A HUNDRED years ago this week, diplomats and academics from the British and American delegations at the Versailles peace conference at the end of the first world war met for a dinner at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, a short stroll from the Arc de Triomphe. Their aim was to work out how to continue their fruitful co-operation beyond the peace talks and promote internationalist values in their countries.

Their initial idea for a single Anglo-American institute to fuse a weakened Britain and an ascendant America was not realised. But the dinner on May 30th 1919 gave rise to two institutions that have shaped public outlook and public policy on foreign affairs ever since: the Royal Institute for International Affairs (known as Chatham House, after the building in which it resides), set up in London in 1920, and the Council on Foreign Relations, founded the following year in New York. They have served as templates for numerous other think-tanks around the world.

Yet as the two organisations prepare to celebrate their centenaries, the festivities are tinged with anxiety. For how can institutions founded to pursue non-partisan, evidence-based research, carried out by experts, survive in an era when facts do not seem to matter quite so much?

After all, people have had “enough of experts”, in the words of Michael Gove, a senior Tory politician in Britain. President Donald Trump positively boasts of trusting his gut “more than anybody else’s brain”. Many of the West’s elected leaders have explicitly rejected the entire rationale for the sort of serious-mined wonkery that used to earn think-tanks influence, status and, most importantly, donors.

With their main customers—politicians and legislators—more eager to probe their digestive tracts rather than scour policy pamphlets for ideas, one might wonder whether think-tanks have had their day. Could they too go the way of five-year plans, Britain’s National Coal Board and Betamax?

Though the quest for fresh political ideas predate modern think-tanks—be it colonial America's pamphleteers or Britain's Fabian Society, founded in 1884—they served a vital function in the 20th century by presenting government officials with thoughtful analysis and policy options that were more immediate and relevant than from academia (but ideally held to the same standard and often by practitioners holding the same qualifications). This was the era of think-tanks, from private meetings at Chatham House to plan for reconstruction following the second world war, to Paul Baran at RAND conjuring up the idea for a data-network that became the internet.

The think-tank industry expanded rapidly, responding to an almost insatiable demand for bright ideas and practical policy proposals. Most of these were devoted to domestic and economic policy rather than foreign affairs. American and British think-tanks were often in lockstep at the forefront of ideological churn, from Keynesianism to Thatcherism/Reaganism in the 1980s, through to Blairism, the “third way” and Bill Clinton’s “New Democrat” era in the 1990s and beyond.

Think of the influence of the Institute of Economic Affairs on Mrs Thatcher, or the links between the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Reagan administrations. A political generation later, Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) contributed to the creation of Tony Blair’s New Labour. The Progressive Policy Institute provided the intellectual blueprints for Bill Clinton’s centrist agenda. The Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, the Aspen Institute and others were never too far away. Think-tanks not only contributed ideas, but also people; presidential and prime ministerial staffs were stuffed with their bright young wonks.

But as a class, the thinkocracy was caught out badly by the phenomena of Trump and Brexit. In neither case did it contribute much to these movements, nor did it see them coming. Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, has donned the hair-shirt. In an essay last November, he noted that “Western think-tanks evolved principally into supporters and managers of globalisation […] focusing excessively, or indeed exclusively, on the net gains […] and insufficiently, or indeed not at all, on the local dislocation and widening economic and social inequality.”

In Britain, the insurgency against the European Union, against immigration, against London and the south-east, against globalisation—all exposed by the Leave campaign’s victory in the Brexit referendum in 2016—largely by-passed London’s thinkocrats. In America, the policy jocks missed similar signs of anger on both the right and the left, whether the issue was the culture wars or the economy. The think-tanks thus failed in one of their primary functions: to analyse and clarify the main trends of the day, and consequently to advocate relevant policies. Accustomed to making the weather, think-tanks were victims of an intellectual storm.

Indeed, much of the new thinking (or gut-gazing) of men like Steve Bannon and Nigel Farage evolved specifically in opposition to what they perceived to be an out-of-touch elite of pointyheads and political careerists—exemplified (for them) by bodies such as Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations. In as far as Mr Trump has any use for advisers dealing in evidence-based arguments, it is, as one of those advisers, Cliff Sims, recalls of his time in the White House, to “provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition”. The concept of “objective truth” has broken down, especially in America—and this is exactly what think-tanks have traditionally aspired to enunciate.

Furthermore, this is symptomatic of a rising distrust of experts and professionals more generally. The loss of confidence in professions such as politics and journalism is well advertised. But in America, for instance, this has extended to all institutions associated with learning and knowledge. In 1974 the average confidence level for these institutions peaked at about 50%, yet by 2012 it had declined to just 31%. In Britain, according to YouGov, a polling organisation, in 2017 just 25% of respondents trusted economists—the backbone of many think-tanks—while 44% distrusted them. Only politicians were more distrusted. Think-tanks are equally on the receiving end of the new scepticism in Britain. In a poll last year only 17% of respondents trusted what think-tanks had to say.

The stakes are rising. The anti-fact populists are muscling up for a fight. Mr Bannon and others have leased a 13th-century monastery outside Rome to serve, in his words, as a right-wing “gladiator school for cultural warriors”. Mr Bannon wants it to be a counterweight to the Open Society Foundation backed by George Soros, a liberal-minded investor and philanthropist.

How can think-tanks survive in this setting? They could wait it out, of course. All the polling suggests that deepening political partisanship in both American and Britain accounts for some of this distrust in expertise. That is, Republicans are far more likely to be sceptical of evidence-based research and scientific methods than Democrats, just as Brexiteers are more sceptical of authority than Remainers.

As one academic study of contemporary American politics concludes: “For the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate”. The centre may yet regroup, provoking a renewed faith in objective facts. But that is to bet on the Trump era not being part of a long-term secular trend.

More to the point, think-tanks should help themselves. The first place to start is with trust. To an extent, people are right to be sceptical of the institutions’ claims to objectivity. Many of them have a long way to go in terms of openness and transparency. And far from being engrossed in the noble pursuit of truth and reason, some of the beltway think-tanks have begun to look more like brainy guns for hire, prepared to shoot off whatever argument a country or corporation gives them—a situation exposed by the New York Times. Brookings and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have come under particular scrutiny. The think-tanks need to be vigilant that they’re not simply selling their brands.

Next, think-tanks must get outside the bubbles of London, Washington, DC or New York and have a broader reach, both in terms of input and output. IPPR, for one, set up a well-respected branch in the north of England with offices in Manchester and Newcastle. Meanwhile, Chatham House has been expanding its London headquarters. As for CFR, it holds an annual “national” meeting in New York: its membership might learn more about the forces shaping American politics if the location were changed to Youngstown, Ohio—emblematic of a small city’s factory closures, crime and disgruntlement.

Last, think-tanks must not abandon their strengths, of reason and empirical analysis, but they need to draw from wider sources of knowledge and experience and then communicate their research to a wider audience. They means doing more to involve ethnic minorities, young people, people of different political persuasions and, most of all, fully-blown mavericks. Some of the thinkers who Mrs Thatcher deployed so successfully in her think-tanks were barely house-trained, but they certainly had plenty of attitude and iconoclasm, precisely what is needed to think the unthinkable. Sir Alfred Sherman, for one, had fought for the communists in the Spanish civil war; a journalist, he enjoyed nothing better than riling the bien pensants. Think-tanks can survive in a post-fact universe not by marshalling more facts but by showing more verve.

Three years after the meeting that gave birth to Chatham House and the CFR, the Hotel Majestic was the setting for another get-together: the so-called “dinner party of the century”. Five of the most acclaimed artists of the 20th century dined and debated there: the novelists James Joyce and Marcel Proust, the young painter Pablo Picasso, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the choreographer Sergei Diaghilev.

Each represented a new and vibrant strand of the Modernism in the air. Today their achievements are considered classics, but relegated to libraries and museums, respected more for their historical importance than their contemporary relevance. Think-tanks, an idea born of that era, must reform themselves to avoid a similar fate.