Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, will step down after nearly a decade of leading the conservative think tank.
Brooks wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal he instructed AEI’s board of trustees to start looking for his successor and said he believes “social enterprises thrive best” when their leaders don’t exceed a decade of service. He said the search will take place over the coming year.
In addition to announcing his impending departure, Brooks sounded the alarm on what he believes is an attack on the “competition of ideas.”
“Many would rather shut down debate than participate in it,” Brooks wrote. “Politicians from both parties try to discredit their opponents with name-calling and ad hominem attacks. On too many college campuses, people with the ‘wrong’ viewpoints are unwelcome. Much of the mass media has become polarized, meaning readers and viewers on the right and left are never challenged in their conviction that the other side is made up of knaves and fools.”
Brooks recalled one instance several years ago when, while giving a speech at a conservative event, he said he had “no reason to believe progressives are stupid or evil.”
An audience member told Brooks he was wrong, saying, “They are stupid and evil.”
“This bothered me because the person was insulting many of my family and friends,” he wrote. “You probably love someone with whom you disagree politically.”
Brooks said he believes Americans need to work to counter this phenomenon and urged them to “commit to stand athwart this trend.”
An accomplished economist and musician in addition to being the head of a prominent think tank, Brooks was perhaps best known among conservatives and Republicans on Capitol Hill for his ability to describe free-market economist and conservatism in approachable, optimistic terms.
Just on Thursday, the Harvard Business Review published an article by Brooks in which he discussed his tenure at AEI, describing how the think tank has measured its influence through proxy variables such as the number of op-eds placed in prominent newspapers and the number of times its scholars testify before Congress. AEI is first among think tanks on both metrics, according to Brooks.
During Brooks’ tenure, AEI also grew in size and purchased and moved into a new renovated 1917 Beaux Arts building on Massachusetts Avenue.
Under Brooks, several people affiliated with AEI joined the highest ranks of President Trump’s administration. Food & Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb was an AEI scholar before joining the administration, as was Council of Economic Advisers chairman Kevin Hassett. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was a donor.
AEI has not aligned with Trump the way that other conservative institutions, particularly its rival, the Heritage Foundation, have. Some scholars at AEI count themselves with “never Trump,” the group of conservatives who split with the GOP over Trump’s nomination.
For his part, Brooks has attributed Trump’s rise to a lack of respect for people left behind by economic growth, who haven’t been treated with dignity by other politicians. He’s also argued that some of Trump’s populist proposals, including on immigration and trade, are not the proper response to that problem.
In the op-ed announcing his departure, the AEI leader lamented what he described as “mediocrity through trivialization, largely from misuse of new media.”
“To understand this, remember Gresham’s law: ‘Bad money drives out good,’” he wrote. “If one form of currency is inherently more valuable than another in circulation, the better one will be hoarded and thus disappear.”
Brooks observed that today, academics spend time trading barbs on Twitter, while journalists allow their political biases to peak through on social media at a detriment to their reputations and that of their news organizations.
“When half-baked 280-character opinions and tiny hits of click-fueled dopamine displace one’s hard-earned training and vocation, it’s a lousy trade,” Brooks wrote.
Brooks has served as president of AEI since Jan. 1, 2009.
Before being chosen to run AEI, Brooks was a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, where he studied, in particular, research on happiness, charitable giving, and nonprofit organizations — studies that proved relevant to running a major think tank and cultivating donors.
He came to academia through an unusual route. Before going to college he worked as a musician, playing the French Horn in the U.S. and Europe, where he met his Spanish wife. In his late 20s, however, he gained his undergraduate degree through correspondence courses, and then earned a master’s in economics and then a PhD from the RAND Corporation.
Brooks has been a prolific writer and public intellectual as both a professor and AEI president. In addition to newspaper columns and other writings, he’s written 11 books. The most recent, 2015’s The Conservative Heart, is a manual for conservatives and the Tea Party movement to translate their free-market agenda into terms that would be attractive to non-conservatives and allow for a governing coalition.
