Thurbsday Blurbsday

From the classroom, to the conference room, to the locker room.

Right Moves (2019) is a sharp little monograph about the history of right-wing think tanks. Its most important intervention is demonstrating how, in the 1950s, the American Enterprise Institute was able to cunningly begin moving Washington’s legislative and regulatory Overton Window to the right, the American Enterprise Institute. The method was to begin describing the studies from the pioneering policy think tank the Brookings Institute, which strove for ideological descriptions of the technical means to make public policy, as, inherently, ideologically liberal. That allowed AEI to represent every policy question as “debates” between “conservative” positions (the ones preferred by AEI, which invariably weakened state power vis-a-vis corporate interests) and “liberal” ones—the one that used to not be considered ideological at all. This had the intended effect of getting policies intended to reverse the New Deal get a much more serious hearing on Capitol Hill. Here’s my blurb from back then:

“Jason Stahl’s book is not only the best available account of evolution of the world of right-wing think tanks, it provides a crucial intellectual history of how conservatives manipulated the rhetoric of 'balance' in order to move America’s ideological center to the right. Highly recommended.”

Next week’s Blurbsday will take this important innovation in normalizing right-wing politics back to the 1950s, as innovated a far more extreme group.

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And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story. Jason is no longer a historian. He told the story on the first post on his Substack, in 2020: how he was stuck teaching in an academic backwater at the University of Minnesota where the football program sent their students, and witnessed so much terrible abuse of these unpaid athletes that he ended up deciding to try to organize them into a union. He’s still Substacking regularly, but now as the executive director of the College Football Players Association. You can read more about that journey here, and/or watch this. All power to the professors who move from studying political institutions, to building them.