Reducing government intervention in the private sector has always been a central goal of conservative think tanks, and during the nineties deregulation has become even more of a focus. As their budgets have grown, conservative think tanks have been able to branch into new areas of deregulatory activity. In addition to escalating longstanding attacks on environmental and worker-safety regulations, they have recently concentrated fire on federal laws safeguarding the nation's food and drug supply. For example, in the mid-nineties, the Progress and Freedom Foundation launched a major project aimed at weakening the FDA. Financing this work was at least $400,000 in contributions from drug, biotechnology and medical-device companies.

Following their historic victory in eliminating the federal welfare entitlement, conservative think tanks have begun a vigorous attack on the other main components of the New Deal/Great Society legacy: Medicare and Social Security. Aided by major new infusions of money from the financial services industry, Cato and other conservative think tanks have invested millions of dollars in a sophisticated campaign to privatize Social Security. Among the more influential results of this effort has been the plan put forward last year by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that advocated partial privatization of Social Security along with deep benefit reductions. Meanwhile, other groups like the National Center for Policy Analysis have put enormous resources into developing the Medical Savings Account concept and other ideas for privatizing Medicare. Overall, these efforts reflect stepped-up conservative efforts to do away with universal entitlement programs that have created common cause between the poor and the middle class.

The past few years have seen major new efforts by conservative think tanks to publicize ideas on the Internet. Their Web sites are some of the most extensive and heavily used sites in the entire public policy arena. The National Center for Public Policy Research, an organization with an otherwise low profile, runs an extensive Web site that links together different conservative organizations and bodies of policy analysis. Cato has built a state-of-the-art Web site advocating Social Security privatization. Heritage's Web site receives 100,000 hits a day and is an electronic octopus that now has more than half a dozen separate sites dealing with various policy issues, a vast archive of publications, a large job bank and links to scores of other organizations. Heritage also collaborates with National Review to fund and manage Town Hall, a venture that U.S. News & World Report called the "premiere website on the right," and one that was logging 145,000 hits a day in 1997.

Conservative think tanks have also begun new campaigns to influence politics at the state level. Throughout the nineties, conservatives have strengthened a network of more than fifty state-level conservative think tanks; these institutions are now better funded and more sophisticated than ever before. The most visible include the Heartland Institute in Chicago, the Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives in Pennsylvania, the North Carolina Center for Public Policy Research and the Independence Institute in Colorado. Many of these organizations explicitly pattern their operations after Heritage, producing brief and easily digested materials and focusing heavily on marketing. All of them have moved aggressively to take advantage of the "devolution revolution" in the late nineties by pressing conservative ideas for downsizing government at the state level.

Ultimately, it is impossible to measure the exact role that conservative think tanks have played in bringing about the recent rightward shift in American politics. But to those who play or observe the Washington game, on both left and right, their influence is inescapable--and, most agree, it is rising. Most impressive is the way in which conservative policy entrepreneurs have been so skilled and invested so heavily in marketing their grand story of American politics to the media. If national politics can be seen largely as a contest of broad frameworks, there is little question that conservatives have won this game in recent years.

Today, conservative think tanks are well positioned to consolidate and extend their major policy gains. In terms of resources, there is every indication that the vast funding stream that currently supports the conservative policy infrastructure will continue to grow in the early twenty-first century. Meanwhile, there is still no left-of-center parallel to the critical mass of conservative think tanks operating in the United States today. While progressive philanthropists and liberal foundations have greater financial resources overall than their counterparts on the right, they have proven reluctant to invest heavily in the war of ideas. Instead, the lion's share of these resources are funneled into single-issue advocacy groups and direct-service organizations [see Michael H. Shuman, "Why Do Progressive Foundations Give Too Little to Too Many?" January 12/19, 1998]. New progressive think tanks find it difficult to raise money, and even established ones are invariably underfunded.

It is now beyond dispute that left-of-center funders have made a calamitous strategic blunder by underfunding public intellectuals and policy thinkers. This mistake is profoundly ironic. Who would have ever thought, thirty or forty years ago, that the right would come to believe more deeply in the power of ideas than the left?

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