DeMint also brought in his own management lineup from his Senate days: Ed Corrigan, Wesley Denton, and Bret Bernhardt. At Heritage, the three became DeMint’s enforcers. There is now a political check on all Heritage research papers to make sure they conform to the political and tactical line before they go out the door. Corrigan killed one such paper, defending the law authorizing National Security Agency practices as constitutional, only to have the Brookings Institution, a relatively liberal think tank, publish it. Corrigan also put the kibosh on several policy papers on the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, including one by Heritage scholar Edmund Haislmaier about what states should do on Medicare expansion. Because the official Heritage strategy was now to defund Obamacare, any paper acceding to a reality in which the law existed was verboten. The scandalous Heritage report on immigration, co-authored by a scholar who had once claimed that Hispanic immigrants have lower IQs than whites, was also the product of DeMint’s approach: Policy analysts were shut out of the discussion, and the paper, which was written to conform with DeMint’s anti-immigration stance, did not go through the standard vetting procedure.

Corrigan and three Heritage Foundation scholars met with our group. They were all white men that, with the exception of Corrigan who is quite striking with his pre-maturely silver hair (you can see a picture here), looked so much alike that I would not be able to pick them out of a line up (having failed to note their names, I actually went to the Heritage Foundation website to try and identify them from their photos and couldn’t do it).

Washington etiquette, and the terms of my fellowship, prevent me from reporting the details of our discussion, but I can certainly share my experience of the event. Personally, it was excruciating sitting through the presentations from Corrigan and his colleagues, especially since many of their positions on civil rights are in direct conflict with my own interests and experience. And, I was not the only one squirming in my chair. Many of the questions my colleagues asked were vaguely, if not openly, confrontational.

Initially I wanted to get up and walk out, but then I began to channel my anger into seeing this as an opportunity to learn how these Heritage scholars think about negotiating the boundary between politics and policy. They work at an organization that, unlike “liberal think tanks” such as Brookings whose policy analysts could, and do, make conflicting policy recommendations, is explicitly committed to conservative public policy. I wondered how self-aware they were about the epistemological implications of this position. On the one hand, what they are doing appears to violate the basic foundation of mainstream social science research in America, namely that the minimum standard of good research is not whether or not it accords with a set of values-based criteria, but rather that it must meet criteria of falsifiability. You have to be able to answer the question, “How do I know if I’m wrong?” On the other hand, there is something vaguely Marxist in their insistence that all think tanks have a political agenda. If all knowledge is value-laden, perhaps they could argue that they make their agenda explicit while others hide behind a veneer of objectivity. I decided to try and find out if they are as intellectually promiscuous as they appear.

In spite of the highly unlikely possibility of hearing a defensible “Marxist” argument come out of their mouths, I wanted to ask my question in a way that gave them them just enough rope to either save or hang themselves. Already having been told repeatedly, and only half-jokingly, not to use words like “hypothesis” and “epistemology” in Washington, I asked, “If you are committed to a conservative political agenda, yet you perform fact-based research, what do you do with the data that does not support your political position?” After I finished the room fell silent and one of my APSA colleagues simply said “Boom.” Without repeating anything that the Heritage fellows actually said, my impression was that none of them had spent much time thinking about it. Corrigan offered a canned response that did not address the question at hand, but one of the Heritage fellows did appear to grapple honestly with the possibility that reality might diverge from his idealized version of it. It was as if the idea had never really occurred to him before, in which case he is not intellectually promiscuous at all. It’s worse: He’s a true-believer, fully committed to the cause.