01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 28, 2004

THE FEDERAL ELECTION Commission is considering a proposal -- pushed aggressively by the Bush re-election campaign -- that would curb spending on federal elections by a handful of Democratic advocacy organizations. They are referred to as "527" groups, under the Internal Revenue Service provisions granting them tax exemptions. Republicans accuse the groups, including America Coming Together and MoveOn, of being little more than a shadow arm of the Democratic Party.

Yet Republican agitprop groups, also tax-exempt, have been politically active for years. This little-known political machine is in fact unparalleled in American political history, and it augments the official Bush campaign. It contains some 350 right-wing activist organizations, highly coordinated, adeptly led and well funded, by private foundations, corporations and individuals.

These GOP groups operate in unison as a virtual government outside the government in Washington and state capitals. They promulgate policy and lobby for it heavily in Congress, legislatures and the mass media. This activist constellation is counterrevolutionary and anti-constitutional, and it pushes for a one-party state.

Reinforced by this unofficial apparatus, the Republicans dominating the three branches of the federal government thwart constitutional checks and balances. In a recent study, "The Axis of Ideology," on the funding of this idea-action machine, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) says that "it has played a critical role in helping the Republican Party dominate state, local and national politics."

In formation since the early 1970s, this coalition of right-wing activist groups works from the same page to roll back the gains of center-to-left politics. It has tilted American governance, economics, education, media and law rightward.

NCRP finds that $253 million flowed between 1999 and 2001 alone to these 350 organizations, from 79 private grant-making organizations.

The Heritage Foundation, the senior component of the apparatus, was the lead recipient, at $25 million. Heritage drew up the post-inaugural agenda of the current Bush administration and is its employment and personnel-vetting arm. The NCRP report concludes that the right-wing establishment, fertilized by multiple millions, has "undoubtedly helped advance, market and strengthen the conservative agenda in all policy realms," from civil rights to international relations.

The apparatus leads the assault on affirmative action. Its policy and lobbying operations drive the privatization of Medicare and Social Security. Two think tanks -- the American Enterprise Institute and the Project for the New American Century -- housed leading planners of the Iraq war before Bush's inauguration.

They include Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff; Richard N. Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; and Paul Wolfowitz, now deputy secretary of defense.

Major media ignore the cumulative existence of this force. It thus operates invisibly -- in the open. Individually, its "fellows" and "experts" deluge op-ed pages, interview programs and talk shows, and produce an unending stream of books and magazine articles.

Rob Stein, a Washington researcher who lectures on this apparatus, estimates that since 1972 a total of $2.5 billion to $3 billion has flowed to its leading 43 affiliates. He terms these "the cohort, an incubator of right-wing ideological policies that constitute the Bush administration's agenda."

The cohort, he says, is "a potent, never-ending source of intellectual content, laying down the slogans, myths, and buzz words" -- such as the myth of the liberal media -- "that have helped shift public opinion rightward."

Representatives of these affiliated organizations meet each Wednesday in Washington under ad-hoc director Grover Norquist, who heads Americans for Tax Reform, to coordinate action, hone strategy and refine talking points. The cohort includes the multiple-issue think tanks mentioned above and the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Reason Foundation, Citizens for a Sound Economy (lobbying for Bush's tax cuts for the rich), the Cato Institute (leading the charge to privatize Social Security), the Lexington Institute (larger defense budgets), the Federalist Society (propounding legal theory for right-wing litigators), the American Legislative Exchange Council (influencing state policies), the Young America Foundation (student recruiting and training on campuses), and the National Association of Scholars (assaulting affirmative-action programs in higher education).

Their ideological platform, which is better known than its activist promoters, is: less government, lower taxes for the wealthy, restrictions on the public right to sue, and "pure" free-marketry, unfettered by regulations or the public interest. Bush campaigns to empower the ideological agenda of the apparatus, and the apparatus, in turn, campaigns for Bush.

In the early 1970s, when the movement was spawned, seed funding came from a relative handful of private foundations established by far-right industrialists and inherited wealth. They included the Bradley Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the quartet of foundations controlled by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Smith Richardson Foundation (Vicks), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors beer) and the Koch-family foundations (energy).

The movement was energized by a soon-to-be Supreme Court justice, Lewis Powell, and soon-to-be Treasury secretary and energy czar, William Simon.

In social ferment over consumer rights, Vietnam, racial injustice and Watergate, Powell, then a Richmond, Va., lawyer, wrote a memo that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce distributed widely, calling for an organized assault on what Powell saw as the ramparts of the "Liberal Establishment": politics, media, courts and campus. He exhorted big business to become politically active.

Simon wrote two highly influential books calling for business leaders, intellectuals and students to create a "counter-intelligentsia" that would roll back the "despotism" of liberalism.

Spurred by the election of Ronald Reagan, in 1980, Powell's and Simon's blueprints produced what Sidney Blumenthal calls the "counter-establishment."

Years later, as liberals gear up to combat it, some liberal leaders wonder whether it's too late.

Jerry M. Landay, of Bristol, a former CBS-News correspondent, is an occasional contributor. This article is adapted from a longer piece that he wrote for www.mediatransparency.org.