Once the crisis had passed, however, it was inevitable that some economists would return to the old faith. By the late 1940s Friedman and his colleague George Stigler were already inveighing (with considerable justification) against the evils of rent control. Over the course of the 1950s this expanded into a broad attack on government intervention and regulation in general. By the early 1960s Friedman had made almost a complete return to free-market fundamentalism, arguing that even the Great Depression was caused not by market failure but by government failure. His argument was slippery and, I’d argue, bordered on intellectual dishonesty.[11] But the fact that a great economist felt compelled to engage in intellectual sleight of hand is, itself, an indication of the powerful allure of free-market fundamentalism. Free-market economists began rejecting not just the New Deal, but the reforms of the Progressive Era, suggesting that even such government actions as policing food and drug safety were unjustified. And Friedman associated himself with the Goldwater campaign.
The revolt of the sociologists came later than the return of free-market fundamentalism, and had a darker tone. Where Friedman and his associates radiated Panglossian optimism, the group that coalesced around Kristol and The Public Interest, founded in 1965, were skeptics, even cynics. They were rebelling against Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which they saw—with some justice—as a foolish, doomed exercise in social engineering. “We were especially provoked,” Kristol would later write, “by the widespread acceptance of left-wing sociological ideas that were incorporated in the War on Poverty.”[12]
And so you had Daniel Patrick Moynihan rejecting liberal pieties by arguing that the roots of much black poverty lay not so much in discrimination as in the rise of female-headed families, Edward Banfield rejecting the claim that urban riots were about racism by arguing that most rioters were not so much protesting injustice as simply engaging in looting.
The Friedmanites and the neoconservatives saw themselves as outsiders, alienated from the liberal establishment. To a remarkable extent the heirs of these movements still manage to feel this way. Yet by the 1970s the intelligentsia of movement conservatism had an establishment of its own, with financial backing on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of its liberal opponents. To put it bluntly, becoming a conservative intellectual became a good career move.
In a 1996 report, “Buying a Movement,” People for the American Way described the career of Dinesh d’Souza, who rose to prominence with his 1991 best seller Illiberal Education, an attack on affirmative action and political correctness on campus. Leaving aside the merits of his work, the interesting point is the way D’Souza’s career differed from those of a previous generation of conservatives.
The original modern conservative intellectuals were, for the most part, scholars who happened to be or become conservative. Milton Friedman, to take the most spectacular example, was in the first instance a professional economist, whose work on consumer behavior, monetary forces, and inflation is accepted and honored by the vast majority of economists, whatever their political persuasion. He would have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics whatever his politics. Similarly most of the “dozen or so scholars and intellectuals” who Kristol says formed the “nucleus” of The Public Interest were academic sociologists who built their careers on more or less nonpolitical work, and came to conservatism only later.
D’Souza, however, has had a very different kind of career. He moved from editing a conservative college publication, the Dartmouth Review, to editing a conservative alumni publication, Prospect. After writing a complimentary biography of the evangelist Jerry Falwell, he became a senior domestic policy analyst in the Reagan administration. He then moved to a position at a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, where he wrote Illiberal Education and a later book, The End of Racism (in which he declared that “for many whites the criminal and irresponsible black underclass represents a revival of barbarism in the midst of Western civilization”), with support from the conservative Olin Foundation. His books have been promoted by conservative magazines, especially the National Review.
D’Souza, in other words, is something that didn’t exist forty years ago: a professional conservative intellectual, who has made his entire career inside an interlocking set of essentially partisan institutions.
Where did these institutions come from? The story, in brief, is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s members of the new conservative intelligentsia persuaded both wealthy individuals and some corporate leaders to funnel cash into a conservative intellectual infrastructure. To a large extent this infrastructure consists of think tanks that are set up to resemble academic institutions, but only publish studies that play into a preconceived point of view. The American Enterprise Institute, although it was founded in 1943, expanded dramatically beginning in 1971, when it began receiving substantial amounts of corporate money and grants from conservative family foundations. The Heritage Foundation was created in 1973 with cash from Joseph Coors and Richard Mellon Scaife. The libertarian Cato Institute relied heavily on funds from the Koch family foundations.
Media organizations are also part of the infrastructure. The same set of foundations that have funded conservative think tanks also gave substantial support to The Public Interest, as well as publications like The American Spectator, which obsessively pursued alleged scandals during the Clinton years.
In seeking the support of foundations and business groups, neconservatives cheerfully accepted a coarsening of their ideas. “We say, repeatedly,” Kristol wrote in 1995, “that ideas have consequences, which is true but what we have in mind are complex, thoughtful, and well-articulated ideas. What we so easily overlook is the fact that simple ideas, allied to passion and organization, also have consequences.” You might think that this was a lament—but Kristol was actually congratulating himself and his comrades-in-arms for going along with crude formulations of conservatism in order to achieve political success.
This was especially true in economics, where The Public Interest, along with the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, became the principal advocate of supply-side economics. Supply-side doctrine, which claimed without evidence that tax cuts would pay for themselves, never got any traction in the world of professional economic research, even among conservatives. N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist who was the chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers between 2003 and 2005, famously described the supply-siders as “cranks and charlatans” in the first edition of his textbook on the principles of economics. (The phrase vanished from later editions.) Why, then, was Kristol convinced that the supply-siders were right? The answer is that he wasn’t—he didn’t care whether they were wrong or right. Kristol’s only concern was that the supply-siders’ ideas were politically useful. Here’s how he put it in his 1995 essay:
Among the core social scientists around The Public Interest there were no economists. (They came later, as we “matured.”) This explains my own rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems. The task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority—so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.[13]
12.
Irving Kristol, “American Conservatism, 1965–1995,”