The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite.

• Author: Alterman, Eric

The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite

When Vaclav Havel appeared before a joint session of Congress last winter to argue the Hegelian point that consciousness precedes being--not the other way around as Karl Marx had posited--he sent many patriotic and politically inspired Americans into a deep depression. How is it, Americans asked themselves, that the Czechs managed to elect this exquisitely brave and eloquent intellectual as their president on their very first try, while we, after 200 years of practice, remain fixated on flag factories and mug shots of Willie Horton?

The answer is that democracy is a much easier notion to pay tribute to--and to cloak one's partisan rhetoric in--than to put into practice. In the United States, many of our central democratic institutions have atrophied almost to the point of nonexistence.

The two works under discussion here approach a part of this problem, and in the absence of any incipient rejuvenation of our political culture on the horizon, they begin to take on a certain immediacy. Specifically, if our politicians' rhetoric is not to be believed ("Read my lips") and Congress's ability to deal with the many complex and politically costly issues before it is not to be trusted, then just who is minding the store? Who makes the rules, and from where do our policies truly derive?

Smith, a former staff member of the Twentieth Century Fund in New York, has written a thoughtful intellectual history of think tanks in which he argues that "public policy has become almost entirely the preserve of the experts, with the idea of 'public debate' merely an anachronistic fiction." Hirsch, a suburban Maryland lawyer, argues instead for the centrality of TV opinion-commentators who, according to him, are "supplanting the newspaper op-ed page as the primary source of the public's exposure to opinion commentary."

Smith has written just about as worthwhile and provocative a book on American public policy think tanks as one could hope for. Of course, given the subject, one could not have hoped for terribly much. Smith traces the history of public policy research from its origins at the turn of the century through the glory days of the appearance of the Heritage Foundation's thousand-plus-page bestseller, Mandate for Leadership, in 1981. Smith provides a sophisticated analysis of many of the ideas which have animated the rise of certain kinds of think tanks, along with useful sketches of a number...