I do hear sometimes, as I roam around meatspace and cyberspace, that our elder sister institution the Center for American Progress is the Democratic-Party-policy-apparatus-in-exile (largely true during Republican administrations) and the Democratic-administration-farm-team (somewhat true–but only for policy positions, and only for a subset of them), and will produce whatever arguments a Democratic administration demands.
This last is not true.
But when I ask people why they think this is true, I get pointed to things like this from Ken Silverstein last February at the New Republic calling the Center for American Progress “Heritage’s liberal counterpart” and including it on a list of “purportedly scholarly institutions”.
Now everybody who either worked for the Clinton administration in 1993-1994 or who was hoping to see improvement in America’s health-care system in 1993-1994 (overlapping but not identical sets of people) derived a view of the New Republic from back then: our view was and is that, based on what it published on health-care policy in 1993-1994, The New Republic’s office furniture, computer, paper stock, any presses it has ever used, any trucks that have ever carried it, its servers, its routers, and its cables should all be set on fire and burned, the rubble should be razed, and the brownfield sown with salt and marked with nuclear waste signs. Then-publisher Marty Peretz, then-chief editor Andrew Sullivan, current publisher Chris Hughes, and chief editors who followed Sullivan–the late Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, Peter Beinart, Franklin Foer, and Richard Just–all really ought to make a full, complete, explicit, and abject apology, and it speaks volumes as to their guts and their honor that not a single one of them has done so.
So from our perspective it is not surprising to see the New Republic behaving badly. We should probably take it as a mitzvah that Ken Silverstein’s article is not as bad as Betsy McCaughey’s was.
For the record: the Center for American Progress is in no way Heritage’s liberal counterpart. The technocratic quality of the work it produces is light-years ahead of most things you will find from Cato and the American Action Forum, almost anything you will find from AEI or the National Center for Policy Analysis, and everything I have seen from Heritage.
And CAP President Neera Tanden had a very good response:
Continue reading “Neera Tanden on the Center for American Progress: Thursday Focus (January 16, 2014)” →