What the Crackup of the Heritage Foundation Says About the Post-Trump Right

“You can never institutionalize the gut instincts of a great, heroic populist like Donald Trump, or Teddy Roosevelt, or Andrew Jackson,” Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, told me this spring. “But the point is that, moving forward, on the evening of Jan. 20, 2029, President Trump will have left the stage. We as conservatives have to answer the question, Where is this movement going? And what it can’t do — what it must not do — is go back to 20 years ago.”

The Heritage Foundation currently finds itself engulfed in an internal struggle that mirrors the one roiling the Republican Party: how to harness the energy unleashed by Trumpism without being completely overrun by its conspiracy- and nativist-minded elements, particularly among the rising generation that has known little else. Long accustomed to placing its experts in key positions in Republican administrations, as it did in Trump’s first term, Heritage presented its Project 2025 as just the kind of master plan an uncompromising second Trump administration would need to implement its agenda.

But once Trump took office, Heritage was instead pushed to the side. As it tried to work its way back into the center of power, the foundation was consumed by a vicious in-house conflict. An old guard of establishment experts saw themselves swamped by an influx of more radical, often younger conservatives eager to remake the institution for the post-Trump right in their image: terminally online, ruthless in fighting the culture wars and vehement in rejecting the dogmas of postwar conservatism.

A watershed moment came last October, when Roberts posted a video to X in support of Tucker Carlson, who had been widely criticized for inviting the 27-year-old white nationalist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes onto his show. Condemnations flooded in from across the right, with several of Carlson’s closest allies breaking with him over his decision to turn his show into what one of them, the Israeli American philosopher Yoram Hazony, recently called “the leading clearinghouse for virulent antisemitism on the political right.” Roberts leapt to Carlson’s defense, denouncing the “venomous coalition attacking” Carlson and arguing that conservatives should “feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class” and the “bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda.”

Roberts later apologized to Heritage staff for his choice of words, which some had criticized as playing into antisemitic tropes, and for having “let down this institution.” But when I asked him about the video, he insisted that it was Heritage’s job to figure out how to bring together a coalition that can win elections and exercise power effectively. Roberts, who is 52, projects a friendly, confident energy. He was wearing a fitted blue suit along with alligator-style cowboy boots, in keeping with his years as president of Wyoming Catholic College. Before taking over at Heritage in 2021, his pitch to the board of trustees, according to The Dispatch, was that he could marry the conservative movement’s new populist ethos with a traditional institution like Heritage. “You can’t have a governing coalition if you’re saying, I’m not even going to talk to people who occasionally listen to a podcast by someone who’s a total goofball,” he went on, referring to Fuentes. “That doesn’t mean that we endorse what that person says. We endorse trying to convince these people of what’s right, and what isn’t right.”

Many employees and experts at Heritage appeared to disagree with the premise that such people belonged in their coalition, and especially that anyone was trying to set them right. Longtime Heritage employees told me that the people they usually collaborated with in congressional offices, circuit courts, foreign embassies and other institutions no longer wanted to be publicly associated with Heritage and what they perceived as its fidelity to Carlson. In a resignation letter later made public, Josh Blackman, a legal scholar who had for years been working on a new edition of “The Heritage Guide to the Constitution,” said the volume’s contributors pulled out of an event promoting the book and refused to sign copies. Judges who had spoken at the foundation, Blackman wrote, said “they would no longer affiliate with Heritage.”

Read the rest here.

At CPAC a Generational Divide Over Iran

GRAPEVINE, Texas (AP) — A generational divide over the Iran war surfaced Thursday between older attendees and their political heirs at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, as the group’s leaders pleaded for unity in a challenging midterm election year for Republicans.

Younger conservatives spoke of disappointment and even “betrayal” over President Donald Trump’s launch of strikes against Iran, saying in interviews with The Associated Press that the president’s actions run counter to his many pledges to oppose foreign entanglements.

Meanwhile, older conservatives were looking past Trump’s campaign criticism of military action to topple foreign regimes, arguing the war in Iran is a pragmatic act forced by threats to the United States.

The bright dividing line emerged in conversations with a dozen participants on either end of the age spectrum who gathered for the annual meeting of conservatives, being held outside Dallas. That split could reflect flagging enthusiasm for Trump among some younger voters, a potentially troubling sign for Republicans heading into midterm elections and for the conservative movement as it looks to build beyond Trump’s tenure.

“We did not want to see more wars. We wanted actual America-first policies, and Trump was very explicit about that,” said Benjamin Williams, a 25-year-old marketing specialist for Young Americans for Liberty. “It does feel like a betrayal, for sure.”

Read the rest here.

Lessons of the Heritage Foundation's Implosion

Over the last two days, there has been a massive wave of resignations and departures of scholars and staff from the Heritage Foundation, once one of the nation's most respected conservative think tanks. Those leaving include the leadership of Heritage's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial  Studies,  leading economic policy scholars, my former student and Volokh co-blogger Josh Blackman (editor of the Heritage Guide to the Constitution), and more. This wave of departures follows in the wake of others, such as that of Princeton Princeton professor and prominent conservative political theorist Robert George, who resigned from the Heritage Board last month. Many of the Heritage refugees have moved to Advancing American Freedom (AAF), an organization led by former Vice President Mike Pence.

The immediate cause of the exodus was Heritage President Kevin Roberts' defense of anti-Semitic "influencer" Tucker Carlson and his support of Nick Fuentes, an even more virulent anti-Semite. As it has become clear that Roberts refuses to break his ties with Carlson and unequivocally condemn right-wing anti-Semitism, and that the Heritage board won't remove Roberts,  more and more people have left Heritage.

Read the rest here.

David Starkey: What is to be done?

The Gen Z Rising Star in Conservative Reporting

To understand the motivation of Aaron Sibarium, Yalie, Gen Z reporter and conservative media darling, it’s instructive to travel back in time to last December, and do a little eavesdropping.

Right outside D.C., in a small studio apartment tucked inside an urban-suburban complex in Arlington, Virginia, Sibarium chats it up with libertarian writer Richard Hanania in a video call for a podcast exploring “the right-wing echo chamber.” In other contexts, on other podcasts (like his own), you can find Sibarium leaning into his more conservative opinions, but this is not one of these moments. He’s here to punch right. 

“Everyone on the right wants to write essays and have their grand theories about political economy and the American Right taken very seriously from the time they’re young,” he says, “and the problem is that A) when you’re 22, you don’t really know anything and B) there’s a surplus of that writing already.” 

What he values, he says, is something different from the conservative hot take-machine: real investigations, seeking out scoops, digging for data. As he sees it, he’s providing a rare service, occupying a narrow journalistic niche: old-school, shoe-leather reporting from a conservative point of view. 

“It’s rare to see someone who will cover something like, say, race-based treatment of Covid drugs … who also is like not a crank and has an IQ above 120,” Sibarium says, cracking half a smile. 

This quip is effectively Sibarium’s Statement of Purpose. In the 2½ years since he became a reporter, he’s snared some major scoops: There was his piece exploring how states, advised by the FDA to do so, used racial preferences in rationing scarce Covid-19 drugs, giving preference to young people of color over older white people. (Some of the states stopped the practice soon after he reported on them.) He broke a story that exposed the Columbia Law School’s plans to require video statements from applicants, presumably to evade the Supreme Court decision banning the consideration of race in admissions. (Columbia abandoned that plan, insisting it was a mistake, when Sibarium asked them about it.) And he uncovered Yale administrators’ bullying of a non-Black student who called his apartment a “trap house” in a party invitation, a scandal that brought personnel changes to the school. 

Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, is 27, diminutive, nasally and “formerly autistic.” (More on that later.) He’s become a force on the right who’s drawn praise from conservatives as far apart as Tucker Carlson and David French, who called Sibarium “a rising star reporter.” Sibarium doesn’t see his project as wholly new, as there has been conservative reporting for decades, but he’s trying to do something a little different.

“What maybe is new-ish about my personal project,” Sibarium says, is that he is trying “to report on the culture war in a way that is fairly aggressive and combative.”

As Americans’ trust in media has cratered, driven almost entirely by independents and Republicans, Sibarium has hunkered down, abstained from flirtations with fascism and racism (in imagery, group chats or pseudonymous op-eds) and done what some people have long been begging conservatives to do more of: pure reporting, digging up and revealing new information. Sibarium has done that, quietly, without sting operations — and without the millions of eyeballs turned on pundits like Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino and Carlson.  

Read the rest here.

Ross Douthat on the perilous future of the GOP

For a long time, people have predicted the crackup of American conservatism, the end of a Republican Party dominated by the conservative movement as one of the major powers in our politics. Demographic trends were supposed to permanently marginalize the right. Barack Obama’s 2008 victory was supposed to signal conservatism’s eclipse. The rise of Donald Trump was supposed to shatter Republican politics the way that slavery once broke the Whigs.

Conservatism survived all these prophecies, always clawing back to claim a share of power, maintaining unity and loyalty by offering a bulwark against liberal ambition even as its own agenda became more and more threadbare.

So it would be a foolhardy prophet indeed who looked at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol and assumed that this time, under this pressure, the conservative coalition will finally break apart, sending the Republican Party deep into the wilderness and reshaping American ideological debates along new lines.

But breaking points do come, and the violent endgame of the Trump presidency has exposed a new divide in the conservative coalition — not a normal ideological division or an argument about strategy or tactics, but a split between reality and fantasy that may be uniquely hard for either self-interest or statesmanship to bridge.

Read the rest here. 

RIP: Sir Roger Scruton

A great champion of political/social conservatism and traditionalism, Sir Roger Scruton has died.

Memory eternal.


On Being Consrevative.

Eric Zemmour’s Blockbuster Speech

...Progressivism: the religion of progress, a form of millenarianism that makes a god of the individual and a sacred and divine right of even his most capricious desires.

Progressivism is a form of deified materialism that sees men as undifferentiated and interchangeable beings without sex or origin, beings that, like so many Legos, have been entirely constructed and may thus be deconstructed at will.

Progressivism is a form of secularized messianism, as were Jacobinism, communism, fascism, Nazism, neoliberalism and the ideology of human rights.

Progressivism is a revolution. Indeed, you may recall that our dear President titled his campaign book, Révolution. A revolution that can tolerate no obstacle, no delay, no qualms. Robespierre taught us that the wicked must be killed. For Lenin and Stalin. the good were to be killed, too.

The progressive society that values freedom is deadly to freedom. There is no freedom for the enemies of freedom. Saint-Just’s cry is still on the agenda. Since the Enlightenment, since the French Revolution, since the October Revolution and all the way up to the Third Republic and its radical freemasons, all the way till today, it’s always been the same progressivism: freedom is for them, not for the others. They alone can appreciate and exercise freedom. They alone are worthy of freedom.

...To serve this tyrannical power and impose its diversitarian ideology upon us, as my friend BockCôté aptly calls it, a system of propaganda has been created that brings together television, radio, film and advertising, to say nothing of the watchdogs of the internet. It has proven so effective that it makes Goebbels look like a humble artisan and Stalin a timid novice.

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr Tighe

A Young Appreciation of the Old Right

Calvin Coolidge has become cool again. 

Two large factions now define conservative politics across American universities. There are the right-libertarian or “classical liberal” students, and there are the traditionalist conservative students. Joined in opposition to the leftist academia, these factions cooperate with some hesitation.

Many libertarian students favor social and cultural policies that are more commonly found in the mainstream of the American Left, such as same-sex marriage and marijuana decriminalization. In contrast, traditionalist students oppose drug legalization, open borders, the sexual revolution, and crony capitalism. These fault lines appear everywhere, from College Republican meetings to fraternity houses.

Divisions on the Right, especially among the young and passionate, are not news. Much more curious is the endurance of an at least nominal coalition between these two opposed groups. This improbable alliance is predicated on a shared intellectual tradition, often attributed to the Enlightenment and Edmund Burke.

Recently, however, a seemingly forgotten group of American statesmen and intellectuals have become new symbols of this supposed heritage. In my interactions with peers at conservative conferences, meetings, and social functions, I keep hearing familiar references to the “Old Right.” Both libertarians and traditionalist conservatives reminisce about it as a way to imbue their hopeful entente with some intellectual vigor.

Read the rest here.

FTR I have been a Coolidge fan since my high school days (a very long time ago).

Revisiting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's warnings to the West

... According to Solzhenitsyn it was no coincidence that Soviet Russia shared certain common problems with the West, for he saw socialism and liberalism as kindred ideologies. Both were rooted in a common utopian project that began during the Enlightenment, he claimed, and thus both were marked by anthropocentricity—the belief that man is the measure of all things. Each ideology began by rejecting tradition and transcendent authority in favor of theories of liberation, and each was destined to afflict mankind with moral chaos. Although more economically efficient than socialism, liberalism will in the end prove just as unsatisfying, he concluded, for “the human soul longs for things higher, warmer and purer” than “commercial advertising, TV stupor, and intolerable music.”

Unsurprisingly, the Harvard address shocked Americans, particularly journalists, and even struck some of them as ungrateful. How could a man who had escaped the jaws of a despotic regime have the nerve to criticize the country which had taken him in? While Solzhenitsyn insisted that his criticisms were meant to be constructive, coming “not from an adversary but a friend,” he alienated Americans across the political spectrum by condemning a “destructive and irresponsible freedom” that had, in America, been granted “boundless space.” President Ford, put out by Solzhenitsyn’s intransigent anti-Communism, had already declared the dissident a “horse’s ass.” Now others agreed.

Asinine or no, Solzhenitsyn’s speech must be read in the context of Russian conservatism, a tradition which differs in key respects from its American counterpart. Whereas the American conservative imagination is typically informed by the US Constitution and the Founding Fathers, the Russian conservative takes his bearings from iconography, liturgical music, and folk tales. For better or worse, Russian patriotism is bound up with Slavic heritage and the Orthodox Church, not the ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.

Read the rest here.

Thank you Aleksandr Isayevich. May your memory be eternal.

Forget the liberals, the real fight in the Catholic Church is between conservatives

For most casual observers, whether Catholic or not, the main battle lines within American Catholicism today seem self-evident. The cleavage overlaps perfectly the divide between the political parties, leading to the frequently-used labels “liberal” and “conservative” Catholics. We have Nancy Pelosi and Andrew Cuomo representing the Left, and Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback aligned with the Right. Mainstream opinion has classified Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI as honorary Republicans, and Pope Francis as a Democrat (hence, why he is appearing on the covers of Time and Rolling Stone magazines).

This division does indeed capture real battle lines, but more than anything, the divide is merely an extension of our politics, and—while manned by real actors—does not capture where the real action is to be found today in American Catholic circles.

The real action does not involve liberal “Catholics” at all. Liberal Catholicism, while well-represented in elite circles of the Democratic Party, qua Catholicism is finished. Liberal Catholicism has no future—like liberal Protestantism, it is fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation. The children of liberal Catholics will either want their liberalism unvarnished by incense and holy water, or they will rebel and ask if there’s something more challenging, disobeying their parents by “reverting” to Catholicism. While “liberal” Catholicism will appear to be a force because it will continue to have political representation, as a “project” and a theology, like liberal Protestantism it is doomed to oblivion.

The real battle is taking place beyond the purview of the pages of Time Magazine and the New York Times. The battle pits two camps of “conservative” Catholicism (let’s dispense with that label immediately and permanently—as my argument suggests, and others have said better, our political labels are inadequate to the task).

Read the rest here.
HT: Dr. Tighe

This is one of the more interesting articles I have read in a while. I suspect that there will be at least some Orthodox who are sympathetic to the more trad wing of this debate, myself included. Lots of links in there for those really interested in following the ongoing fight.

One of the Great Socio-Political Philosophers You Never Heard Of

A belated Happy 100th Birthday to Nicolás Gómez Dávila (May 18th). And a particular thank you to Mr. Baltzersen of Wilson Unplugged for bringing him to my attention. The short Wiki article alone was enough to warm my reactionary heart. My "must read" list just got a lot longer.

Political Principals

Below are two short audio clips from a great American speaking on general political principals and discussing government and taxation. Anyone want to guess the identity of the speaker?

Political Principals

On Government Spending and Taxation

With grateful acknowledgment of the Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University for their preservation of these and other gems of our national heritage.