Lessons of the Heritage Foundation's Implosion

The decline of this major conservative institution has been a wakeup call for conservative intellectuals. But will they draw the right lessons from it?

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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.

Perhaps more importantly, the Heritage scandal has served a kind of wakeup call to many conservative intellectuals who were previously inclined to ignore or minimize dangerous trends in the Trump-era political right. As I have previously noted, the rot at Heritage long predates the current scandal. I myself decided to forego any potential future collaboration with Heritage years ago, which is why I refused an invitation to contribute to the Heritage Guide when Josh invited me (I should have been fully honest about my reasons for refusing, at the time). I had been a college student intern at Heritage way back in 1994, when the organization was very different from what it is today.

It would have been better if those now leaving Heritage had recognized the organization's moral deterioration earlier. But better late than never! And I certainly understand that such a break is more psychologically painful for people who consider themselves conservatives and had longstanding close ties to the organization, than it was for me. I am a libertarian, not a conservative, and I have had only limited contact with Heritage since that long-ago internship.

There is, I hope, growing recognition that the problem here goes well beyond Kevin Roberts (though Roberts certainly deserves blame). In his resignation letter, Josh Blackman laments that Roberts "aligned the Heritage Foundation with the rising tide of antisemitism on the right," implying that the "tide" is a more general phenomenon. In a statement welcoming the former Heritage scholars to AAF, former VP Pence said "these people are coming our way [because]…. Heritage and some other voices and commentators have embraced big-government populism and have been willing to tolerate antisemitism."

I hope Josh, Pence, and other conservatives will come to recognize more fully that the root of the problem is the Trump-era shift of most of the American right towards ethno-nationalism. For reasons outlined in detail in my recent UnPopulist essay on this topic, nationalist movements are inherently prone to anti-Semitism and other forms of racial and ethnic bigotry. It is not surprising that anti-Semitism among MAGA conservatives has risen alongside nativism and bigotry towards other minority groups, such as Indian-Americans.

As I explained in the UnPopulist article, the only sure way to avoid this problem is to reject ethnic nationalism and instead recommit to the universalist principles of the American Founding, which the Heritage Foundation once claimed to stand for, but has more recently betrayed:

Conservatives who seek to curb the growth of antisemitism on the right must reject nationalism and recommit to the principles of the American Founding.

In his resignation statement from the Heritage board, Robert George urged Heritage to be guided by the principles of the Declaration of Independence, especially the idea "that each and every member of the human family, irrespective of race, ethnicity, religion, or anything else; … is 'created equal' and 'endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights….'"

In his General Orders to the Continental Army, issued on the occasion of the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, George Washington stated that one of the reasons the United States was founded was to create "an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and religions." Other leading Founding Fathers—including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson—expressed similar sentiments.

Washington sounded a similar theme in his famous 1790 letter to the congregation of the Rhode Island Touro Synagogue, in which he avowed that the United States has "an enlarged and liberal policy," under which "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship," and that the U.S. government "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." America, he emphasized, went beyond "mere toleration" of Jews to granting them full equality. It could do so because American identity was based on universal liberal principles, not ethnic or religious particularism.

The United States has never been completely free of bigotry, including antisemitism, or fully lived up to its ideals. But it has never given up on these ideals either, as much of the right effectively wants it to do now. America has been relatively more free of such prejudices than many other nations, precisely because of its universalist roots. We have also been at our most successful when we reject zero-sum thinking, and instead recognize that the success of Jews, Indians, and other minorities and immigrant groups is beneficial to the majority, rather than harmful to it….

A conservative movement that recommits to the universal principles of the Founding need not abandon all its differences with the left, or with libertarians like me…. But we can unite in rejecting racial and ethnic bigotry.

For more on the dangers of nationalism, see  my 2024 article, "The Case Against Nationalism," coauthored with Alex Nowrasteh.