Staying Relevant on the Right

Even with Republicans out of power in Washington, the grant makers and groups that gird the conservative political movement are eyeing mostly subtle changes in how they operate, including focusing more on economic research and expanding their political advocacy efforts outside of the nation’s capital. Most say they won’t make wholesale changes in how they drum up support for right-wing causes. Conservative groups vow to remain mostly conservative in their practices in 2009, as they wait for opportunities to reassert their agenda.

“Our strategies for advocating for policies that foster individual freedom and entrepreneurship are long term and remain the same,” says Logan Moore, an administrator at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, in Arlington, Va.

While many groups say they will stick to their principles, they also say they will look to improve how they get their messages out to the public. Some promise to tinker with their fund-raising pitches. (See article on Page 26.)

Others will investigate whether conservatism, troubled by shifting demographics, faces a long-term decline. And a handful of organizations will change their points of emphasis, developing new ways to communicate via the Web, or creating new strategies to challenge liberal and progressive officeholders.

Some think-tank leaderssay that the inauguration of President Obama gives them a chance to do something else: Push the reset button.

“This is the best time in years to talk about first principles, about what we believe in,” says Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington that stresses free-market ideals and scholarly research on foreign policy that usually tilts rightward.

New Lessons

The reordered landscapes of Washington and Wall Street give conservative groups a fresh chance to advocate for their core values, such as a frugal government, keeping regulation of financial markets to a minimum, and protecting the interests of business, even more stalwartly, Mr. Brooks says.

Organizations that focus on social issues, like abortion, education reform, or stem-cell research, will probably intensify their messages to counter moves proposed by a Democrat-dominated government, observers say.

“It’s been said that desperate times make the best times for reasonable men,” Mr. Brooks says. “This is our teachable moment, particularly when it comes to what’s happening financially.”

The national financial meltdown is affecting conservative groups on two fronts. Like all advocacy groups, right-wing and libertarian organizations have suffered downturns in the amount they raise from private sources. Partly in response to the 20-percent to 30-percent reduction in endowment values in a bearish stock market, some private foundations are encouraging conservative and libertarian think tanks to perform new kinds of research and ditch old advocacy programs. Some grant makers, with their coffers dwindling, say they will be more choosy.

“We’ve challenged some organizations to rethink the way they fulfill their missions,” says James Piereson, president of the William E. Simon Foundation, in New York, which has made $33-million in grants, mainly to conservative groups and think tanks, in the past five years. “Certain ideas they’ve put forward in the past, such as the privatization of Social Security, or certain ideas about regulation and markets, just won’t fly now. When they send us grant proposals, we tell them they have to adapt to this new environment.”

Some groups have responded by beginning to look at how to balance concerns about freedom of the markets with the likelihood of increased regulations. “Others are continuing to go along as if nothing ever happened,” says Mr. Piereson. “I think they’ll find it hard to raise funds if they don’t change.”

But groups also say they must now explain and conduct research on where the free market, often the centerpiece of their advocacy goals, has gone wrong.

Rather than offering their usual defense of democratic capitalism and the financial markets that drive it, several groups say they will instruct their scholars to examine the current economic state to see where markets — or perhaps the governments that oversee them — have failed. For example, the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, in New York, will perform more investigations on the national economy this year.

“The current situation, in which we find that free-market fundamentals are in question, means that we’ll have to look deeper at the role government plays in the economy,” says Lawrence Mone, the group’s president. The institute will also do more advocacy work to limit the size of government in New York State, he says, where a budget crisis looms.

Some observers say that groups should develop some intellectual flexibility to deal with the new economic climate.

“The whole concept of a free-market, laissez-faire economy is going to change,” says Scott Talbott, senior vice president for government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a group in Washington that advocates for the financial industry. “We have the government involved in banks and markets, so the idea of an independent market has been weakened. Groups will shift their message to push for more balance in new regulations of the markets. ‘Don’t overregulate and don’t overreact’ — that’s what you’ll hear.”

Already this year, Mr. Talbott’s group has advocated against regulations on credit-card lending designed ostensibly to protect consumers. “We don’t want to see the innovation of the credit market stifled by new legislation,” he says.

The State of the Movement

At the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, leaders have stepped up efforts to hire new financial-regulation experts to help them shape their research. Cato has also encouraged the federal government to rein in spending to bring the economy back, says David Boaz, the group’s executive vice president.

“If we’re returning to the 70s and government programs that help cause stagflation, we may be looking at a different view of what government’s role is,” he says. “One year ago, we were talking about a $100-billion stimulus package. Now, it’s $1-trillion, which is just staggering. If Obama locks down the Bush policies — a bailout of financial institutions, national securitization of banks, plus a huge stimulus package — then we’ll have to respond to that.”

Despite arguments that a central tenet of conservatism — deregulated markets — helped cause the financial system to collapse, Mr. Brooks believes that moderate-to-conservative think tanks should take the lead in detailing how the economic system in the United States should work. “It’s something that we’re good at,” says Mr. Brooks, who adds that scholars within his organization published warnings about impending financial calamity more than five years before the current economic problems emerged.

But others say that groups would do well to reconsider the state of conservatism itself and to ask themselves a big question: Is the movement on the wane?

Some think-tank leaders say that the Obama victory in November should not be viewed as an isolated occurrence, and that conservative groups should do more than fall into their usual ways of thinking.

“Things look like they might not get better for a while,” says William Schambra, director of the Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. As single women, minorities, and professionals — all groups less likely to vote for conservatives — increase as a percentage of the electorate, says Mr. Schambra, these demographic trends present challenges for conservative policies. “The question is, are current conservative institutions able to make inroads among such groups? Or do we need new types of advocacy groups to bring some of them over?”

Leaders at the Cato Institute are engaged in an internal debate over whether Americans have grown less likely to back the think tank’s free-market principles. “Have voters reacted to a bad patch because of a financial crisis and the political situation, or are we seeing a more permanent shift away from the Reagan/Thatcher paradigm? We’ll keep an eye on whether there’s evidence of a shift,” says Mr. Boaz. “Some polls say Americans’ ideology hasn’t changed in eight years.”

Surveys taken during the past decade have consistently shown that Americans are more likely to characterize themselves as conservative than liberal. But polls also suggest that Americans are more likely to maintain liberal stances on a wide variety of issues.

A Push for Changes

Faced with an electorate that may be undergoing a quantum change in how it votes, conservatives should be looking to be more inclusive, some organization leaders argue.

Robert L. Woodson, president of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, a Washington group that seeks to help the poor by encouraging them to tap into the free market and religious organizations, says that the Republican Party must either form new institutions to deal with urban problems or come up with new ways for organizations to take care of them.

“We shouldn’t be recruiting people with our ideology. We should be demonstrating that those ideologies work to improve the lives of people,” says Mr. Woodson, a registered independent who has voted Republican for the past 25 years.

“Conservatives always seem to be in opposition to programs that can help people in need, like when they oppose crack-cocaine sentencing changes,” he says. “What they should be doing instead is being positive by advocating for faith-based programs that work to help people addicted to drugs.”

Without changes, he says, the conservative movement might wither. “Conservatives will never be popular as long as they’re perceived to be against the poor,” Mr. Woodson says.

Shifting Tides

Observers on both sides of the political divide say they can count on conservative think tanks to keep up the fight for their principles, even if many in the movement are demoralized.

“It is important to understand that as discredited and depleted as Republican officeholders are at the moment, the institutional infrastructure on the right is alive and well and ready to take action,” says Rob Stein, founder of the Democracy Alliance, in Washington, a network of liberal think tanks Mr. Stein started after studying the success of conservative groups in shaping the Republican agenda in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.

The number of conservative think tanks mushroomed during that period, thanks in large part to grant makers like Simon, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, the Scaife Foundations, in Pittsburgh, and the Walton Family Foundation, in Bentonville, Ark.

During that time, conservative organizations garnered about $400-million in grants from foundations and wealthy individuals, and think tanks have helped develop policies that the government made into law, including the overhaul of the welfare program in 1996.

Now, despite the prevailing political winds blowing against it, the movement will survive the tough times, observers say. To do so, it will have to rely on patience as much as ardor.

“Nothing conservatives do for a while will matter,” says Mr. Schambra. “We’re going to have to sit back and watch — and wait for an opportunity to arise.”