Those Liberal Think Tanks
Avedon Carol notes that the idea that the Brookings Institution is some sort of haven for left-wingers is more than a little daft. (She is referring to Jonathan Chait's article on liberal blogs in a recent New Republic.)
Let's get this straight: Brookings is "liberal" only in the sense that it conforms to the basic American ideal of a nation whose leaders are elected by the general populace to serve the general populace; that is, it is not trying to overthrow our form of government. It is by charter non-partisan and non ideological within the context of American government. Only if you accept that overthrowing our form of government is "conservatism" can you call them "liberal".
But Brookings is a think tank, by which I mean it does real research and formulates policy based on what is known or hoped to work.
This is very true. But I must note that there was a time—not too long ago—when the Brookings Institution was unafraid to point out that the left wing of American politics was right on many points. To its credit, Brookings has not repudiated what it did, but what it does nowadays along those ends is often limited to continuing to keep some of its backlist on print.
- In 1985, Brookings published Raymond Garthoff's Detente and Confontation, which took a contrarian view of US-Soviet relations, and then published a revised edition in 1994.
- In 1989, Martin Binkin and William Kaufmann wrote a tract on the US Army National Guard and Reserve. The authors wondered about the effects of relying more and more on Guard and Reserve in future conflicts.
- In 1987, Brookings published two books by William Kaufmann that tore to shreds the Reagan administration's defense budget in general (A Reasonable Defense) and naval strategy in general (A Thoroughly Efficient Navy). Endemic to these studies were findings that the peculiarities of defense budgeting rewarded planners for buying weapons programs and undermanning forces.
- And in 1990, Brookings published Kaufmann's Glasnost, Perestroika, and US Defense Spending, which argued that wholesale changes in the Soviet Union meant that the US could cut its defense spending in half by 1995.
Kaufmann and his collaborators were right about the bloated defense budgets of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet today, Brookings issues analyzes of defense budgets that call for measly cuts through incremental improvements in existing procedures. And the Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy Studies, Michael O'Hanlon, is prone to such worthy left-leaning activities as arguing in the Washington Times that it is far too early to leave Iraq, lest the "thugs and ruthless killers" win.
I can see why some might think that the Brookings Institution was liberal in the 1980s and 1990s, but it is hard to see it that way now.
Labels: Brookings Instition, fake liberals, Michael O'Hanlon, Raymond Garthoff, William Kaufmann
