MANAGING THE DECLINE OF LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC CAPITALISM: A STUDY OF FOUR POLICY-PLANNING ORGANIZATIONS, 1973-1981 (AEI, BROOKINGS, TRILATERAL)

This study analyzes the efforts of four leading policy-planning organizations to diagnose and propose solutions to the crisis of liberal democratic capitalism in the United States between 1973 and 1981. The four groups examined are the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Institute for Contemporary Studies, and the Trilateral Commission, with a focus on those studies and statements that best capture their political ideology in this transitional period.;The period from 1973 to 1981 witnessed a breakdown in the institutional arrangements, ideologies, and policies that had guided the postwar political-economy. In this context, key policy-planning organizations sought new policy responses to a broad range of problems, domestic and international, which threatened to fragment the existing order.;The Trilateral Commission and the Brookings Institution strove to make the interdependent international economy the touchstone of foreign policy, adapting politics to a new phase of global capitalism. While the AEI and ICS supported a liberalized world economy, they embraced national security positions aimed at maintaining U.S. hegemony against an alleged Soviet Threat. During the Carter years the Trilateral managerialists were undone by international turmoil and a militarist current that included the AEI and ICS.;Likewise the domestic terms of political and economic discourse shifted to the right in the 1970s, effected by the conservative economics and social policies of the AEI, the ICS, and allies. The Brookings Institution's technocratic liberalism was outflanked by the neoconservatism of the AEI, while the Trilateral Commission's neo-corporatist agenda was confronted with an anti-statist business offensive. But both center and right-wing policy-planning organizations saw substantive democratic policies and pressures complicating their crisis management task of addressing the imperatives capitalism posed.;These organizations help shape public understanding of issues by selectively defining problems and proposing remedies from a standpoint that seeks to reproduce the class structure and social relations of liberal democratic capitalism. Policy-planning organizations mediate between class power and state policy, articulating long-range elites into a broad policy agenda.