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If it has seemed to you when seeing recent discussions in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have yet made up their ideas about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have many interest in listening to arguments being made by anybody else in the chamber, it’s probably for they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long ahead they entered the Capitol rooms. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good wording of the “sifting and winnowing” for which this state long ago became prominent.
Conservative History Post-1964: A Brilliant Turnaround Story
Reasserting Wisconsin’s Core Values: Decency, Fairness, Generosity, Compromise
An important associate of ALEC’s, by the way, is the State Policy Network (SPN), which assists coordinate the activities of a broad diversity of conservative think tanks operating at the state level throughout the country. See its home page at
http://www.spn.org/
Many of the announcements of these think tanks are accessible and downloadable from correlates on the SPN website, which are well worth taking the time to peruse and read. A good starting area is:
http://www.spn.org/members/
One conclusion seems clear: what we’ve witnessed in Wisconsin during the beginning months of 2011 did not originate in this state, even though we’ve been at the centre of the political storm in terms of how it’s being implemented. This is a well-planned and well-coordinated national campaign, and it would be helpful to know a lot more about it.
William Cronon
The prank phone call that Governor Scott Walker unhesitatingly accepted from a blogger purporting to be billionaire conservative donor David Koch has received lots of airplay, and it naturally demonstrates that the governor is adapted to having chats with deep-pocketed folks who advocate his cause. If you’ve not actually seen the transcript, it’s worth a scrupulous reading, and is available here:
http://host.madison.com/wsj/article_531276b6-3f6a-11e0-b288-001cc4c002e0.html
For fair one example of how below-the-radar the activities of ALEC typically are, look in where the appoint of the organization appears in this recent story from the New York Times about current efforts in state legislatures to roll back the bargaining rights of public employee unions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/business/04labor.html
Hint: ALEC is way beneath the fold!
Again, I want anyone reading this post to understand that I am emphatically not questioning the legitimacy of advocacy networks in a democracy. To the contrary: I believe they are necessary to democracy. My care is prefer to promote open public dispute and the authentic impact of attitudes amid assorted chapters of the political spectrum, which I believe is best served by full and open disclosure of the interests of those who advocate particular policies.
P.S.: Note to historians and journalists: we really need a good biography of Paul Weyrich.
David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism: A Brief History, 2010.
If you run along a conservative organization you’ve not heard of before and would like to know more about it, two websites can periodically be advantageous for quick overviews:
Right Wing Watch: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/
SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org
Both of these lean left in their politics, so they obviously can’t be counted on to provide sympathetic descriptions of conservative groups. (If I knew of comparative sites whose politics were more conservative, I’d gladly provide them here; please contact me if you know of anybody and I’ll multiplication them to this note.) But for obvious causes, many of these groups favor not to be monitored very closely. Many preserve a cheap outline, so one sometimes learns more about them from their left-leaning commentators than from the groups themselves.
A Study Guide for Those Wishing to Know More
But even though I’m more than arranged to believe that David and Charles Koch have provided massive values of money to help fund the conservative overflow tide that is sweeping via state legislatures right now,airforce one, I just don’t find it logical that two brothers from Wichita, Kansas, no material how rich, can be responsible for this burst of radical conservative legislation. It also works without saying that Scott Walker cannot be single-handedly responsible for what we’re seeing either; I wouldn’t believe that even for Wisconsin, let solo fknow next to nothing of many other states. The governor apparently welcomes the national media attention he’s receiving as a spear-carrier for the movement. But he’s surely not the architect of that movement.
How do you become a membership?  Simple. Two ways.  You can be an picked Republican legislator who, after being personally vetted, pays a token fare of roughly $100 per biennium to combine.  Here’s the member leaflet to use whether you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected lawful?  Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars relying on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even now most of us had this kind of money to endow to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is ambitioning to pay the fee. But possibly I’m being cynical here.
George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in USA Since 1945, 1976(one of the earliest theoretical studies of the manoeuvre, and still important to peruse).
Lee Edwards, The Conservative Revolution, 2002 (written from a conservative outlook by a longstanding fellow of the Heritage Foundation).
Interestingly, one of the maximum fussy accounts of ALEC’s activities was issued by Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council in a 2002 report entitled Corporate America’s Trojan Horse in the States. Although NRDC and Defenders may seem like weird organizations to issue such a report, some of ALEC’s maximum concentrated efforts have been directed at coiling back environmental protections, so their authorship of the report isn’t so amazing. The report and its associated reception unlock are here:
http://alecwatch.org/11223344.pdf
http://www.nrdc.org/media/pressreleases/020228.asp
There’s also an antique, very stale website associated with this effort at
http://alecwatch.org/
Here’s my preparatory answer.
I provide a concise reading catalogue at the end of this note because many human from other parts of the political spectrum constantly seem not to take the mastermind roots of American conservatism very seriously. I believe this is a serious mistake. One key sagacity you should take from this history is that afterward the Goldwater vanquish in 1964, visionary conservative leaders began to build a series of unions and networks devised to promote their merits and construct systematic strategies for sympathetic politicians. Some of these organizations are reasonably well known–for example, the Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, a Racine countryman and UW-Madison alumnus who also started the Moral Majority and whose importance to the movement is about impossible to overestimate–but many of these teams remain largely invisible.
So…who is?
Bruce Frohnen, et al, American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, 2006 (a comprehensive and indispensable reference work).
The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 chips of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the polemical 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)
After watching the sudden and impressively well-organized wag of legislation being introduced into state legislatures that all seem to be pursuing parallel goals merely tangentially related to current financial challenges–ending collective bargaining rights for public workers, requiring photo IDs at the ballot box, rolling back environmental protections, privileging attribute rights over civilian rights, and so on–I’ve found myself wondering where all of this legislation is coming from.
I can’t entirely respond that question in a short memorandum, merely I can sketch its outline and offer counsel for those who want to fill in more of the details.
You’ll of way be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.
I want to add a word of remind here at the end. In posting this study adviser, I do not want to recommend that I think it is illegitimate in a democracy for citizens who share political convictions to gather for the purpose of sharing ideas or creating strategies to pursue their shared goals. The right to assemble, manner leagues, share resources, and pursue general ends is crucial to any vision of democracy I know. (That’s one reason I’m revolted at Governor Walker’s ALEC-supported efforts to shut down public employee unions in Wisconsin, even though I have never belonged to one of those unions, probably never will, and have sometimes been quite critical of their tactics and strategies.)  I’m not suggesting that ALEC, its members, or its allies are illegitimate, corrupt, or illegal. If money were changing hands to buy votes, that would be a different thing, but I don’t believe that’s mainly what’s going on here. Americans who belong to ALEC do so because they genuinely believe in the causes it promotes, not because they’re buying or selling votes.
Basic Tools for Researching Conservative Groups
John Micklethwait & Adrian Wooldridge, The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,Vibram Five Fingers, 2004 (brisk, readable overview by sympathetic British journalists).
A more recent analysis of ALEC’s activities was put attach by the Progressive States Network in February 2006 below the title Governing the Nation from the Statehouses, available here:
http://www.progressivestates.org/content/57/governing-the-nation-from-the-statehouses
There’s an In These Times anecdote summarizing the report at
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/2509/
More recent stories can be found at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/miles-mogulescu/alec-states-unions_b_832428.htmlview=print
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game (about the Arizona immigration law)
and there’s very amusing scope of ALEC’s efforts apt disenfranchise student voters at
http://campusprogress.org/articles/conservative_corporate_advocacy_group_alec_behind_ voter_disenfranchise/
and
http://www.progressivestates.org/node/26400
As I said earlier, it’s not easy to find exact details about the model legislation that ALEC has sought to introduce bring ... to an endthe nation in Republican-dominated statehouses. But you’ll get suggestive glimpses of it from the casual reporting that has been done about ALEC over the past ten-year. Almost all of this emanates from the left wing of the political spectrum, so absences to be read with that discrimination forever in mind.
There are many other important studies, but these are rational starting points.
A Cautionary Note
Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do
Let’s get to work, fellow citizens.
I don’t want this to become an endless professorial discourse on the general outlines of American conservatism today, so let me rotate to the answer at hand: who’s really behind recent Republican legislation in Wisconsin and somewhere?  I’m professionally interested in this question as a historian, and since I can’t send myself to believe that the Koch brothers single-handedly masterminded entire this, I’ve been trying to detect the deeper networks from which this legislation emerged.
Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)
I have always cherished Wisconsin for its neighborliness, and this is not the way neighbors treat each other.

Partners in Wisconsin and Other States: SPN, MacIver Institute, WPRI
Two important SPN members in Wisconsin are the MacIver Institute for Public Policy:
http://maciverinstitute.com/
and the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute (WPRI):
http://www.wpri.org
If you absence to be a well-informed Wisconsin citizen and don’t understand about their go, you’ll probably want to begin visiting these sites extra regularly. You’ll acquire a many better knowing of the underlying motifs that inform recent Republican legislation by act so.
If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org
First visit the “About” list to obtain a sense of the organization’s history and its new members and funders. But the mutton of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the doorway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1
Understanding What These Groups Do
This is already dissimilar instance, in other words, of the impressive and highly able ways that conservatives have built very cautiously thought-out traditions to support for their interests over the quondam half centenary. Although there may be analogous frameworks at the other end of the political spectrum, they’re frequently not nearly so well coordinated just about disciplined in the ways they pursue their goals. (The nearest analog to ALEC that I’m conscious of on the left is the Progressive States Network, whose website tin be perused at
http://www.progressivestates.org/
but PSN was only founded in 2005, does not primarily converge on book model legislation, and is not as well organized or as disciplined as ALEC.) To be fair, conservatives would probably discuss that the liberal networks they oppose were so well woven into the linen of administration agencies, labor unions, universities, mosques, and non-profit organizations that these liberal networks systematize themselves and manipulate quite differently than conservative networks do–and conservatives would be capable to skillful to summon valid evidence to support such an argument, whatsoever we might eventually evaluate the persuasiveness of that testify.
The Walker-Koch Prank Phone Call Reveals A Lot, But Not Nearly Enough
Jerry Z. Muller, Conservatism, 1997 (nationwide anthology of classical texts of the movement).
This is principally true while politicians by the state and local class enhance legislation charted at the citizen level namely may no actually best serve the interests of their family areas and states. ALEC strategists may meditation they’re serving the citizen conservative cause along promoting legislation like the bills recently passed in Wisconsin–but I watch my state being ripped apart along the resulting controversies, and it’s hard to trust namely Wisconsin namely better off for a result. This is not the path citizens or politicians have historically conducted toward every other in this state, and I as one am not cheerful with the changes in our political civilization that seem to be unfolding right now. I’m hoping that numerous of my guy Wisconsinites, whether they lean left alternatively right, agree with me that it’s time to take a long hard look at what has been happening and try to find our bearings afresh.
ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise voters probable to vote Democratic, for instance, and its efforts to break public-sector unions because they also tend to prefer Democrats,2011 adidas, strike me as objectionable and anti-democratic (as opposed to anti-Democratic) on their face. As a pragmatic centrist in my own politics, I very strongly favor seeking the public good from either sides of the partisan channel, and it’s by inches remove to me that recent legislation in Wisconsin or elsewhere can be protected as doing this. Shining a shine light on ALEC’s activities (and on other groups as well, across the political spectrum) accordingly seems to me a invaluable thing to do whether or not one favors its political goals.
I’ll start by saying–a professorial thrust I just can’t resist–that it’s well worth taking some time to familiarize yourself with the history of the conservative movement in the United States since the 1950s if you haven’t already studied the subject. Whatever you think of its politics, I don’t think there can be any question that the mushroom of modern conservatism is one of the excellent turnaround stories in twentieth-century American history. It’s quite a charming series of events, in which a deeply marginalized political movement–tainted by widespread public reaction opposition Senator Joe McCarthy, the John Birch Society, and the massively defeated Barry Goldwater campaign of 1964–managed quite brilliantly to remake itself (and American politics) in the decades that followed.
An Introductory Bibliography on the Recent History of American Conservatism

What you’ll quickly learn even from reading these few documents is that ALEC is an organization that has been doing very important political work in the United States for the past forty years with remarkably little public or journalistic perusal. I’m posting this long note in the conviction that it’s time to start disbursing more care. History is being made here, and hereafter historians need people today to convene the documents they’ll eventually need to jot this story. Much more important, citizens today may wish to access these same documents to be well informed about important political determinations being made in our own time during the prevalent conferences that ALEC organizes among Republican legislators and representatives of many of the wealthiest enterprises in the United States.
Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to query our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a citizen ALEC meeting could be sufficiently many to trigger the “walking quorum rule” that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to dodge this rule (which applies to each other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the country. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a distinctive exemption from that law for its own gathering caucuses, Democrats and Republicans identical. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to clutch hidden meetings with ALEC to intend their legislative strategies anytime they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.
(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very rigid Open Meetings Law.)
It’s also important to understand that accidents at the state level don’t always originate in the state where they happen. Far from it.
That’s why memorabilia like the ones we’ve just experienced in Wisconsin can seem to bring an end to ... of nowhere. Few outside the conservative movement have been paying much attention, and that is ill-advised.  (I would, by the way, say the same thing about people on the right who don’t make a serious effort to understand the left in this country.)
I believe this is especially important when policies are presented as having a genuine public interest even though their deeper purpose may be to promote selfish or partisan gains.