AEI does have very well-credentialed members and prestige, but if you look at their history they are still partisan hacks, providing intellectual justification

AEI does have very well-credentialed members and prestige, but if you look at their history they are still partisan hacks, providing intellectual justification for dangerous partisan nonsense. I used to try to be even-handed and give people like them equal credit, but it was a false equivalency and they are parasites on that open-mindednes. There are reasonable conservative ideas, some of which I support, but climate change denial, torture, the Iraq invasion, absolute refusal to increase any taxes rates, default on the US debt, and many others are absurd and outside the pale (I don't know AEI supports all of those). It's time we started calling it what it is; the damage is too serious. (There are partisan left-wing think tanks, though not as many AFACIT, and I think they are equally absurd.) > There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers" The backers of the modern Tea Party are John Birchers by a new name. The policies are similar and the Koch brothers' father, for example, was either a John Birch Society founder or at least a leader (IIRC; I don't have time to check the details, sorry). > But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared It is the right wing fringe that has created this situation, and it's still mostly a problem of the right. There is no influential left-wing equivalent of Fox' propaganda, by far the leading cable news channel, the Wall St Journal editorial page (the NY Times isn't nearly as partisan), or of right-wing talk radio (Limbaugh, etc.). For example, the Tea Partiers in Congress refuse to respect that their fellow citizens should have a say in the nation's laws and oppose everything that doesn't go exactly their way. They literally try to do serious damage to their own nation's government and economy to get their way. There is no equivalent on the left. Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans (not voted out by Tea Partiers) are willing to make deals. It hasn't always been a problem primarily of the right; the radical left was ascendent and probably equally problematic a few decades ago. But it's a dangerous delusion to overlook the problem on the right now. The real division needs to be between moderates and radical idealogues, who will sacrifice the rest of us to their dogmas. The idealogues of 2015 are mostly on the right.