ABSTRACT
Foundations are nonpolitical institutions that, by the nature of their work, live on the edge of politics and in the shadow of, even the embrace of, the programs of government. The politically conservative foundations were on the whole far less enterprising and influential. The neoconservative hostility also rests partly on their feeling that the large liberal foundations have provoked some of the most dangerous and destructive tendencies in American life, such as the student disorders of the 1960s. Liberal and Democratic political experts now agree with the neoconservatives about the growing importance of ideas in contemporary politics and therefore of the hatcheries that produce them. This is due, in their common view, to the diminished value in electoral campaigns of old-style political organizations, the decline in party discipline, the rapid growth in the number of independent voters, and the rising importance of television in the campaign process.
