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This chapter explores how a transatlantic network of sympathetic businessmen and fundraisers, journalists and politicians, policy experts and academics grew and spread neoliberal ideas between the 1940s and the 1970s. These individuals were successful at promoting ideas through a new type of political organization, the think tank. The first wave of neoliberal think tanks were set up in the 1940s and 1950s and included the American Enterprise Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education in the United States, and the Institute of Economic Affairs in Great Britain. A second wave of neoliberal think tanks were established in the 1970s, including the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in Great Britain, and the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute in the United States.

This chapter discusses the development of the conservative think tank in the 1970s. During this period of time, conservative think tanks grew greatly in stature as they secured new source of funding from wealthy conservative elites. Those at the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and new conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute, used these new funds to promote conservative public policy. However, even more importantly, they used these funds to create a newly dominant understanding of debating all public policy: the marketplace of ideas. Such a discourse placed ideological differences and “balancing” these differences in a public policy marketplace as the highest valued commodity. This mode of public policy debate overtook the liberal technocratic model which had been previously dominant. This chapter shows how, by the end of the 1970s, even formerly liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institution were changing their institution to accommodate this new method of policy debate.

The Republican Party took a beating in the elections of 2006 and 2008. And though it is likely to recover much lost ground in this year's mid-term election, the party—and indeed conservatism generally—have yet fundamentally to repair a tarnished brand. This chapter asks whether conservative think tanks played a part in the GOP's setbacks of recent years. It argues that the role of think tanks was different and more complex than has widely been supposed. Conservative policy intellectuals contributed to both the disappointments and the achievements of Republican administrations, but more consequentially to the latter. That record is of limited consolation, however, since voters tend to punish failures more than reward successes.

This chapter details the entrenchment of the marketplace of ideas discourse of public policy formation during the 1980s and how think tanks used such a discourse in order to move U.S. political culture further to the right. First and foremost, the chapter details how conservative think tanks used this new way of understanding policy in order to plan, promote, and pass their policy ideas now that Ronald Reagan was in the presidency. Specifically, the chapter contains a detailed case study of Reagan's supply-side economics tax cutting policies. Secondly, this chapter carries forward the story of the Brookings Institution and shows how it maintained its relevancy in an era of conservative ascendency. Finally, this chapter contains a detailed study of the rise of the Heritage Foundation as the premier conservative think tank in the 1980s and shows how the entrenchment of the marketplace of ideas was particularly well used by those at Heritage.

This chapter unmasks modern forms of power that use Christianity in the service of policing modern society in the United States. It examines certain claims that marriage and procreation can save our world, and it contends that modern American sexual ethics are not “Judeo-Christian.” By analyzing discourses on marriage and sexuality as diverse as those from the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, the USCCB, and the Supreme Court, it concludes that modern American sexual ethics—be they secular or Christian—are built on the principles of the Augustan marriage legislation and not on the values of early Christianity. Instead of hailing American values as “Judeo-Christian,” this chapter suggests renaming them “neo-imperial-capitalist.”

This chapter explores the relationship between Coors family members – particularly brothers Joseph (Joe) and William (Bill) – and boycotters in the American West in the late 1960s and 1970s. Anti-Coors activists not only targeted the company for allegations of discrimination, but also because of the Coors family’s well-known political conservatism. In particular, activists noted that profits from Coors’s beer sales were used to fund conservative New Right organizations. Joe Coors was a person of special concern for boycotters, and this chapter details his increasingly public political activities, ranging from a term on the University of Colorado Board of Regents to funding the conservative Heritage Foundation and seeking a seat on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in 1975. Ultimately, boycotters’ activism blocked Coors’s confirmation to the CPB, but his company continued to support and pursue free market, conservative values in its business operations and corporate philanthropy.

This chapter focuses on how, after the Cold War and in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the think tank was one of the key institutions involved in pushing a militarized U.S. foreign policy response. In order to delineate this involvement, chapter six looks at two bodies of think tanks. First, it examines neoconservative think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and their role in promoting and implementing such a vision. Secondly, the chapter examines the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Democratic Leadership Council to show how these institutions, in combination with their more right-wing counterparts, created an elite consensus around a militarized response to 9/11, including an invasion of Iraq. Finally, the 2000s also brought about a new think-tank-related dynamic as the decade was a time when the rejection of empirical expertise seeped into the state itself. With think tanks appointees from the Heritage Foundation leading the way within the administration of George W. Bush, the administration accepted the idea that technocratic policy planning by “experts” was impossible as such a model was inherently biased toward liberalism.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s main arguments while recapitulating the broad narrative and temporal sweep of its subject matter. It highlights the apparent paradox raised in the introduction of the book: how a minority of a minority, a small group of Moroccan Jewish Communists, reviled as pariahs and liabilities by many, became among the most prominent state-supported symbols of Moroccan liberalism and Muslim–Jewish interfaith harmony or convivencia in the region. It demonstrates the continuity of the Sultan’s Jews into the Sultan’s Communists, shedding light on ongoing political and cultural developments in Morocco under King Muhammad VI.

This chapter analyzes the shift in border policy in the United States. The shift evolved with what was framed as the surge of undocumented immigration after 1980, and the securitization of what had been a circulation of workers from Mexico to and from the United States. The perception of failure of immigration policy emerged not from a widespread reaction to a sense of failed integration, as in Europe, but to the increased political focus on the growth of the population of undocumented immigrants. The progressive reinforcement of the border, particularly after 1992, had the perverse effect of providing an incentive for migrants to remain on the US side in larger numbers than ever before. The growth of the undocumented population weighed on the political process in three ways. First, it fed a growing perception of failure of the adequacy of southern border controls. Second, as the issue of the border became politicized, it began to undermine stable understandings of policy within the policy network on immigration. Third, the border became a growing focus for intra- and interpolitical party conflict, and was accelerated by federal dynamics.

This chapter details the return of the Yup'ik Flying Swan mask to Berlin in the early 1990s after a half-century-long postwar odyssey. The mask held a distinguished place in Berlin's Museum für Völkerkunde. For almost two decades, it hung top and center within a prominent glass cabinet in the Eskimo exhibit among the museum's celebrated new Schausammlung. The chapter then discusses the destruction of war, in which collections were devastated and many scattered across vast distances. It reports that some 33,000 objects from the African collections, mostly items from West Africa, were lost in “safer” locations, and on the East Asian collections, only 40 percent survived. Over time, it became clear that Soviet trophy brigades had seized some 75,000 or more archaeological and ethnographic objects from the bunkers, the Royal Mint, and the mines and the castle in Silesia. Amid this postwar devastation, the chapter highlights how Germany's surviving ethnologists quickly returned to their science and began trying to reconstitute their museums. It looks at the creation of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in 1957, founded by the federal government to obtain and preserve Prussian cultural heritage.

When I wrote my first book African American Women Chemists I neglected to state that it was a historical book. I researched to find the first African American woman who had studied chemistry in college and worked in the field. The woman that I found was Josephine Silane Yates who studied chemistry at the Rhode Island Normal School in order to become a science teacher. She was hired by the Lincoln Institute in 1881 and later was, I believe, the first African American woman to become a professor and head a department of science. But then again there might be women who traveled out of the country to study because of racial prejudice in this country. The book ended with some women like myself who were hired as chemists in the industry before the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Therefore, I decided to write another book about the current African American women chemists who, as I say, are hiding in plain sight. To do this, I again researched women by using the web or by asking questions of people I met at American Chemical Society ACS or National Organization for the Professional Advances of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) meetings. I asked women to tell me their life stories and allow me to take their oral history, which I recorded and which were transcribed thanks to the people at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia, PA. Most of the stories of these women will be archived at the CHF in their oral history collection. The women who were chosen to be in this book are an amazing group of women. Most of them are in academia because it is easy to get in touch with professors since they publish their research on the web. Some have worked for the government in the national laboratories and a few have worked in industry. Some of these women grew up in the Jim Crow south where they went to segregated schools but were lucky because they were smart and had teachers and parents who wanted them to succeed despite everything they had to go through.

Milton Goldberg Worried. As he entered the White House State Dining Room with the members of the commission that he had staffed for the previous two years, the teacher and administrator from Philadelphia pondered what the president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, would say about the report on which they had labored so vigorously. Everyone understood that most federal commission documents descend into immediate obscurity. He feared that destiny for their report. He also feared that the president would call again for policies, such as prayer in schools, vouchers for private school tuition, tuition tax credits, or abolition of the Department of Education (Goldberg’s current employer), that the commission had not endorsed. The president strode vigorously into the room as Goldberg rose anxiously. Reagan genially introduced the report, saying that it fully accorded with his earlier enunciated views on education. Obviously he had not read the report since it did not deal with any of those issues. This report was Reagan’s last major presidential effort on education, although he continued to discuss education in various speeches. The commissioners, who sought public attention for their report as a stimulus to change, feared that the press would now ignore the report, believing they had written a Reagan-support document. As one of the commissioners, physicist Gerald Holton, reported, the authors were appalled and one said loudly enough for the press to hear, “We have been had.” Hearing the remark, journalists in attendance suddenly developed an intense interest in the report. They immediately recognized a profound disconnect between the Reagan administration’s rhetoric about education and the content of the report. Both the political disconnect and the subject matter initially intrigued them, but the substance of the document caught the public’s attention and has remained there for nearly a quarter of a century. A Nation at Risk alerted the American people, often in rather colorful and occasionally purple and erroneous prose, to the danger the country faced if the academic achievement of schoolchildren did not improve.

For most of two centuries, the United States was a nation of small farms and many farmers, raising much of their own food along with one or more cash crops and livestock for local markets. Today, farms run by families of weatherbeaten farmers, pie-baking farm wives, and earnest 4-H offspring are disappearing. Americans live on supermarket or take-out food, mostly produced on extensive, highly mechanized and chemical-dependent industrial-scale “conventional” farms, raising single-crop monocultures or single-breed livestock. The larger farms cover tens of thousands of acres, too much for single families to manage. It is not agriculture, but agribusiness— an industry run by corporations. Conventional industrial agriculture is highly productive, and supermarket food is cheap. So why should anyone worry about growing food with chemical fertilizers, expensive equipment, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals? The reasons, acknowledged even by the industry, are that agribusiness “saddles the farmer with debt, threatens his health, erodes his soil and destroys its fertility, pollutes the ground water and compromises the safety of the food we eat.” Croplands presently encompass some 57 million acres in the 11 western states (table 2.1). Giant plantations consume huge amounts of natural resources—soil, fertilizers, fuels, and water. Synthetic fertilizers keep overused soils in production, until they become too salty (salinated) and must be abandoned. Industrial farming has taken over large areas of wildlife habitat, including forest, scrub, desert, or prairie, to replace degraded croplands. The clearings and massive pesticide applications threaten or endanger large and increasing numbers of plant and animal species in the western United States. Pesticide exposures sicken family farmers and agribusiness workers in the fields, and add environmental poisons to our diet. Pesticides and other problematic agricultural chemicals accumulate in our bodies. Agribusiness consumes especially huge amounts of increasingly costly, nonrenewable petroleum. “Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten” to run fleets of immense plowing, planting, cultivating, harvesting, and processing machines, plus countless irrigation pumps. Growing a pound of American beef consumes half a gallon of petroleum. A top executive of the giant agriculture-chemical corporation Monsanto has admitted that “current agricultural technology is not sustainable.” High-tech agriculture, such as cloning and genetically modifying crops, does not help conventional agriculture become more sustainable.

To school desegregation activists in the 1960s, school choice plans represented one of a series of tactics of avoidance or obstruction. Yet choice programs became part of school desegregation remedies and then became initiatives for varied school reforms. Political alliances and clashes around the issue of school choice color public perceptions even more than the actual effects of school choice on students’ achievement or social integration. School choice can enable both self-segregation or student mixing across many lines of difference. As a tool of school reform, school choice continues to hold promise and risks for those seeking equality and integration within schools while enhancing pluralism and respect for differences in society as a whole. Yet some forms of school choice could undermine equality goals unless they are accompanied by direct efforts to maintain and enforce these goals. Widespread perceptions that American schools are failing have fueled a major nationwide movement for school reform since the early 1980s. At the forefront have been business leaders who—worried about American competitiveness and the qualifications of the workforce for jobs requiring increasing technical skills—have brought conceptions of competition and innovation to the school reform initiatives. Parents and teachers, seeking greater control of local schools, have also energized the movement. Challenging established school bureaucracies and political arrangements, these reformers have pushed for performance standards, voucher systems to promote competition and consumer choices, site-based management, and other opportunities for innovation at the level of the individual school rather than the district or statewide system. One of the key themes pursued by a range of parents, teachers, business leaders, and other advocates as a motor for reform is parental choice. This concept combines a market-style consumer sovereignty idea with notions of personal liberty. School choice stimulates competition among providers, as parents look for benchmarks for assessing quality. As a result, states and localities have initiated institutional innovations. These include magnet and pilot schools, which draw students from an entire district by offering a special focus. Vouchers permit poor students to use public funds to pay tuition in private schools.

Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012 stunned the GOP establishment. Their shock showed how out of touch the party was with its own base. The Republican National Committee commissioned a study to identify the party’s barriers to growth, which found that single women and young voters were turned off by Republican positions on abortion, gay rights, and climate change, while Hispanics were repelled by opposition to immigration reform. At the same time, the report gently raised the threat to the party from the power of the (unnamed) Koch network, stating that “centralized authority in the hands of a few people is dangerous.” The GOP donor class of billionaires and multimillionaires favored ideological purity over incremental progress, and could outspend and outorganize the party when they found the right, uncompromising candidates. House and Senate GOP leaders were steadily losing control of their caucuses, and no one understood how much damage could be inflicted on the party by someone willing to savage colleagues to further themselves. Thanks to newly elected Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a political firebrand out for himself no matter the cost, they were about to find out. Senator Marco Rubio, a darling of the party’s establishment, saw his attempts to craft an immigration reform bill destroyed by Cruz—who described undocumented immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.” Cruz then engineered a disastrous government shutdown and became one of the most reviled members of the Senate, even as he gained the admiration of social conservatives and became a role model for their children.

All parties to the hearings knew that on June 14, 1972, at exactly 10 a.m., the door of the EPA administrator’s office would open and out would come someone to distribute copies of the decision on the future of DDT. Nobody knew what was in it, but all parties figured there would be something they would not like and would therefore want to appeal it to an appeals court. Appeals could be heard by any of several federal appellate courts around the country. More important, the first appeal made to any court would likely determine the location or venue where the appeal would be heard. The DDT proponents knew they had done poorly in the DC Court of Appeals, so they wanted to get their appeal out of DC; surely the cotton belt would be best. So they were waiting for that door to open with an open telephone line to the 5th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Louisiana. We knew what they were up to, so we were determined to file our appeal very quickly with the US Court of Appeals for DC, where we had done very well. That was not a simple procedure. Cell phones did not exist in those days. The EPA administrator’s door opened, the papers came out, and both appeals were rushed to the respective courts of appeal. Not a second was wasted to see what was in the decision. EDF attorney Bill Butler flashed the appeal on a pay phone, which had an open line to another pay phone in the DC Court of Appeals building near the clerk’s office, where EDF secretary Marie Bauman filed the EDF appeal. Each side claimed it had gotten to its preferred appeals court first. The DDT proponents said the case would move to New Orleans for the appeal. Much controversy and confusion ensued. Finally, it was decided that the clocks were not properly synchronized and that EDF had won the rapid communication derby: The case would stay in Washington, DC.

On November 24, 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M aircraft on the Syria-Turkey border. For seventeen seconds the Russian aircraft crossed the southern tip of a salient of Turkish territory that Syria claimed rightfully belonged to it. Two Russians ejected from the plane over Syria. A local Turkmen militia, commanded by a Turkish citizen, fired at the aviators, killing one. A second Russian serviceman was killed during a rescue mission to save the surviving aviator. The incident, recorded on radar systems by many countries and partially captured on video camera, was the first time since the Korean War that a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) country’s fighter jet destroyed a Soviet/Russian Air Force aircraft. Fortunately the event did not escalate into a full-blown NATO Russia crisis, although with tensions high over the Ukraine crisis and two authoritarian leaders at loggerheads, it could well have done so. There were background accusations. Turkish president Erdoğan was aggrieved that Russia was bombing co-ethnic kin in its southern near abroad while aiding Kurdish separatists, while Russian president Putin saw Turkey as an accomplice of international terrorists. Entwined territorial and terrorist anxieties, as well as near abroad insecurities, preoccupied both men. Had Russia responded with force against Turkey, this could have triggered Article V of NATO’s Washington Treaty, and NATO members would have faced the prospect of war with Russia over a tiny piece of territory in the Middle East most knew nothing about. Relations between the NATO alliance and Russia are now at their lowest point since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Airspace violations, incidents at sea, military training exercises, and hybrid war hysteria have kept tensions high. After Crimea, NATO moved to strengthen its capacity to respond to perceived Russian encroachment on the Baltic countries. The Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative was launched in June 2014 with a $1 billion budget for training and temporary rotations. In a speech in Riga in September 2014, President Obama declared: “We’ll be here for Estonia.