectual institutions or think tanks...

...SUMMER • 1997 • 51 The War of Ideas Why is the "project"' approach not seen as self-defeating...

...What has the "side of the angels" been up to all these years...

...Overturning that context required intellectual tenacity and political planning—but it also took the passivity of a selfsatisfied majority...

...from the body of democratically established rules for the proper functioning of society to the blind operation of economic forces...

...Whereas orthodox Marxism explained nearly everything by economic forces, Gramsci added the crucial cultural dimension...

...This includes research/policy institutes, journals, and independent intellectual workers inside or outside of universities...

...As Thatcher put it, "It is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit of us all...

...It pioneered intellectual public relations in the 1950s and 1960s, working directly with members of Congress, the federal bureaucracy, and the media...

...The director of the American Enterprise Institute was jubilant when in 1972 he convinced the prestigious Ford Foundation to give AEI $300,000—a significant sum at the time...

...His paper is immediately published in the National Interest ($1 million Olin subsidy) edited by Irving Kristol ($376,000 grant as Olin Distinguished Professor at New York University Graduate School of Business...

...The exclusion of a third or more of their members is, however, precisely the situation that obtains in societies regulated almost exclusively by the "laws of the market...

...So I am mightily perplexed by their behavior...

...As neoliberalism dismantles the gains of the past fifty years and ever greater numbers of its victims are cast adrift, the pressure to fund only "projects" will grow, pushing us into a self-reinforcing procession toward the definitive dysfunctional society...

...Simon knew what he was talking about: not only can well-targeted money create "debates" out of thin air...

...it is, however, known that Czech prime minister, Vaclav Klaus, the former French finance minister Alain Madelin, Boris Yeltsin's chief advisers, and Margaret Thatcher belong...