Here is an interesting article from last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. It’s about the efforts of some Democratic donors to create a liberal infrastructure, parallel in some ways to the network of conservative institutions and organizations that cater to the GOP. I think this is wonderful news, and not just because I am a Democrat: I think it’s unhealthy for only one party to have a network of organizations working to promulgate its ideas, since those ideas will tend not to be challenged as much as they should be. Moreover, to speak to an area I know something about, there are a lot of really interesting political philosophers on the left, and they have at present no organized way to run their ideas past, say, legislators and opinion-makers. Their colleagues on the right, by contrast, can get involved in any number of conservative organizations, and this can lead, if they’re good and articulate and interesting, to their ideas getting much broader exposure. (Sort of a system of farm teams.) Providing liberals with something similar would, I think, make our public discourse much richer. Likewise, providing progressive lawmakers and others with a coherent set of ideas, or better yet, several coherent sets of ideas to choose among, would be great.
However,
