Every society depends upon some source, or sources, for new ideas. In a dictatorship, the source is the government – period. Nobody else is expected – or allowed – to come forward with innovative suggestions for analyzing, let alone proposing, new social developments.
In a free society like ours, everyone is, theoretically, welcome to make any suggestions he or she may have. And indeed, once in every blue moon or two, some inspired individual does manage to break through and exert important influence on subsequent events. But it is rarely very easy. Karl Marx devoted his entire life to writing books and articles and supporting political movements (and very nearly starving in the process) before he succeeded in propagating his crackpot interpretation of the “laws of history” and launched communism on its century-long onslaught on the human spirit. Better men and women, fighting for better causes, have had much the same experience – or worse.
As a practical matter, therefore, people in a free society who seriously want to advocate important new ideas have usually sought shelter in some relatively welcoming environment. And for many years, in the United States and elsewhere, the colleges and universities provided that environment. As institutions devoted to the study of ideas, they were well suited to serve as roosts for people intent on critiquing the fashionable ideas of the day, or (better yet) promoting new ones. To serve as forums for these ideas, there developed the so-called “journals of opinion” – small but highly influential publications, designed to be read not by the public at large but primarily by intellectuals very like the people who wrote for them. Over time, these techniques begat such disparate phenomena as the New Deal and the Reagan Revolution.
The New Left recognized the significance of the whole process when it declared, in the 1960s, its intention to embark on “a long march through the institutions” of American society, by which it meant primarily the institutions of higher education. True to their word, the young leftists of the ’60s became the youthful instructors in the colleges and universities of the ’70s and ’80s, and in the fullness of time the dominant professors of the ’90s and our own era.
There they reign today, issuing their ukases against what they consider the many faults of American society and proposing leftist solutions for its problems. Like the leaders of any sensible despotic regime, they take great care not to allow dissidents into their charmed circle. A serious conservative like Harvey Mansfield at Harvard or Robert George at Princeton is as rare as a unicorn, and is usually kept on display merely to demonstrate the institution’s professed open-mindedness.
But in recent decades, a strange thing has happened: While the colleges and universities have become ever more the creatures of the left, confined to promoting what few new ideas that viewpoint can boast, the real action has moved to a new group of organizations, loosely and sometimes rather dismissively called “think tanks.”
These, too, of course, can and do exist on the left. The Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations, to name only three, have long since been taken over by the academic left and twisted into grotesque parodies of their founders’ views. But here and there around the country there are conservative think tanks busily promoting conservative viewpoints. In Washington, the Heritage Foundation does a masterful job of issuing conservative commentaries on almost every imaginable aspect of public policy. At Stanford, the Hoover Institution continues its great work of historical analyses of the Russian Revolution, the wars of the 20th century, and much else. At Claremont, Calif., near Los Angeles, the Claremont Institute (of which – full disclosure – I am a Fellow) is breaking new ground in, among other things, its studies of the Founding generation (whose members include those who helped create our government). And there are still others, fighting the good fight for conservatism on a hundred fronts.
These, and not the country’s intellectually arthritic universities, are the institutions that are providing America’s genuinely new ideas today.
