The Washington Post reports that a group of wealthy Democrats will fund a network of left-wing think tanks. They know they’ve lost the war of ideas. They hope to turn this tide by competing with conservative and libertarian outfits such as the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and twenty others within the Beltway.

The Center for American Progress and the Progressive Legislative Action Network (PLAN) are two of their creations. PLAN recently announced the opening of a Montana branch. I welcome this development, for citizens are best served by a robust debate in the marketplace of ideas.

Here’s an observation: the sure sign of weakness in a movement is when it fails to address, or even admit, the fundamental causes of its decline. Martin Peretz, editor of the liberal The New Republic nailed it in his widely circulated piece, “Not Much Left”:

“[I]t was John Kenneth Galbraith, speaking... [at] the high point of post-New Deal liberalism, who pronounced conservatism dead. Conservatism, he said, was ‘bookless’.... Without books, there are no ideas. At this point in history, it is liberalism upon which such judgments are rendered.... It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. Ask yourself: ...Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire?... [G]ive me a single liberal idea with some currency, even a structural notion, for transforming the elucidation of knowledge and thinking to the young. You can’t.”

An amalgam of ideas from the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, modern liberalism dominated political and intellectual debate for most of the last century. Its goal: to remake America in the image of present-day Western European welfare states. Liberals were confident their vision would prevail, believing, in the Marxist sense, they were on “the right side of history.”

Alas, in every policy arena, reality intruded. For example, it’s obvious that many European welfare states are failing. High unemployment, stalled economies, and rising ethnic tensions do not make for an appealing vision.

On the domestic front, scholars such as Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Charles Murray exposed the counterproductive effects of progressive social policies. These men challenged conventional wisdom about the causes of social problems and the efficacy of proposed solutions. Moynihan’s 1965 report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Murray’s 1984 book, Losing Ground, and Glazer’s 1988 book, The Limits of Social Policy, laid the foundations for the landmark 1996 overhaul of the federal welfare program.

For decades liberals held the political majority. American universities continue to reinforce the view that all “right-thinking” people share liberal ideas. Conservative ideas are derisively dismissed as lacking intellectual or ethical merit. (Imagine supporting vouchers in a school of education or patriotism in an American Studies department.) Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly are presented as conservative “thinkers” rather than James Buchanan, F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Robert Nozick.

This tilted academic playing field has a pernicious effect any athlete understands -- weak competition dulls skills. With few adversaries and opposing ideas, the left’s thinking has become stale. In contrast, conservatives are constantly tested and toughened.

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, recently told The New York Times that as a student at Harvard, “Somebody would make some left-wing comment and no one would challenge it, whereas if you made some right-wing comment, you’d get 20 questions. We grew up and we built tougher, smarter, better advocates on the right than the left did. You see this all the time: The left gets frustrated if somebody asks a second question.”

Visit the web sites of the Heritage Foundation, AEI, or the Cato Institute. You’ll find page after page of serious policy analysis by Ph.D. refugees from PC academia. Next check out the liberal Center for American Progress. Their staff primarily comprises political appointees. Rather than logical analysis and data, they feature political cartoons. Wow!

I recently saw the bumper sticker “Bush is a dumbass” (right under a Middlebury College logo). I hope this partisan feels good. But as the dismal failure of liberal talk radio (i.e., Air America) suggests, ill-mannered righteousness is a losing strategy. When will the American left seriously consider that the root causes of its problems are that its core ideas are fundamentally flawed?