To successfully enact the sweeping neoliberal policies and oligarchic legal shifts of the late 20th century, politicians faced a fundamental challenge: they needed to justify these changes to the American public. To do so, they fundamentally altered the way information and policy analysis were produced in Washington. They dismantled a decades-old system of neutral, problem-solving expertise and replaced it with highly organized, privately funded “partisan knowledge regimes”—a transformation that scientifically engineered the extreme political polarization we see today.
To understand this shift, one must look at the system it replaced. For much of the 20th century, the United States relied on a “technocratic knowledge regime” to manage the rapidly expanding federal government. This system was anchored by research universities, a robust professional civil service, and nonpartisan think tanks like the Brookings Institution and the RAND Corporation. Congress even built its own formidable analytical bureaucracies, creating the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), and expanding the Congressional Research Service (CRS) to provide lawmakers with rigorous, unbiased facts. Because both Democrats and Republicans relied on this shared pool of neutral expertise, the mid-20th century was an era of historically low polarization where lawmakers routinely found bipartisan consensus to solve pressing national problems.
However, conservative intellectuals began to view this technocratic consensus as an existential threat. Thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr. argued that the universities, the media, and the supposedly neutral bureaucrats were inherently liberal, relentlessly pushing the expansion of the federal government. Frustrated that even Republican presidents like Nixon and Ford continued to rely on these mainstream experts, conservative activists realized they needed to build their own alternative reality.
The critical turning point occurred in 1973 when two Republican congressional staffers, Ed Feulner and Paul Weyrich, backed by the conservative beer magnate Joseph Coors, founded the Heritage Foundation. Heritage revolutionized the role of the think tank. Older institutions operated like “universities without students,” where independent scholars produced long, academic reports. Heritage, by contrast, pioneered an “advocacy” model. They functioned as a strategic political weapon, closely monitoring the congressional agenda and producing highly ideological, easily digestible policy briefs designed to pass the “briefcase test”—meaning they were short enough for a politician to read during a cab ride to the airport.
Instead of waiting for a problem to arise and then objectively studying solutions, these new partisan think tanks engaged in “agenda hijacking.” They developed pre-packaged ideological goals—like tax cuts, deregulation, or privatization—and opportunistically waited for a crisis to justify them as the perfect solution. This gave conservative politicians the seemingly authoritative data they needed to justify right-wing policies to the public. Heritage also famously championed the motto “People are policy,” aggressively funneling hundreds of its own ideologically vetted staff into the Reagan administration, and more recently, spearheading “Project 2025” to staff future conservative administrations.
To solidify this new partisan knowledge regime, politicians actively destroyed their own access to neutral information. When Newt Gingrich and the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, they gutted the legislative branch’s internal brain trust. Fulfilling a promise in their “Contract with America,” they slashed the budgets of the CBO and CRS, completely abolished the Office of Technology Assessment, and decimated professional committee staff. By deliberately lowering Congress’s internal capacity to process information, lawmakers became heavily dependent on outside partisan think tanks and corporate lobbyists to write legislation and explain its impacts.
For decades, the Democratic Party was slow to respond, preferring to stick with traditional, rigorous nonpartisan experts. However, after repeatedly losing policy battles, progressive elites launched a counter-reaction. In 2003, former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta, backed by megadonors, founded the Center for American Progress (CAP). Modeled explicitly on Heritage’s aggressive advocacy structure, CAP became a “shadow government” for the Democratic Party, supplying policy and personnel to the Obama and Biden administrations. Alongside groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Democrats now possessed their own formidable partisan knowledge regime.
The rise of these privately controlled partisan think tanks directly correlates with the explosive polarization of American politics. By supplying custom-tailored “facts,” these organizations short-circuited the democratic process of problem-solving. If politicians did not like what objective science or economics told them, they no longer had to compromise; they could simply turn to a partisan think tank that would provide a biased analysis confirming their preexisting agenda.
The consequences have been profound:
- Economic Disinformation: Republican-aligned think tanks routinely publish biased economic analyses claiming that massive tax cuts for the wealthy will pay for themselves by generating explosive economic growth, despite overwhelming consensus from neutral economists to the contrary.
- Climate Change Denial: When global warming emerged as a major policy issue, fossil-fuel-funded conservative think tanks flooded the political system with reports denying the science and exaggerating the economic costs of environmental regulations. This effectively forced the Republican Party to abandon its historical support for conservation and adopt outright climate science denial.
By creating separate, hermetically sealed information ecosystems, partisan think tanks ensured that Democrats and Republicans could no longer even agree on basic reality. These “knowledge regimes” transformed political parties from organizations that sought to solve public problems into uncompromising vehicles for intense policy demanders and wealthy donors, perfectly rationalizing the oligarchic policies of the modern era while tearing the American electorate apart..