BOOK EXCERPT

The Triumph of Conservative Philanthropy

Our current miasma has its roots in 1970s right wing foundations

"Goals Reached, Donor on Right Closes Up Shop" read the headline in the New York Times in May, 2005, announcing the shuttering of the John M. Olin Foundation, as per the founder's wishes. The audacious nature of the headline - a philanthropy declaring victory? - was in fact not braggadocio. Most philanthropies don't actually have reachable goals. Feed the hungry? House the homeless? Provide medical care for those who cannot afford it? Those goals are not reachable.

It was these few foundations alone, funded at first by a handful of plutocrats, that coordinated their giving in a way that People For The American Way once called "Buying a movement"

The foundation's stated goals as per the Times - reducing economic decline, urban disorder and Soviet expansionism - obscured its true goals, which included reducing taxes on the wealthy, freeing corporations' hands in the regulatory and taxation spheres, eliminating the social welfare state, eliminating trade unionism, reducing the size of government, privatization of government services, and ensuring a steady stream of government money towards the national defense state. Those are the kinds of things a foundation created by a chemical and munitions magnate can endorse.

Reaching those goals required a full-spectrum initiative aimed not just at transforming American politics, but actually transforming how we think about our lives, the government's role in our lives, the very meaning of significant words, and how we perceive and experience the world around us.

The Olin Foundation didn't accomplish these things alone - it had help in the beginning from about a dozen other conservative philanthropies, and was an equal partner with American business. But it was these charities alone, funded at first by a handful of plutocrats, that coordinated their giving in a way that People For The American Way once called "Buying a movement," and that the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy called “The strategic philanthropy of conservative foundations.”

As the Olin Foundation began to realize its dreams and visions for modern day America, research on just what had happened to the country over the previous 35 years began to come in. The conclusions were good news to those in the corporate class and the wealthy, but for the rest of the country things had taken a dismal turn.

Somethin's happenin' here

 

The chart above shows that as the US economy grew from the 1980s up to the Olin Foundation's closing of its doors the top one percent of earners made outsized gains in income, completely out of whack with previous patterns. The same pattern held, even more strongly, after the Great Recession of 2008, when the top one percent of earners captured 95% of the income gains in the first three years of the recovery. In the generation following World War II prosperity was broadly shared by nearly everyone in the economy, but all that began to change in the late 1970s.

Over the same period American workers' productivity increased in line with historical norms, but a new paradigm held in how those increases translated to wage gains:

 

As these few charts demonstrate, the country underwent significant economic distributional changes over the period that shifted incomes and wealth at the top into the stratosphere while those of the remaining 99% remained essentially stagnant.

As David Cay Johnston reported in 2013:

The average increase in real income reported by the bottom 90 percent of earners in 2011, compared with 1966, if measured at one inch, would extend almost five miles for the top 1 percent of the top 1 percent.

And that

In 2011 the average AGI [adjusted gross income] of the vast majority fell to $30,437 per taxpayer, its lowest level since 1966 when measured in 2011 dollars. The vast majority averaged a mere $59 more in 2011 than in 1966. For the top 10 percent, by the same measures, average income rose by $116,071 to $254,864, an increase of 84 percent over 1966.

A 2013 paper by Pavlina R. Tcherneva of Bard College noticed another disturbing distributional trend:

 

The graph shows the remarkable and unstoppable trend of income gained during expansions going increasingly to the top 10%. Amazingly the trend is so strong that during the 2009-2012 expansion the bottom 90% actually lost income, while the top 10% gained more than all the new income.

The story is much the same for wealth measures. As a recent study reported with just a little hyperbole, "The Top 10% of White Families Own Almost Everything." In the so-called "ownership society" real wealth - not income - is heavily skewed towards the top. The top one percent of wealth holders control 75% of all wealth. The bottom 50% share just two percent of the nation's wealth.

 

There is also a racial component to wealth disparities.

 

The think tank Demos reported in 2014:

The median white family has a net worth of $134k. The median Hispanic family has a net worth of $14k. The median black family has a net worth of $11k.

Whites hold an extremely disproportionate amount of the national wealth. Whites are also the largest racial group. Consequently, whites own almost all of the wealth in the nation:

 

In written form these statistics are alarming, but no more so than for the deleterious real life effects of these disparities for those on the short end of the stick.

As we shall see, the conservatives' successful redefinition of the word “Freedom” into an almost purely economic context has proved nearly meaningless for the bottom tiers in income and wealth distribution. For them other kinds of freedom might have more meaning: freedom from poverty, or freedom from worries created by the rentier society - freedom from the worry of going bankrupt if you get ill.

The levers of power

So it is undisputed that beginning in the late 1970s the United States began a great economic and political turning.

In their book Winner Take-All Politics, authors Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson take note of the economic decline of most Americans and the rise of economic inequality over the past 40 years. They sought to find out who had turned the US into a virtual plutocracy and how they had done it. They weren't specifically looking for the conservative movement, but they found it.

As Hacker and Pierson write, various explanations exist in popular discourse to account for our current economic predicament. One big question has been whether what has happened is organic and intrinsic to capitalism (and, implicitly, the best we can do), or whether government policy has played a large role.

A common intrinsic argument made by economists is that rapid technological change has placed a high value on education and separated the very wealthy from the rest of us. Hacker and Pierson, however, disagree, arguing that "Skill-based Technological Change, is at most a modest accomplice."

Instead, they document how [emphasis added] the "...roots of the winner-take-all economy...lie in the political transformations of the 1970s."

This is a very big claim to make, but Hacker and Pierson make a convincing argument. Their main construct is what they call the conservatives' 30 Year War, which they date to the 1970s, a period when the nascent conservative philanthropy movement was just getting started. The 30 Year War [but not the war] ends just as the Olin Foundation was declaring victory and closing its doors in 2005.

Now correlation is not causation, and there are other factors in play for the given time period, but it is no coincidence that the rise of conservative philanthropy was concurrent with a period of increasingly severe income and wealth inequality and the unleashing of corporations from regulation. The changes obviously represent the success of the conservatives.

It is clear from scholarship on and about the conservatives that they made the changes happen on purpose, to enrich themselves and increase their power, with the intent to dispossess and pressurize ordinary citizens. History was on their side, since more egalitarian periods of American history are more the exception than the rule. A resurgence of plutocratic or oligarchic paradigms is somewhat a reversion to the mean.

The philanthropists did not act alone - business and corporate spending on politics and lobbying also increased radically during the period. Importantly for their political impact, in the 1980s the conservatives were able to bring right wing religion on board their movement.

Hacker and Pierson go on to show that it was government policy that had over the past 45 years served to increase inequality:

1) "...government is doing much less to reduce inequality through taxes and benefits at the very top of the income ladder."

2) "...a large number of new laws that greatly exacerbate inequality have been created..."

3) "...what we call 'drift' -- systematic, prolonged failures of government to respond to the shifting realities of a dynamic economy."

So it's clear that government policy played a large, if not the largest, role in creating today's social and economic conditions. Beginning in the late 1970s conservatives put in place an elaborate and well-funded, long-term plan to both gain control of government, and supply the policy and its advocacy once elected. Their focus on these areas proves their potency, and that, in theory at least, government policy could be used to do the opposite - ameliorate economic and social conditions.

Time to celebrate

By the aughts it wasn't just the Olin Foundation that was declaring victory - other of its allies also celebrated their victories in the 30 year war.

One of those gatherings had occurred three years earlier, in 2002, at a conference of conservative foundations in New York City, where The American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner had been invited to play a liberal foil.

The pre-dinner panel, titled Philanthropy, Think Tanks, and the Importance of Ideas, featured the heads of four top conservative philanthropy-sponsored think tanks: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute and the Manhattan Institute.

During the panel Roger Hertog, a center-right philanthropist, described how the conservative philanthropies were changing history (emphasis added):

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 Counter-Establishment

Though the conservatives eventually waged campaigns in every important sector of society, writers and reporters of the period first began to take notice of the nascent movement's new intellectuals and their institutional homes. The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, penned by Sidney Blumenthal in 1986, is subtitled "From Conservative Ideology to Political Power."

The counter-establishment had an important role to play not just in providing the intellectual underpinning of an entire movement, but also in attempting to take over public institutions of all types. Sometimes when they were stymied from gaining control over an existing social institution they would instead create alternative, parallel organizations in an attempt to weaken or destroy the existing one; or, if their power wasn't sufficient for that, at least create schism within the sector to create chaos and ineffectiveness. This is the path they took, for example, with the mainline protestant religions.

Blumenthal described the counter-establishment's origins in a small but highly ideological group that remained on the American Right after their movement's nearly mortal wounds suffered in the 1930s and 40s. Many conservatives had been isolationists and opponents to government in the run-up to World War II; some had been openly friendly to the Germans, and American companies supplied key elements to German industry and military production. Being wrong on so many things with such disastrous consequences had reduced their ranks to what Blumenthal calls "The Remnant." Today, conversely, being wrong on such important issues seems to have no effect on the reputations on the conservatives.

Through the 1950s the Remnant was a small but persistent minority on the Right. Deals had been made about the nation's social contract. Trade Unionism was a broadly accepted reality within the corporate sector. This consensus held until the early 1960s when a group of radicals within the Republican Party secured the presidential nomination for Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who lost in a landslide to President Lyndon Johnson. But out of the ashes of that campaign began a rebirth of hard core conservative ideology and power, fueled by societal changes of the time.

Blumenthal identified the key people who ended up leading this movement in the 1970s and 1980s as the "New Class," a group of think-tankers and other ideologues with sinecures at think tanks, universities, media shops and foundations.

Most of the New Class institutions were funded by a handful of rich philanthropies, including the Olin, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Coors, Scaife Family, Sarah Scaife, Claude Lambe [controlled by Scaife], Charles Koch, David Koch and the Smith Richardson foundations. Four of those foundations - Bradley, Scaife, Smith Richardson and Olin - were collectively known as the "Four Sisters" because of their coordinated giving.

Beginning in the 1980s the conservatives initiated an explosion in both the number of conservative philanthropy sponsored institutions and the members of the New Class who inhabited them. Over that period hundreds of new think tanks, media institutions, legal organizations and other political outfits - nearly all incorporated as charities - were opened. That flood of money and political power encompasses a large part of the engine of Hacker and Pierson's 30 Year War.

Other authors weren't so generous of the movement's methods, including John S. Saloma III who had a slightly different take on the New Class in his 1984 book titled “Ominous Politics: The New Conservative Labyrinth.” In his introduction Saloma presciently states:

The new “conservative” network is self-righteously ideological: it links together and coordinates neo-conservaives, neo-liberals, military-corporate interests, the disciples of the Social Darwinism which was discredited a century ago, rapt irredentists of the Confederacy who still cling to the fantasy of states' rights, and the religious and moral fundamentalists who are confident that they represent the will of God.

One peculiar aspect of the ascendant conservatism was their feeling as an embattled minority, even at times when they controlled all the branches of the federal government. Self-proclaimed conservative writer Alan Crawford wrote in his 1979 book, Thunder On the Right: The New Right and the Politics of Resentment, that there was "almost no relevant right wing organization in America.”

The heart-felt notion of Republicans feeling like an embattled minority persisted through the 1980s, 90s, and 00s, even though by 2001 they had a near total lock on the federal government, controlling the House, Senate, White House, much of the Judiciary and a large part of the traditional media.

Crawford had also warned that what he called the New Right was distinguished by its intent to use non-profit organizations for political ends. Philanthropists like Richard Mellon Scaife used his funding and connections to perform essentially hostile takeovers of existing conservative organizations in order to politicize them. According to Crawford, it didn't take long for a well-oiled machine to evolve:

By the 1970s, the Right had been transformed into an institutionalized, disciplined, well-organized and well-financed movement of loosely knit affiliates.

Crawford's list of organizations and people involved in this movement includes a surprising number who survive in our political / media landscape to this very day. It includes organizations like Young Americans for Freedom (now the Young America's Foundation), the Heritage Foundation, the Washington Legal Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation (now FreedomWorks), and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Leaders of the movement in the 1970s and 80s included Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors, Irving Kristol, Richard A. Viguerie, Paul Weyrich, Patrick J. Buchanan, Phyllis Schafly and Jerry Falwell. Most of those people have now passed on, but there is no shortage of others to pick up their batons.

The plan: The Powell Memo

The consensus blueprint for the 30 Year War was written by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell in a 1971 letter to the US Chamber of Commerce, a document now know as The Powell Memo, or the Attack on America memo.

When Powell wrote his famous rant the suggestions contained within it were mere wishes, "Blue-skying" in the words of the chamber itself. It was a maximalist, paranoid strategic document laying out how, in theory and practice, business could regain the reins on the US polity that they had lost in the 1930s.

Powell was optimistic about the ultimate fate of his soup-to-nuts project because of the huge reservoir of untapped money and power held by American business.

That sector of America had previously bought into the postwar status quo of labor rights and a social contract, in exchange for labor peace in the nation's factories, and acquiescence in Washington's larger plans. No less than Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower had expressed his support of this social/economic order. As a result business up until the 1970s had, relative to today's activities, sat out the larger political fights.

When this latent power was finally brought to bear on the American polity in a systematic, strategic and long-term plan it succeeded in ways that probably would have astonished most of those who had dreamed it up.

The conservative philanthropies perhaps wouldn't be such a powerful force if there existed analogous philanthropies on the left. The problem is that there are very few liberal philanthropies, for good reasons. An extremely wealthy individual or corporation would have to literally campaign against the very system that created their fortune in the first place. While there are a few of those kinds of egalitarian and enlightened people and entities, the vast majority of wealthy individuals and corporations tend to support wholeheartedly the agenda of the conservative philanthropies.

It's “Dance with the one who brought you.” It takes a unique kind of person to get rich off a system, and then turn around and say that system has some big problems that are hurting people.

Though the conservatives claim that some of the larger, traditional philanthropies such as the Ford, Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations were and are vanguards of a liberal takeover, that wasn't and isn't really true. These foundations were and are actually very centrist, and would never get involved in economic advocacy aimed at taking on inherited wealth or corporate power. As just one example, before and during the 30 Year War some of these philanthropies actually participated in various kinds of operations with the Central Intelligence Agency.

So-called "liberal" giving by these philanthropies is largely targeted at environmental and human rights issues, such as Gay rights. None of these philanthropies advocates the overthrowing of the US economic order of extreme capitalism. Very few become involved in media issues as the conservative philanthropies do.

None advocates, for example, single payer health care to insure all Americans. As one liberal critic of the giant centrist foundations has noted, these philanthropies in the main help to ameliorate some of the worst by-products of gloves-off capitalism, i.e. feeding the poor, housing the homeless and providing health care to those in need. They don't go after the very causes of these problems because that would mean advocating for basic changes in a system that created the very wealth they are distributing. And by smoothing over catastrophic human carnage created by capitalism they make it more palatable to citizens who might otherwise demand systemic change.

So while the existing centrist philanthropies refused to engage in conversations about faults, for example, in the capitalist system, the new philanthropies of the Right are specially designed primarily to strengthen the prerogatives of money and corporations. They pursue their goals quite openly and with political intent, even though as tax-exempt charities they are theoretically not allowed to engage in substantial political activity.

Launching Conservative Philanthropy

At the onset of the 30 Year War business began to bring this new money and power to bear, initially in the creation of political committees, think tanks and lobbying shops. A significant share of the money went to help conservative philanthropies create a new and novel right wing political/ social/ intellectual/ religious infrastructure aimed at influencing most sectors of American life.

The dominant philanthropies during the period mostly came from inherited wealth, with the families usually having suffered some significant indignity despite their possession of great wealth. The Coors family, for example, had suffered blistering labor troubles over the years at their beer brewing plants and other industries in Colorado. The result was that an inheritor of the family fortune became a key aggressor in the 30 Year War. Others of the pioneer conservative philanthropies were born out of political, economic and social battles that left permanent scars on the family line.

Some philanthropies merely accurately represented the economic and political interests of the benefactors. John M. Olin, the scion of a chemical and ammunition corporation, created the philanthropy which bore his name and that was a major leader in the 30 Year War.

The Koch brothers of Wichita actually had both motivations – their father had helped the Soviet Union in the 1930s learn how to refine oil, an action he sought to atone for until he died. But the Koch's businesses – mainly oil, timber and refining – are subject to the power of state and federal government regulation, and thus they are invested in shaping the nation's – and the nation's politicians – views on regulation and taxation.

For the Kochs, who are today [2014] together worth $80 billion, a $300 million investment in shaping attitudes and underwriting political campaigns can result in tens of billions of dollars in increased profits for their companies. As an added benefit, the money spent by their philanthropies is tax-exempt.

Adding it up

Defining conservative philanthropy, while central to this book's thesis, is a difficult thing. In many respects conservative philanthropy is a self-selecting movement. Most of the philanthropies studied in this book share relations of various kinds, including funding each other, sitting on each other's boards of directors and working for a funder or a recipient organization. The movement has even created organizations to facilitate coordinated activity at both the state and national levels.

The question therefore of exactly how much money conservative philanthropies have spent over the past 45 years is a complicated and subjective task. Deciding which philanthropies to include is itself a form of bias; then there are the sometimes limited life spans of a given philanthropy, the varying amounts of money handed out over various lengths of time, the conditions of the philanthropies' investments over those years, and other confounding factors. Most of the conservative philanthropies also do not limit their giving only to conservative movement institutions, so deciding which grants to include or not can be an inexact pursuit.

The Media Transparency database of 38 funders shows the total given from 1985 through 2006 as $3.4 billion. Even if half that money went for non-ideological purposes it would still represent a $1.7 billion investment over a period of 21 years, or about $80 million a year. And that's from only 38 funders.

At their 2002 conference a key leader of the movement cited a figure of $70 million per year as the conservatives' level of investment. A more comprehensive figure from the National Center for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP), a liberal umbrella group, titled their 1999 report $1 Billion for Ideas: Conservative Think Tanks in the 1990s. That breaks down to $100 million per year, just for think tanks, which seems a little high. But by 2013 just one institution, the American Enterprise Institute, took in $45 million, spent $31 million, and had assets of almost $200 million.

In the aughts philanthropies such as the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation joined the conservative philanthropies in investing heavily – north of $3 billion – into education projects to promote charter schools, testing, breaking up schools, pressurizing teachers and an escalation of technology and data usage.

Failing upward

Any enterprise that spends billions of dollars over multiple decades chasing ideological ends will no doubt experience a degree of grift, graft and failure. While the New Class and the conservative philanthropies have achieved, to one degree or another, their original aims, those very things they view as successes might be viewed very differently outside the movement.

Failures in this realm come in many different flavors, from micro to macro, individual to an entire movement, domestic and foreign policy failures, mendacity versus honest mistakes. Somewhat paradoxically, one person or organization can embody many modes of failure through their own success.

Economics

Obviously the biggest failures of the conservative philanthropists, as shown above, are in the economic realm. Here again, their successes have inevitably led to failure and degradation for nearly everyone who isn't part of the one percent.

Their victories include pervasive deregulation, decimation of trade unionism, a large increase in industrial sectors dominated by just a few players (monopolies), privatization of government services, under-investment in national infrastructure, concentration of the largest mass media properties into a very few hands, facilitating international trade, and a program of austerity, obedience, and religiosity for the poor and the left behind.

Much of this economic failure comes as a result of following conservative ideologues such as Milton Friedman, whose counter-intuitive argument that the financial sector works just fine regulating itself has resulted in two waves of deep recessions in the past 25 years, and the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression. Other seemingly crazy economic theories have contributed as well.

Arthur Laffer, who coined the so-called “Laffer theory,” argued that if taxes were cut government revenues would increase. He got this idea from President John Kennedy's chief financial adviser, University of Minnesota Economics Professor Walter Heller. But Heller had made a much subtler argument than Laffer – he wrote that tax cuts will only boost the economy when it is coming out of a recession, and if marginal tax rates are historically high, as they were in the early 1960s.

Neither of those preconditions were true when Laffer was advising President Reagan and the Democratic congress in the early 1980s. So, quite predictably, tax cuts enacted on his expertise created budget deficits so large that by 1982 President Reagan, that saintly Republican icon, was signing the largest tax increase in since 1962.

Laffer turned out to be wrong about his central premise, but his theories had nevertheless led to tax-cutting that caused government funding shortfalls, which in turn led to the defunding of social programs that disproportionately served the poor and middle class.

Like other failures in the conservative movement, Laffer's wrongness did not kill his career, or his ideas' potency in political discourse. Today his ideas live on in economic policy circles where so-called “dynamic scoring” justifies increasing projections on tax revenues based on tax-cutting. He still writes columns for newspapers, appears in the broadcast financial media, and generally does not suffer reputational problems. He is perversely seen as an economics expert – it's not for nothing that economics is called the “dismal science.”

DOW 36,000

Another case of economic flim-flam was perpetrated by two career think-tankers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Kevin Hassett and James Glassman. The two published a book in 1999 titled “DOW 36,000,” based on the novel economic theory that stocks and bonds, counter-intuitively, bear an equal amount of risk, and thus stocks were greatly undervalued.

In the words of the Washington Post's Wonkblog: “If you followed this book's advice in 1999, you may have lost a lot of money.” When the book came out the DOW sat at about 11,000; three years later the index would be off by about a third, at 7,300. Hassett and Glassman had written that the index would soon triple.

You'd be pardoned for thinking that Hassett and Glassman must have been hounded out of the pundit class. But, again, you're probably just as likely to see or hear from the two today as in 1999. If the wrongness serves the right interests it is highly rewarded.

Core strategy: reducing the power of unions

Another area of success for the conservative philanthropists has been minimizing and in some cases eliminating the power of unions within the US marketplace, and around the world. By the beginning of 2013 headlines like this one in the New York Times had become commonplace: “Share of the Work Force in a Union Falls to a 97-Year Low, 11.3%.”

 

The effects of the decline of unions are felt in ripples across society. One strong correlate is a concomitant drop in share of national income for the Middle Class, which has dropped in tandem with the decline in union membership, as shown in the chart above.

Unsurprisingly, as another primary goal of the conservatives is to shift income upward, over roughly the same time frame the share of income going to the top one percent has skyrocketed:

 

In a clever strike at public unions, in the 1980s the conservatives launched a an attack against public schools and public school teachers.

This approach simultaneously served a number of conservative purposes, including weakening one of the few unionized sectors left in American labor, exposing $800 billion in public funding to private profit, and the partial defunding of the Democratic Party.

Under the misleading banner of “school choice” the conservatives were able, over time, to bring in many Democratic and liberal lawmakers and pundits, making the attacks on public education one of the only truly bipartisan issues in Washington.

This assault on public-sector unions might have been foreseen as inevitable given the low numbers of union penetration in private business.

Conservative ideology: Counter-intuitive nonsense

Mainstream conservative ideology, in particular, has failed in numerous and consequential way; some are monstrous, such as the AEI's Charles Murray's 1993 book The Bell Curve, which preposterously claimed to scientifically show that Blacks are genetically intellectually inferior to other races. Murray put a new spin on Darwinian sociology – since Blacks were not up to par, we needed to put them to work in menial jobs!

Charles Murray is a specialist in Right Wing counter-intuitive narratives that just happen to serve those in power. The Bell Curve, for example, told majority elites that their racism was not, in fact, racism, but just a normal reaction to the low intelligence of Blacks.

A decade earlier Murray had told another counter-intuitive tale that reverberates in popular and political culture to this very day. His 1984 book, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980, argued that social welfare programs designed to help the poor and disadvantaged actually hurt those populations by making them dependent on government largess.

Again, Murray argued in scientific terms that sounded perfectly reasonable, citing statistics and studies, until you took a hard look at his evidence and reasoning. A deep dive into Murray's actual argument in Losing Ground revealed a pastiche of dissembling, misuse of statistics, ignoring of confounding factors, and fallacious logic. The book's title itself is actually a gross exaggeration of the studied subject as Murray only examined a tiny sliver of actual government social policy.

But the logical absurdity of Murray's argument played almost no part in the public reaction to his book – which was credulous enough to make him a policy star. To this day Murray's argument about government social policy can be heard and read in political and social discourse, and not just among Republicans.

Three years before the legislative passage of President Bill Clinton's radical restructuring of welfare in America, the president acknowledged that Murray's writings had heavily influenced his thinking: “He [Murray] did the country a great service. I mean, he and I have often disagreed, but I think his analysis is essentially right. ...” So despite Murray's writings being fraudulent, a Democratic president was agreeing with his thesis and implementing radical social policy based on it.

The Neocons

In foreign policy the conservative philanthropies and their sponsored institutions have spread havoc and misery literally across the planet. Using additional money from the military industrial complex, and acquiescence from liberal interventionists, the conservatives created a new branch of foreign policy advocacy and research who were dubbed the Neoconservatives, or Neocons.

This relatively small group of organizations and people – originally led by Democratic hawks - grabbed control of the Washington Foreign Policy establishment beginning in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and they still hold significant sway all the way through the Barack Obama Administration.

That is an incredible accomplishment given their utter lack of morals, mercenary attitude, criminality, and, most importantly, record of almost complete failure. No less than the American Conservative magazine noted in 2014 that “To be a Neocon in 21st-century America is truly never to be held accountable for one’s errors.”

The Neocons have engineered American military and covert interventions around the world. From the invasion of Grenada to the creation of the contras in Nicaragua to our disastrous invasion of Iraq the Neocons have been the behind the scenes guiding hand. They are especially adept at avoiding responsibility for their actions, moving back and forth from their think tanks, to the government, to private business, tainting the institutions they once belonged to.

Neocon think-tankers from the American Enterprise Institute staffed the secretive Office Of Special Plans (OSP) in the Bush White House, where they cherry-picked intelligence in order to make a bogus case for war on Iraq in 2003. Later a prominent military historian called that war the most foolish in 2,000 years, one that the US and the world will be paying the price for for many years. One of those men, Douglas Feith, was called the "the stupidest fucking guy on the face of the planet" by US General Tommy Franks.

John Lott: The dog ate my homework

Another conservative think-tanker, John Lott, toured the country in the aughts touting his counter-intuitive “research” showing that places that relaxed gun laws had less crime. When asked to produce the actual research Lott said it had been lost in a computer crash. Nevertheless many states loosened firearms restrictions based on his claim. In some states Lott actually showed up to testify in front of the legislatures. But reality has a way of catching up with grifters, and in 2014 a definitive study of the relationship between gun laws and crime was published by Stanford University, showing, oddly enough, that if you weaken gun laws you get more crime.

From 30 Year War to perpetual war

The chapters ahead describe those failures in depth, as well as many others. Most of the perpetrators of these fiascoes not only paid no price for their failures, but are still sitting in their offices with their sinecures making new plans to further enrich the wealthy and remove constraints on businesses and corporations. They regularly show up in the popular media.

In the 1970s the conservatives committed to the long view, funding advocacy in nearly every sector of American life. Their persistence, along with a refusal to view short-term setbacks in pessimistic terms has paid dividends for their tribe in riches and policy successes that they hardly dreamed possible when movement godfather William E. Simon penned his seminal A Time For Truth, or when future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell circulated his call to arms for the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971.

The effects have been a 45-year long trail of mayhem and disarray, creating or exacerbating schisms in politics, economics, religion, foreign relations, education, the law – virtually every important sector of America.

Threat to democracy

The combination of philanthropic, business, and corporate power has presented a threat to democracy, as the pure power of wealth in a mass society exerts its will against the great majority.

A hidden key to this power has been the use of tax-exempt monies by philanthropies which have obvious political intent, which is theoretically against US tax law. But neither of our political parties will do anything about this because the Democrats use the same subterfuges and tax dodges, though with far fewer resources and notably less strategizing and cooperating. It is yet another way the two parties cement themselves as the only political choices available.

Since conference of tax-exempt status is dependent upon the IRS ruling that an organization is non-partisan, media lazily view such institutions as impartial, rarely delving into the large web of partisan support which looms behind them. One famous media analyst once called this phenomena News From Nowhere.

Given the steady flow of philanthropic and business dollars to the conservative side of the 30 Year War and the obvious lack of accountability for their actions we can no doubt look forward to many more failures in coming years. And there's not an obvious solution to the conservative's skillful skirting of non-profit tax law, despite their obvious political intent.

One commentator recently said that the conservatives deliberately set out to transfer wealth and political power from the lower and middle classes to the upper classes, and they've succeeded wildly.

Ideological combat in the Internet Age

And so as we look upon the landscape of early 21st century United States, we see a nation deeply transformed from what existed just a few short decades earlier. We've come a long way since 1971 when a Republican President - Richard Nixon - offered a plan for mandatory employer-provided health insurance, and created the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Supreme Court Justices who were considered moderate and nominated by Republicans in the 1970s are now considered the most liberal on the court. The shift was accomplished in no small part by a laser-like focus of conservative philanthropy on the justice system. Indeed, membership in the movement legal organization the Federalist Society is akin to the secret handshake for becoming a Bush administration lawyer.

Today, however, there are forces at work that may serve to mitigate the conservative philanthropies' influence, including the advent of the Internet, the creation of a few more liberal think tanks, and a growing media infrastructure built upon the Internet.

Though the new Left infrastructure receives only a fraction of the money that goes to the Right's institutions, it has nonetheless helped to level messaging capabilities.

Some of the out sized influence of the Internet Age's new Left can be attributed to the gross imbalance in support that existed, and still exists, between the Left and Right.

Going from a world of one-to-many mass media controlled by six corporations to the openness of many-to-many communication on the World Wide Web has blunted (somewhat) the political power of money and television. It is no surprise the Right has struck back at this new opening for the Left by using its control of the justice system to enact rulings like Citizens' United, which unleashed a wave of dark corporate and personal money on the political system.

Today we take for granted new media forms that have emerged to take advantage of open networking, such as blogs or non-profit news sites. There are also group blogs, on-line reports from various sources, and aggregators to make sense of it all.

Conversely the Right has always had enough resources to publicize its case, so the lowering of the cost of transmission only freed up money to spend on other things, all the while keeping their basic structure intact.

Now that the Left has finally joined the War of Ideas, as one wag calls the 30 Year War, albeit in an underfunded and less ideological way than the Right, the conservative philanthropies at least don't have the field to themselves.

The conservatives' institutional structure – top down, coordinated, well-funded, diverse yet focused – is very different than the new Left structure, which is diffuse, mildly connected, and more organic. Both approaches have their appeals in political calculations. This is the story of how the conservatives built their structure that transformed our country.