First, a big Thank You!
The Rockridge Institute was founded with a mission: to teach Americans about the role of values and framing in political debate, and to help progressives equalize the framing advantages enjoyed by conservatives. With your help, Rockridge has done more than any small think tank could be expected to do. About 1,000 of you have donated to support our efforts. More than 8,000 have registered as members of Rockridge Nation to engage actively with us. And hundreds of thousands, both in the US and abroad, have bought our books and used our materials. If you are one of those hundreds of thousands, political discourse will now look different to you. As you read the newspapers and the blogs and watch TV, you can see the effects of our work everywhere. Your support has made that possible. For this and so much more, you have our complete admiration and gratitude.
Nonetheless, the Rockridge era will come to an end on April 30.
What we have written will remain as archives on our websites www.rockridgeinstitute.org and www.rockridgenation.org.
The end of any organization, even a small one, is a complex matter, and an emotional one for those who have invested themselves in its life. In important ways, Rockridge's triumphs and its limitations reflect the state of the progressive community and point to what the progressive future needs to be. Let's begin at the beginning.
The Rockridge Institute was formed to address a set of challenges: The right-wing think tanks, after spending 35 years and 4 billion dollars, had come to dominate public debate. They had done this by framing Big Ideas their way: the nature of government, the market, taxation, security, morality, responsibility, accountability, character, nature, even life. This allowed them to then frame lower-level issues, special cases like terrorism, Iraq, education, health care, retirement, stem-cell research, the death penalty, affirmative action, and on and on.
Our challenge was to figure out exactly how they had achieved such dominance over the minds of Americans and what progressives could do—not just how to respond case by special case, but how to do the Big Job: to reframe the Big Ideas governing our politics.
Frankly, I'm sad and a bit confounded about why they didn't make it more well known they were in trouble. For those of you not familiar with their work, I urge you to check out their website. They were an amazing group of people who had a large impact on the current progressive movement. I'm very interested in seeing what they do next.
