The Trump Debate Inside Conservative Citadels

By Bari Weiss - This is in the Times. Yes it's the whole article. It's a good read. Don't tell anyone I shared it with you.

Last week the venerable Hudson Institute, a think tank founded in the early 1960s by the nuclear game theorist Herman Kahn, invited three speakers to discuss foreign policy. Leon Panetta and David Petraeus, both former C.I.A. directors, fit comfortably in the establishment mold in which Hudson has long operated.

Not so the third speaker, Stephen K. Bannon. Donald Trump’s former chief strategist has proudly declared “war” on the Republican Party establishment. And yet that very establishment had laid down the welcome mat to this self-described “Leninist.”

The event offers a snapshot of the dilemma facing conservative think tanks in the era of Trump: How much should they engage not just with this administration, but with the increasingly powerful Bannon wing of the Republican Party?

Think tanks are chiefly supposed to provide independent expertise to policymakers. But they also seek to be politically relevant. To be relevant, you need access. And, of course, they also must answer to well-heeled donors, like the Mercer family, whose political loyalties are sometimes vehemently pro-Trump.

This reality leaves these institutions with an uncomfortable choice: fellow-travel with Mr. Trump or let the Trump train pass your station and risk diminishing influence in a Washington where he is boss.

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In the past two weeks, I spoke to more than a dozen employees and former employees of the most well-respected think tanks on the center-right: the Manhattan Institute, known for its expertise on local and state policies; the Hudson Institute, the home of foreign-policy heavyweights like David Satter and Walter Russell Mead; the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where researchers are largely focused on Iran, North Korea and terrorism; and the American Enterprise Institute, which defends classical liberalism and free markets.

At each, I found scholars concerned about the following questions: Will the Trumpists capture the principled conservative intellectual establishment in 2017 as easily as they captured the Republican Party in 2016? And should independent scholars at these organizations break ranks over the powerful and growing influence of this president and his allies?

More than nine months into this shambolic presidency, the vast majority of conservatives skeptical of Mr. Trump haven’t broken with their Trump-curious institutions — at least not yet. Most of those who have and spoke to me for this story didn’t want to be identified, citing the fact that they still need to work in Washington.

Sol Stern didn’t have that concern. “I’m 82 years old,” he told me. “I want to say what I believe and feel a little cleaner.”

Last month, Mr. Stern, who’s worked at the Manhattan Institute for more than two decades, tendered his resignation. “This is very important. It’s about the future of our country. It’s about the degradation of language and ideas,” Mr. Stern insisted. He, along with several others I spoke to, felt the think tank and its prestigious publication, City Journal, was acting like Sweden in the face of the Trump threat.

“This now seems to be the only way for me to protest the magazine’s intellectual abdication on the most urgent crisis facing the nation today: the election of an unfit, dangerous man to the presidency, plus the myriad ways in which the forces of Trumpism and Bannonism are tearing the country apart,” Mr. Stern wrote in a resignation letter addressed to Larry Mone, the president of the think tank, and Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Mr. Mone took issue with Mr. Stern’s characterization. “The notion that we’ve stayed on the sidelines through this election and current administration is demonstrably false,” he wrote in an email, pointing me to pieces by Judith Miller, Heather Mac Donald, Steven Malanga and Nicole Gelinas. “When we think the administration is right, we write about it. When we think they are wrong, we write about it.” And unlike some other conservative and libertarian think tanks, which tend to focus on federal policy, since its founding in 1977, the Manhattan Institute and its scholars are looked to for their expertise on subjects such as urban policing and school choice.

But to one journalist previously published by City Journal, that doesn’t justify the way the publication has responded to the Trump presidency. “While City Journal’s desire to sit out the Republican civil war was perfectly understandable, it is not a viable long term option now that Donald Trump is president,” he wrote me. “A political journal in the Trump era” that hardly engages with the president “isn’t like ignoring a 900-pound elephant. It’s like ignoring an invasion from Mars.”

In the broader conservative world, Mr. Stern isn’t alone in making the choice to leave in protest. At The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, nearly every editor and writer of the “Never Trump” persuasion left the paper in the past year, this writer included. George Will did not have his contract renewed at Fox News after his anti-Trump views fell afoul of a network in thrall to the president.

At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election. “The ability to criticize became very limited. We had to be more and more populist and right wing in our views and our analysis,” one former employee told me. He said that the reason was explained clearly by the leadership: “We were told time and time again that for eight years we’ve been out in the wilderness. Now we have an opportunity for access. We can’t pass it up.”

Mark Dubowitz, the chief executive of the foundation and a self-described political independent, acknowledged to me that “after the election, some F.D.D. people wanted to join the ‘resistance.’ ” But that’s not what his organization does, he said. “Our mission has been to provide research and policy options to three administrations to defend American interests and global leadership.”

Access is one reason. Money is another.

Among the biggest donors to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies is Bernie Marcus, the founder of Home Depot and a major Trump supporter. In June 2016, Mr. Marcus wrote an article endorsing Mr. Trump and urging Republicans to get in line: “I have a message for the #NeverTrump crowd: Enough already. Donald Trump is our presumptive nominee and it is time to get over wishing it were not so. If you don’t, change your social media hashtag to #HillaryGOP.”

But it’s very difficult to draw a direct line between pro-Trump donors and the operations of a particular organization. In part that’s because all of the boards of these think tanks are mixed bags when it comes to Mr. Trump.

Take the American Enterprise Institute. Its large board includes Seth Klarman, a well-known anti-Trump billionaire, and Dick DeVos, the billionaire husband of Mr. Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. A number of A.E.I. scholars have joined the Trump administration: Scott Gottlieb is now the commissioner of the F.D.A., and Kevin Hassett is the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. And yet the think tank is also home to Norman Ornstein, a liberal who just co-wrote a book about the danger of the Trump presidency. Though he says he is further to the left than almost all of his colleagues, he said that “I don’t get any sense at all that what they’ve been doing or what they’ve been saying has been shaped in any way by the donors to the institution.”

“I have little doubt that some of our donors rail against me,” he added. “But I’m not told about it. And if anyone in a position of influence here leaned on me politically I wouldn’t be here. I’d leave.”

From the outside, the board of the Manhattan Institute seems similarly diverse: The pro-Trump intellectual Roger Kimball sits alongside William Kristol, a leading Never Trumper. But Rebekah Mercer is also on the board, and several sources described her as “very active.” In his resignation letter, Mr. Stern singled out Ms. Mercer and her billionaire father, calling her “an accomplice in one of the most malignant political movements in the country.”

The Mercers are the key backers of Breitbart News: In 2012 they donated $10 million to the site, which Mr. Bannon has boasted is “the platform of the alt-right.” After Andrew Breitbart’s death later that year, Mr. Bannon took over the site, and under his watch it has become an open sewer of conspiracy theories and barely veiled white nationalism, anti-Semitism and racism. The Mercers also serve as patrons of the former Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos, a man whose views have earned him a proud Nazi salute from Richard Spencer. (Just today, however, Mr. Mercer announced that he was “severing all ties” with Mr. Yiannopoulous, saying he was “mistaken” to have supported him. He also said he was selling his stake in Breitbart to his daughters.)

In his resignation letter, Mr. Stern asked if it made any sense for the Manhattan Institute to make common cause with Ms. Mercer, who Christopher Ruddy, a Trump surrogate and the owner of Newsmax, has called “the first lady of the alt-right.” As he put it: “Shouldn’t we be fighting back in this war, instead of withdrawing from combat or, even worse, providing institutional legitimacy for the bomb throwers?”

For a sense of what it looks like for the bomb throwers to run the joint, one needn’t look far. The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors. Ms. Mercer sits on the board; one source called her “a wrecking ball.” In May, Jim DeMint was ousted abruptly as the think tank’s president in a shake-up largely seen to be driven by Ms. Mercer. At the time, Mr. Bannon’s name was publicly floated as a possible replacement. “Heritage has gotten away from its core function, was to provide top-notch policy research to advise conservative lawmakers. It’s become the de facto arm of Bannonism,” one person close to Heritage told me. In recent weeks, the think tank has hosted the president. The home page of its website boasts: “Donald Trump and many newly elected Republican congressmen promised they’d drain the swamp. And Heritage is here to help them do just that!”

Is the Hudson Institute at risk of capitulating to Trumpism, too? Several fellows I spoke to at the Washington think tank told me they were shocked by Hudson’s recent decision to host Mr. Bannon. “I and a lot of other people were very upset that he was on the same stage as David Petraeus and Leon Panetta,” Ronald Radosh, a historian and an adjunct fellow, told me. “The decision to give a platform, and thereby lend the prestige of Hudson, to a sinister character like Stephen Bannon was an appalling lapse,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a senior fellow. Kenneth Weinstein, the president and chief executive of Hudson, declined to comment.

“Bannon and Trumpism is a definitive threat to the country. The ideology is a dramatic departure from a long American tradition of America being a global leader,” added Mr. Radosh. “Bannon has spoken of wanting an international alliance with all these emerging right-wing populists in Europe. It is a fundamental rejection of liberalism.”

Mr. Stern agrees about the severity of the threat posed by Mr. Bannon and his ilk. “I am convinced that Manhattan Institute will find itself in an untenable situation as the Bannon-Mercer war machine gathers force and attracts more media attention. I hope my action prompts a conversation at the institute about the Mercer-funded assault against traditional conservatism,” Mr. Stern put it in his resignation letter.

Let’s see if it does

I'm not real smart but it seems like this article makes things more complicated and complex than they really are.

of course, as I mentioned, maybe it really is a complex situation that simply glides right over and through my relatively limited level of knowledge and intellect.

It seems to boil down to this. Party over country. These people have spent so long trying to get their horrible policies enacted, that they are willing to sell out the American people in order to get their horrible policies enacted at any price.

InTenSity wrote:It seems to boil down to this. Party over country. These people have spent so long trying to get their horrible policies enacted, that they are willing to sell out the American people in order to get their horrible policies enacted at any price.

yep.

you were accurate and succinct. Which is why you'll never be some pointy-headed pseudo-intellectual who likes to write/participate in really long articles that is designed to be the envy of all of your colleagues at NYC black tie cocktail parties.

Over-generalization helps nobody.  If you want to come out of this mess, you need to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the right who think this shit is just as bad as you do.  The real problem has always been and continues to be money in politics.  But SOME rich folks are perfectly happy with an oligarchy and others less so.  I know a lot of my esteemed colleagues disdain incrementalism, but we need to support those who are less inclined toward robber baron-ism before we can get to representatives that represent their constituents over their financial backers.

In my opinion.  

This is a local fight and needs to take place with your reps.  If all you're doing is posting on the internet, you're useless.

Rocinante wrote:Over-generalization helps nobody.  If you want to come out of this mess, you need to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the right who think this shit is just as bad as you do.  The real problem has always been and continues to be money in politics.  But SOME rich folks are perfectly happy with an oligarchy and others less so.  I know a lot of my esteemed colleagues disdain incrementalism, but we need to support those who are less inclined toward robber baron-ism before we can get to representatives that represent their constituents over their financial backers.

In my opinion.  

This is a local fight and needs to take place with your reps.  If all you're doing is posting on the internet, you're useless.

if only those people on the right could do something about it.

Rocinante wrote:Over-generalization helps nobody.  If you want to come out of this mess, you need to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the right who think this shit is just as bad as you do.  The real problem has always been and continues to be money in politics.  But SOME rich folks are perfectly happy with an oligarchy and others less so.  I know a lot of my esteemed colleagues disdain incrementalism, but we need to support those who are less inclined toward robber baron-ism before we can get to representatives that represent their constituents over their financial backers.

In my opinion.  

This is a local fight and needs to take place with your reps.  If all you're doing is posting on the internet, you're useless.

My reps have been Democratic at a national level, until I moved recently. What can I do? I can only vote in one district.

InTenSity wrote:

Rocinante wrote:Over-generalization helps nobody.  If you want to come out of this mess, you need to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the right who think this shit is just as bad as you do.  The real problem has always been and continues to be money in politics.  But SOME rich folks are perfectly happy with an oligarchy and others less so.  I know a lot of my esteemed colleagues disdain incrementalism, but we need to support those who are less inclined toward robber baron-ism before we can get to representatives that represent their constituents over their financial backers.

In my opinion.  

This is a local fight and needs to take place with your reps.  If all you're doing is posting on the internet, you're useless.

My reps have been Democratic at a national level, until I moved recently. What can I do? I can only vote in one district.

and my representative in a heavily gerrymandered East Lansing district is a knuckle-dragging republican.

if he's one of the folks on the right who is as appalled as I am, maybe I can convince him to work to redraw the district to accurately represent the citizens in and around East Lansing, thereby losing his job, power and access to his mistresses on Capitol Hill.

Otherwise, my US Senators are solid, moral Americans who fight for the good of America.

InTenSity wrote:

Rocinante wrote:Over-generalization helps nobody.  If you want to come out of this mess, you need to acknowledge that there are a lot of people on the right who think this shit is just as bad as you do.  The real problem has always been and continues to be money in politics.  But SOME rich folks are perfectly happy with an oligarchy and others less so.  I know a lot of my esteemed colleagues disdain incrementalism, but we need to support those who are less inclined toward robber baron-ism before we can get to representatives that represent their constituents over their financial backers.

In my opinion.  

This is a local fight and needs to take place with your reps.  If all you're doing is posting on the internet, you're useless.

My reps have been Democratic at a national level, until I moved recently. What can I do? I can only vote in one district.

Of course you can vote in more than one district.

Signed,
Why do you think Democrats opposed voter id / voter roll scrubbing laws

Dr. Strangelove wrote:

InTenSity wrote:
My reps have been Democratic at a national level, until I moved recently. What can I do? I can only vote in one district.

Of course you can vote in more than one district.

Signed,
Why do you think Democrats opposed voter id / voter roll scrubbing laws

Caution: Mainstream Media Link Below

Click Me

Rote hadn’t planned on voting twice but said it was “a spur-of-the-moment thing” when she walked by the satellite voting location, she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Saturday.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote said.

She added she has been a supporter of Donald Trump since early in his campaign, after Republican candidate Mike Huckabee dropped out of the primary race.

and he/she plead guilty in August..

On August 15, 2017, Terri Lynn Rote was sentenced following her guilty plea to Election Misconduct in the First Degree, a Class D Felony. Rote was charged after she was caught voting twice in the 2016 general election.

so, yeah.

Especially when your reps are republicans, you need to find creative ways to call them out. In deep red wyoming we are doing it, and getting some results. Sometimes they are hard to see but citizen action is what has torpedoed the ACA repeal again and again.

Rocinante wrote:Especially when your reps are republicans, you need to find creative ways to call them out.  In deep red wyoming we are doing it, and getting some results.  Sometimes they are hard to see but citizen action is what has torpedoed the ACA repeal again and again.

this is true.

it's easy for the knuckle-draggers to practice immorality when the glow of the public light isn't being shone upon them. So, yes, shine the light.. shame them into doing the right thing.

Robert J Sakimano wrote:

Rocinante wrote:Especially when your reps are republicans, you need to find creative ways to call them out.  In deep red wyoming we are doing it, and getting some results.  Sometimes they are hard to see but citizen action is what has torpedoed the ACA repeal again and again.

this is true.

it's easy for the knuckle-draggers to practice immorality when the glow of the public light isn't being shone upon them. So, yes, shine the light.. shame them into doing the right thing.

The light of righteousness that prevents sexual abuse can also prevent political corruption?

Yay fossil fuels!

Rocinante wrote:

Robert J Sakimano wrote:
this is true.

it's easy for the knuckle-draggers to practice immorality when the glow of the public light isn't being shone upon them. So, yes, shine the light.. shame them into doing the right thing.

The light of righteousness that prevents sexual abuse can also prevent political corruption?

Yay fossil fuels!

sincerely,

Rick Perry
Secretary of Energy
Dancing With the Stars Alumnus

Robert J Sakimano wrote:

Dr. Strangelove wrote:

Of course you can vote in more than one district.

Signed,
Why do you think Democrats opposed voter id / voter roll scrubbing laws

Caution: Mainstream Media Link Below

Click Me

Rote hadn’t planned on voting twice but said it was “a spur-of-the-moment thing” when she walked by the satellite voting location, she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Saturday.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote said.

She added she has been a supporter of Donald Trump since early in his campaign, after Republican candidate Mike Huckabee dropped out of the primary race.

That looks like the doctor lady on MSU football’s sideline.