In the same way that medieval kings seized any excuse to invade neighboring countries, today’s politicians perennially seek pretexts to further invade citizens’ lives. And there is never a shortage of intellectuals who, like the courtiers long ago, assure their masters that God – or at least social science – blesses their aggression.
Inside the Washington beltway, it is bad taste to recognize how federal policy is often shaped by the love of power. Experts and activists persistently overestimate the likelihood of successful interventions because of their starry-eyed assumptions about the political class. Because political scientists cannot measure power lust, they leave it out of their equations. This makes everything neat and tidy garbage.
The more power that government amasses, the more intellectual homage it receives. Washington experts constitute a Greek chorus that bestows accolades on the Powers That Be. There are now more than 400 think tanks in the Washington area, some of which offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors.
Oppressive regimes buy good reputations as think tanks become “a muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington,” the New York Times reported in 2014. The Brookings Institution received a windfall from the government of Qatar, which has a dismal human-rights record, to set up a research institute that, according to the Qatari government, would devote itself to “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.”
After an especially tawdry fixed election in 2011, the Kazakhstan government’s image was burnished by two think tanks on its payroll – the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Institute for New Democracies. The Atlantic Council, another prominent D.C. think tank, pockets cash from Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and NATO. The Times noted in 2014 that “since 2011, at least 64 foreign governments, state-controlled entities or government officials have contributed to a group of 28 major United States-based research organizations.”
Washington think tanks proliferated at the same time that federal policies became more hare-brained. Some think tanks are little more than “cash machines for power” for politicians. Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations.
The profusion of think tanks and policy wonks spawn the illusion that ideas drive policy in Washington. But in many cases, ideas are simply pretenses to sanctify the pursuit of power. A president or prominent politician knows he can recite bosh and a bevy of commentators will race to praise his courage and vision. For instance, in a 2016 email to Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chief John Podesta, Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, assured him that she was a “loyal soldier” and that “I would do whatever Hillary [Clinton] needs always.” The Washington definition of “independent thinker” is merely someone without a visible receipt for his opinions.
Some think tanks have been fronts for political operatives. Jack Abramoff, the most powerful lobbyist in Washington during the early years of the George W. Bush administration, placed an aging beach lifeguard at the head of American International Center, a think tank he created to funnel money to himself and his favorite causes. The scam was fruitful until Abramoff’s other machinations won him admission to federal prison.
Newt Gingrich’s boutique think tank, the Center for Health Transformation, pocketed $37 million from healthcare corporations and industry groups before going bankrupt in 2012 after Gingrich’s presidential campaign floundered. Gingrich used his op-eds and speeches to tout positions favored by his think-tank donors and omitted mentioning who was bankrolling his operation.
Think tanks have done nothing to countervail Washington tendencies that conspire against common sense. As the New York Times‘ Mark Leibovich noted, “From the moment Obama secured the Democratic nomination [in 2008], he and his staff were subjected to a frantic frenzy of flattery.” The more applause a politician hears, the more deluded he usually becomes. And the biggest hallucination in Washington is that politicians’ power is a great blessing for America. That assumption would be scoffed at in most places but is greeted with solemn nods in receptions and briefings in the nation’s capital.
The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” showed why, once government acquires vast power, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.” In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, illegal government surveillance, and presidential killing sprees.
Former White House spokesman Bill Moyers observed in 2007: “The further you get away from official Washington, the closer you get to reality.” Rewards go to those who report what politicians want to hear, and political loyalty is infinitely more prized in D.C. than fidelity to facts. As attorney-author Chase Madar observed, “When there is good intel that runs against the political winds, the intel gets politicized. The politics don’t get intelligent.”
For instance, President Obama ignored dire warnings before committing far more soldiers to the Afghan war. Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran noted, “Obama purposely did not read a grim CIA assessment of Afghanistan that found little measurable benefit from the 30,000 ‘surge’ forces Obama eventually approved.”
Bad policies balloon into national catastrophes because politicians ignore bitter realities. In 1967, the Pentagon ordered top experts to analyze where the war in Vietnam had gone wrong. The resulting study contained 47 volumes of material exposing the intellectual and political follies that had already left tens of thousands of Americans dead. After the study was finished, it was distributed to the key players and federal agencies – and completely ignored. At the time the New York Times began publishing excerpts in 1971, “the White House and the State Department were unable even to locate the forty-seven volumes.” New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented at the time that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”
