The Niskanen Center's emergence in Washington is more than a story about an obscure think tank. It's about whether ideas have a place in our politics at all, or whether we're doomed to division and stasis instead
Niskanen as “one of the most creative think tanks in America today” and credited it with helping birth a “new center” in the fallow fields of American policy thought.The Niskanen Center
As a college student at the University of Iowa in the 1980s, Taylor worked for the political campaigns of Sen. Chuck Grassley and former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. When his college loans ran out, he ditched school and moved to D.C. to work for the American Legislative Exchange Council, the influential pro-business state-level conservative lobbying group. After a few years, he was recruited by Cato to work on environmental issues.
When I met him in 2015, shortly after Niskanen’s founding, Taylor was fixated on the idea that libertarianism’s anti-statism was counterproductive to its supposed project of maximizing individual liberty. The Nordic countries, he pointed out, combine a robust welfare state with a strongly capitalist ethos. At the time, I found Taylor interesting but not particularly relevant: Niskanen seemed to be serving a niche within a niche.
The ideological journey that began with the hard right had left Taylor in the center, or perhaps on the center-left. In October 2018, in antitled “The Alternative to Ideology,” he announced he was embracing a new label: moderate. “Moderation has a poor image in American politics,” he acknowledged, yet moderate politicians tend to be the most popular, and the plurality of voters describe themselves as moderates.
Gayer, who had been serving as interim president of the Brookings Institution, took the reins late last year, paving the way for the organization to move past its brilliant but erratic founder. Gayer’s task now is to professionalize Taylor’s ragtag band and give it coherence at a moment when its approach is suddenly in demand.were not exactly a golden age of policy intellectualism. D.C. careened from crisis to crisis; Congress struggled to keep the lights on.
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