Postwar business conservatives built think tanks that functioned like political parties without mass support.

Evidence

These business critics of New Deal liberalism supported a wide range of organizations during the 1940s and 1950s. Some of the groups they worked with, like the National Association of Manufacturers, focused on mobilizing businessmen themselves, disseminating antiunion strategies and orchestrating public relations campaigns. Others, like Fred Schwarz’s Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, were populist organizations seeking to educate ordinary citizens about the threat of the far left. But one of the most significant areas of activity for business conservatives in the postwar years was in creating and funding conservative think tanks such as the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the American Enterprise Association (AEA—the organization eventually changed its name to the American Enterprise Institute). These think tanks were devoted to articulating an economic philosophy centered on the idea of the free market and disseminating this vision to intellectual elites—journalists, politicians, businessmen, and academics. Such intellectual organizations were, in a sense, the ideal social technology for business conservatives. Through funding think tanks, the business opponents of the New Deal could bring ideas reflective of their broad political views—not simply their immediate interests—into the intellectual life of the nation, and they could do so regardless of whether or not such ideas could command support in elections or compel a mass-based organization. The partisan think tanks functioned almost like a political party, in terms of developing and refining ideology and relating it to matters of immediate concern. Yet their great strength from the standpoint of the businessmen who funded them was that they were able to operate without any real need for a popular organization. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1440

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the modern think tank as a ‘political party without a popular base’ — how this institutional form, born of postwar business conservatism, now dominates both ends of the spectrum.
• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s law-merchant work on institutions: think tanks emerge to fill an information/reputation function much as private judges did for medieval trade — elites solving coordination without mass politics. — connects to: Conservative foundations funded unorthodox ideas decades before the think tank boom — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free…, 322; Think tanks mobilized citizens to draft government-spending-cut plans — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 585; Neoliberal think tanks were designed to influence elites rather than politicians — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 576 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Eisenhower’s moderate Republicanism drove business conservatives to abandon populist mass campaigns for elite influence #responds-to (0.85) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1458
• Rightwing ideological funding organizations were almost nonexistent in the postwar period #contradicts (0.80) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 250
• Chilean neoliberals founded think tanks to preserve their influence after losing power #exemplifies (0.75) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 1610