Back to (politics) school
A note on conservative institutions
Hello dear readers! It’s been much longer than I anticipated, and I’m thankful for your patience. I found it utterly impossible to write anything worth reading in August while my kids were home and we were hosting friends and family. Now that we are back in England and the kids are (mostly) back to school, I’m overwhelmed about all there is to say. I’ve started and discarded posts on idealism v. materialism among contemporary conservatives (i.e. whether culture or economic conditions are the driving force of history); the state of the anti-war movement in the US and Israel; post-liberal critiques of feminism, capitalism, and ‘having it all’; and Bibi’s fictional history of Jews and Arabs. If any of those sound like topics you badly need to hear more about, drop a note in the comments and I’ll see what I can salvage.
But given that it’s back-to-school season, perhaps this is a good time to write about some of the institutions on the American right engaged in political education. Let’s be clear: conservatives are exceptionally good at creating institutions, using them to cultivate young talent, and greasing the policy wheels by throwing money at the battle of ideas. Over the last few years we’ve seen the emergence of a number of new key players, including the Edmund Burke Foundation (b. 2019), American Compass (b. 2020), and American Moment (b. 2021). They join the slightly older Conservative Partnership Institute (founded in 2017 by a former Heritage Foundation president) and the re-booted Heritage Foundation, where Kevin Roberts took charge in 2021, as the central institutions of the Republican party realignment.
Many of these institutions are focused on identifying and incubating the next generation of congressional staffers, policy wonks, and intellectuals, and operate fellowship programs to bring bushy-tailed young conservatives to DC. As Politico reports, American Moment was founded with the backing of J.D. Vance with the express aim of developing new talent for future Republican administrations. Per Politico’s Ian Ward, “Saurabh Sharma, the group’s bespectacled president and co-founder, told me that his long-term goal is to nurture a new class of Beltway elites who are steeped in an explicitly reactionary worldview — and who have the institutional knowledge and political acumen to translate that philosophy into policy.” Notably, in 2023 Sharma was also appointed Executive Director of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was created by Hazony as the institutional umbrella for the National Conservatism movement.
American Moment runs the Fellowship for American Statecraft, which “pays accepted Fellows $3,000 per month for the spring, summer, or fall, and places them at an internship either on Capitol Hill or in the public policy non-profit sphere in Washington, D.C.” They also operate the Foundations of American Statecraft program—a “twelve-week, rigorous educational program designed to give interns in Washington, DC an education in conservative public policy, critical professional skills, and mentorship opportunities with most talented staffers in politics”—as well as a weekly Friday seminar for junior Hill staffers featuring speakers and free Chick-fil-A.
If that’s not your speed, perhaps you should check out Conservative Partnership Academy, which offers in-person courses on energy policy, healthcare, the appropriations process, and “America First: A Foreign Policy Overview,” among others. Or consider the War Studies and Political Studies Programs offered by the Hertog Foundation - founded by retired financier Roger Hertog, former chairman of the right-wing Zionist Tikvah Fund, which helped fund recent attacks on Israel’s Supreme Court. The Political Studies program is directed at college students who come to DC for an intensive six-week course that explores the theory and practice of politics, with the Foundation providing “residential accommodations and a stipend to offset travel and living expenses.” The War Studies program is a full-time, two-week program that surveys warfare from Napoleonic campaigns to contemporary Great Power competition. Students receive “$1,500 in addition to housing, meals, and subsidized transportation to and within Washington, DC.”
Such programs suggest an awful lot of money sloshing around conservative intellectual and policy circles, but just as importantly, a willingness to throw that money at the battle of ideas. In contrast, legacy liberal institutions don’t seem to prioritize the sort of talent cultivation that we see on the right, nor is there a parallel group of new progressive institutions that match the influence and funding levels of groups like American Moment. Brookings Institution offers the competitive LEGIS Congressional Fellowship, which places fellows with legislators and their staff for a period of seven months or one year, for the bargain basement price to fellows of $4,650 and $6,250, respectively. I don’t think I have to spell out what sort of people can clear such barriers to entry, or how they hinders the cultivation of new talent from working or even middle class backgrounds. What about Center for American Progress? Much like Brookings, there’s very little on offer beside CAP’s own intern program (they are currently hiring a single facilities intern). From my admittedly limited research, only the Roosevelt Institute—which has a more progressive bent—has any sort of fellowship programs to compare to those on the right.
This is all particularly irksome, I suppose, because I have seen the hunger for rigorous political education from my years at Brooklyn Institute. And while BISR does offer tons of classes on topics that touch on all aspects of contemporary politics, we don’t train legislative aids or have the capacity to place bright young things in congressional offices (at least not at this level of operating budget: if you’re a billionaire who wants to finance our Washington D.C. extension, please do let me know).
But moving beyond my personal frustrations, why is this the case? Why don’t liberal institutions seem to have the same support networks for cultivating new talent? I think we could point to a few different things. First, there is an argument to be made that since universities as a whole lean to the left, there is a lesser need to engage in progressive political education. I think that’s a fair point, but also not entirely on target. The sort of specialized training programs offered by American Moment, for instance, are not just about teaching young people how to think about politics, but actually plug them into policy circles in a meaningful way. Just because you read Foucault doesn’t mean you’ll know how to draft a piece of legislation!
But I also think there’s something bigger at play here as well. Many liberals assume that the truth is on their side, leading to a sense that liberal ideas are self-evident. That has arguably never been the case, and never less so than today. But, speaking as someone who used to spend a good chunk of my time fundraising, it’s hard convincing liberals that you have to pay for the war of ideas. From the Volker Fund’s role in creating the Chicago School of economics down to Peter Thiel’s support for National Conservatism, it’s evident that conservatives do not entertain such delusions — and that they’ve seen tremendous ROI from these investments in moving the goal posts of political thought.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for helping unstick my brain. I think it will be easier from here on out. Next time, let’s talk more about the pools of money that help the intellectual sausage get made.
I'm getting to this a couple weeks after you posted it, but I want to put in a vote for your exhuming whatever you wrote about the anti-war movement, and maybe connecting it to what you have to say here about political education on the Right. You might have seen Zeynep Tufekci's piece in the NYT the other day (Sept 21) about how the anti-war movement has been out-played by university administrations. I think her verdict has to be filed under "Sad but True." And the explanation lies with the very thing you discuss in this post: the anti-war movement has been outmaneuvered because right-wing institutions are part of the maneuver.
It's really incredible to watch left students get their asses so thoroughly kicked by their right-wing antagonists, partly for lack of funding, partly for lack of support, partly for lack of experience, partly for lack of training. But all of those problems are remediable. The remedies can basically be read off the descriptions of the problems themselves. But remedies aren't free. They have to be paid for.
I'm a failed product of right-wing political education. I was one of Hazony's minions at The Princeton Tory. I attended all of IEA's shin-digs with the likes of Fred Barnes, William Buckley, Charles Kesler, Alan Keyes et al in DC. I had a three-year internship at the National Association of Scholars. I went out to dinner with the likes of Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol. I rubbed shoulders with the likes of Greg Johnson, one of the founders of the alt-right. Etc. I'm describing, not bragging. It's nothing to brag about.
I eventually went in a more libertarian-than-conservative direction, toward the Institute for Humane Studies at GMU (where I was the recipient of a 1994 summer fellowship). Twenty-six years of academic life turned me toward the Left, and made me persona non grata at all of these places. But I learned one lesson from it all: you get what you pay for. If you don't want to put the effort into building something, don't cry when nothing gets built.
It really astonishes me to see how myopic the Left is on this, BISR excepted. They've had forty years to figure out the Right's playbook. It's been right there in front of their eyes the whole time. It's no secret. But anyone who can see it should be able to reverse-engineer it.
For all the bullshit they sling about how "marginalized" they are, there is a direct connection between elite universities and cushy right-wing sinecures just about everywhere in government and other places of influence. When I was a lecturer at Princeton in 2002-2004, I taught within the James Madison Program, and regularly wrote letters of rec for right-wing students going places--the White House, the State Dept, etc. etc. That doesn't happen by accident.
I live in Princeton and am on campus every day. The poor, helpless, marginalized conservatives of the James Madison Program essentially own intellectual life here. They've deliberately invested in creating an intellectual infrastructure, and now they have one. I saw that play out at Princeton (where I was an undergrad), and then at Notre Dame (grad school). Who do these people think they're fooling?
They seem to be fooling the Left. We're living in a country sliding into fascism, committing genocide, and courting nuclear war. But the Left--the monied Left--seems to be sleepwalking through it all. Fifteen Princeton students are making their way through the courts on bullshit charges of defiant trespass. Who's following that case? An undergraduate intern at National Review. And that's just a small fraction of all of the students who were arrested this spring. Why is this not a cause celebre? Why is this not the equivalent of the Freedom Rides or Freedom Summer? Why are Left organizations not lining up to defend them, or at least expressing some real anger at their treatment?
A movement can't move itself. It's not a Prime Mover Unmoved out of Aristotelian cosmology. It needs support, or else it will die. I don't know how any of us will live with ourselves if the anti-war movement dies on our watch. But that's where it's headed. We're at Code Blue.