Discovery Institute for Public Policy

Seattle, WA

The Conscience of an (ex-)Conservative

A blow-by-blow report of a dissolution of a political marriage

Leaving an organization can be hard. Leaving a movement, harder. And leaving an idea — unless you realize that the movement has deserted the idea, and that it’s time to say so — traumatic.

The proximate cause of my recent departure from Discovery Institute, Seattle’s main conservative think tank, was my opposition to President Bush’s Iraq war. But I also left because I could no longer abide the purposes of the movement. Over the last several years, I’ve become sadly convinced that American conservatism has grown, for lack of a better word, malign. Not exactly a congenial conclusion for someone who started out with Goldwater in ’64 and ended up writing defense memos for Steve Forbes in 2000...

...A conservative philanthropist once told me that he found the task of getting conservatives to talk with, let alone support each other, akin to herding cats. Christian paleocons, the Bill Buckley/ National Review crowd, didn’t always coexist peaceably or productively with Jewish former-Marxist neocons, or urbane Easterners with polyester Sun Belt self-satisfieds whose reading consisted of the Bible and the Neiman- Marcus catalogue, not necessarily in that order. And there was always a darker side to this particular force — segregationists, Birchers, militias, homophobes and male supremacists (words I do not use lightly), plus the "Christ died so we could tell you what to do" brigades...

...Michael Joyce, former president of the Bradley Foundation, once gave a speech calling on conservative philanthropies to start funding conservative poets, novelists, artists, composers. To my knowledge, nothing ever happened, except perhaps some prunelike pittances for "defense of the canon of Western civilization."

...Not for nothing did Russell Kirk, author of The Conservative Mind, contend as late as 1989 that conservative thought began with Edmund Burke and ended with T. S. Eliot. All else, as [Michael] Lind points out, consists of a few overpaid "stars" and a supporting plethora of more or less penurious drones, wannabes and hacks.

I agree, not least of all because I’ve watched the same people in the same think tanks turning out the same studies for decades...

...So what went wrong with conservatism? A complex question amenable to a simple answer. It went wrong because it failed and it succeeded. Culturally, it failed utterly to march the country back to an idealized past that never existed. Politically, it failed to implement its traditional agenda.

But it also succeeded. It became Important. Until Reagan, until Gingrich, until the big-money think tanks and media stars, conservatism saw itself as, and was, a minority movement. It still is. But that minority now disposes of a high- viz elite, serious cash and real power.

Power corrupts. It corrupts especially when you’ve got it, but can’t seem to accomplish what you set out to do, and you’ve jettisoned your ideals somewhere along the way, but can’t quite face the fact...

...There’s a curious new form of cultural separatism, centered on the Washington, D.C.–based Free Congress Foundation, the kind of outfit that attempts to discern God’s will on Amtrak privatization. They call it "cultural independence," opting out via home-schooling, alternative churches, their own media and building a Suburb on a Hill to which they can repair until the rest of the country gets its mind right and decides to be like them.

There’s a bodacious renascence of religious right and other movements determined to "use the war to take back the culture." Local exemplar: Toward Tradition and its new "American Alliance of Christians and Jews," given to producing National Review Online articles entitled "The Seeds of War...and the good things that will be born of it" and press releases gleefully tabulating the number of times George W. Bush uses the word "evil."

...It’s almost enough to make me head left...were the Democrats not (to borrow from New York Times columnist Frank Rich) "clueless in defeat," "farcically mired in the past" and cursed with "a lack of seriousness" and "soullessness."

Read the full report >

Jodi Wilgoren
NY Times
August 20, 2005

Bill Gates Funding Intelligent Design Center

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/national/21evolve.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=0bd235262066da5c&hp&ex=1124683200&partner=homepage

Politicized Scholars Put Evolution on the Defensive

..the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provides $1 million a year to the Discovery Institute

Chris Mooney
American Prospect
August 9, 2005

Inferior Design

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10084

In late September, a contemporary Scopes trial gets under way in Pennsylvania. For the right, it’s been 39 years in the making

On September 26, an event that the national media will surely depict as a new Scopes trial is scheduled to begin. Hearings will commence in a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district over its decision to introduce “Intelligent Design,” or ID, into its biology curriculum...

That movement’s [ID] home base is Seattle’s Discovery Institute, whose attempt to lead a speciﬁcally intellectual attack on evolution -- one centered at a think tank funded by wealthy extreme conservatives and abetted by sympathetic Republican politicians -- epitomizes how today’s political right has developed a powerful infrastructure for battling against scientiﬁc conclusions that anger core constituencies in industry and on the Christian right.

NY Times
July 8, 2005

Leading Cardinal Redefines Church's View on Evolution

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/09/science/09cardinal.html?ei=5094&en=c1d22e12f70c2ef1&hp=&ex=1120968000&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print

VP of Discovery Institute urged Cardinal to write op-ed

Bruce Chapman, the [Discovery] institute's president, said the cardinal's essay "helps blunt the claims" that the church "has spoken on Darwinian evolution in a way that's supportive."

But some biologists and others said they read the essay as abandoning longstanding church support for evolutionary biology.

"How did the Discovery Institute talking points wind up in Vienna?" wondered Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, which advocates the teaching of evolution. "It really did look quite a bit as if Cardinal Schönborn had been reading their Web pages."

Walter Gilberti and Joseph Kay
World Socialist Web Site
June 19, 2005

An attack on science: Smithsonian Institution to show film on Intelligent Design

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jun2005/smit-j20_prn.shtml

On June 23, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is scheduled to show a documentary, “The Privileged Planet,” put out by the Discovery Institute. The Seattle-based Discovery Institute is the country’s most prominent advocacy group for the “theory” of Intelligent Design, a quasi-religious teaching that seeks to undermine the science of evolution.

Washington Post
March 13, 2005

Battle on Teaching Evolution Sharpens

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A32444-2005Mar13.html

Propelled by a polished strategy crafted by activists on America's political right, a battle is intensifying across the nation over how students are taught about the origins of life. Policymakers in 19 states are weighing proposals that question the science of evolution...In Seattle, the nonprofit Discovery Institute spends more than $1 million a year for research, polls and media pieces supporting intelligent design.