With the establishment of the socially conservative Institute for Canadian Values, it’s worthwhile to consider how conservative ideas have been successfully developed and communicated in the United States, where these things are further developed.

James Piereson writes a little history of conservative philanthropy in today’s Wall Street Journal as a way of measuring its successes in assisting conservative intellectuals and politicians over the past 30 years, and considers what the future might hold. The article is worth reading in its own right, but I want to highlight some points that are relevant for Canadians.

The first is that philanthropists are incredibly important in funding studies and intellectuals. This is true of foundations like the Liberty Fund and the now defunct Olin Foundation on the conservative side. However, it’s also important on the liberal side, as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations - which are considerably larger and more influential - have been instrumental in funding various activist organizations.

Second, philanthropists don’t act on their own. They need intellectuals and leaders informing them what needs to be done. Piereson notes that one of Friedrich Hayek’s great accomplishments was to teach businessmen that ideas matter, and that they needed to confront socialists in the area of ideas. Businessmen are largely pragmatic, so they need extra prodding to understand that bad ideas need to be countered with good ideas. True, bad ideas have a way of demonstrating their impracticality, but let’s not forget that socialism wasn’t really discredited until the mid-1970s. Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1945.

Third, not just little ideas, but big ideas too. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom provided a governing political theory that provided a coherent alternative to socialism. Piereson points out that today’s neocons tend to focus on policy issues, showing how this or that policy won’t work and suggesting alternatives. Focusing on policy is useful, but it’s focusing on individual trees when tending to the forest is also needed. This is one of my criticisms of think tanks like the Fraser Institute. They provide decent studies on various minutiae of policy, but their narrow scope means that they’ll forever remain parochial. They need to adopt a strategy like that of the American Enterprise Institute, which, in addition to publishing various studies on policy issues, also have in-house philosophers and theologians like Walter Berns, Michael Novak Leon Kass, and Christina Hoff Sommers, who are capable of addressing broader cultural issues. The Centre for Cultural Renewal partially fills this gap in Canada, but they’re mandate is less that of a think tank and more of an organization that facilitates communication and networking of scholars and activists.

I wish the Institute for Canadian Values well. But I also wish the other think tanks in Canada would shed their parochial, policy-wonkish ways.