Another Brick Out the Wall
Don't tell me there's no hope at all
WSJ (“The Heritage Foundation Blows Up“):
The debate over the direction of the post-Trump right is underway, and one of the first casualties is the Heritage Foundation. On Monday some of its most important conservative scholars and their policy departments said they are leaving Heritage to join Mike Pence’s policy shop.
Some 15 or more Heritage employees, including the leaders of three prominent policy departments, are jumping to the Advancing American Freedom foundation that the former Vice President established in 2021. The defectors include the leaders of Heritage’s most important policy shops: The Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, the Center for Data Analysis, and the Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies.
The move by John Malcolm and his colleagues at the Meese Center is especially notable. We’re told it is endorsed by Mr. Meese, the Reagan-era Attorney General who is now 94 years old and has been a fixture at Heritage. The Roe Institute is the think tank’s free-market shop—or it was before Heritage embraced Trumpian industrial policy. One data project stifled at Heritage is to map the district-by-district impact of the Trump tariffs.
“They called us first,” says Mr. Pence about the defectors. “They see us as being a consistent, reliable home for Reagan conservatism.” Or maybe simply conservatism, which Heritage was founded to promote and did for decades. But that changed with the arrival of Kevin Roberts as president, who tried to play the game of populist politics rather than promote the think tank’s traditional principles.
Heritage once supported free trade; now it is protectionist. It once supported a robust American foreign policy; Heritage purged its defense hawks two years ago. Heritage was a supporter of the originalist judicial revolution and the rule of law; now it defends Mr. Trump’s expansion of executive power whether or not it has a constitutional basis.
The Heritage turn has been the work of Mr. Roberts and the young Tucker Carlson admirers he brought on board. Conservatives need to “know what time it is,” Mr. Roberts likes to say as a sneer at conservatives who believe the movement should still stand for more than a lunge for power.
Tension has been building inside Heritage for a long time, as our Kate Odell reported in 2023. It broke into the open after Mr. Roberts said there should be no enemies to the right as he defended Mr. Carlson’s softball interview with Nazi fanboy Nick Fuentes.
Several Heritage board members have resigned, as has Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore. Monday’s departures are the largest so far, and they underscore how far Heritage has wandered under Mr. Roberts. Mr. Pence and his board have set a target of $15 million from donors to finance the defecting analysts for three years, and as of Friday we hear they had raised more than $13 million.
Later on Monday two other Heritage stalwarts, Cully Stimson and Hans von Spakovsky, also resigned with what they called “a heavy heart and profound sadness.” Readers will recognize both bylines from our pages.
This is just the latest sign of a rupture in the elite portion of the MAGA coalition. While Heritage was long rather mainstream, it was after all the home for Project 2025. A mass exodus there is more than a minor curiosity.
In this particular case, it seems motivated by genuine revulsion over the overt anti-semitism and white/Christian Nationalist turn. While it was always there, even in the 2016 campaign, it mostly operated on the fringes and offered plausible deniability. When Heritage is hosting defending the likes of Fuentes, that’s no longer possible.
In other cases, there is backlash on policy issues like the significant impact Trump’s mercurial tariff policies are having on profits, shock (for inexplicable reasons) that the administration seems to be favoring Russia over Ukraine and our NATO allies, the sheer cruelty of the immigration roundup, and the abandonment of other longstanding conservative policy positions.
Whether any of this constitutes a “vibe shift,” much less the ending of “cruelty as the dominant culture,” remains to be seen. After all, significant numbers of Republican elites, notably national security professionals who started the #NeverTrump movement, rejected the original shift and were easily replaced by working class folks brought in by the culture wars, economic frustrations, or a simple desire to burn the whole thing down.
Still, it’s noteworthy. For a decade, Republicans in positions of power bent the knee. They put their fingers in the wind and decided that the only way to survive politically in the party was to support whatever Trump was pushing, regardless of how much is violated their own ideological or ethical inclinations. We’re now seeing a growing number who either feel emboldened to resist or who are deciding it’s no longer worth it and getting out of elective office.
In this morning’s open forum, longtime commenter Michael Reynolds observes,
Is MAGA growing? No.
Is Trump increasing in popularity? No.
Has MAGA organized effectively? No.
Has opposition faded? No.
Has the opposition become more focused? Yes.
Has MAGA reached the Brown Shirt level? No.
Is Trump weakening physically, visibly aging? Yes.
Is he increasingly unfocused, less able to craft an effective message? Yes.
Did the gerrymandering maneuver work? No.
Has the international community, NATO and Canada, surrendered? No.
Has the military swung to Trump’s side? No.
Is the frantic re-naming a sign of strength? No.
Is there currently someone who can take over for Trump and keep MAGA united? No.
Alas, as Steven and I noted earlier in the week, Trump remains in power and continues to destroy longstanding institutions and otherwise make decisions that will have long-term consequences unable to be easily or quickly undone. While there are some one-offs on the Epstein files and ObamaCare subsidies, thus far the House has been unwilling to exert its power. Ditto the Supreme Court. For now, at least.
But the House majority is thin and getting thinner as Republican Members resign prematurely. And it’s possible that, once SCOTUS rules on cases in full rather than issuing preliminary rulings without explanation on the Shadow Docket, they’ll uphold the Constitution as we’ve known it in the modern era.
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I think this is an example of what I have noted for some time: our politics contains the pieces of more than two parties. This kind of split between pro-business, more traditional conservatives, and the nationalists/MAGA types (before anyone jumps on my categories, those are meant to be basic, not comprehensive descriptors) is the kind of thing I am talking about. If the electoral systyem was more representative, we would see a clearer evolution of such groups. The problem is that while think tankers can move from one to the other, politically, both sides have to work together electorally, which will continue to empower the nationalist side, especially since they have more power at the moment anyway.
BTW, a correction:
Unless I missed something, the issue was embracing Tucker Carlson and defending his platforming of Fuentes, not some direct hosting of Fuentes.
What will be interesting is where these renegades end up politically, especially if Vance is able to corral the nomination early and fend off a serious challenge. Mostly they’ve been anti-anti trumpers with some grudgingly supporting the felon. It is hard to see them joining the anti trump right, essentially the neo-conservatives, a group that is partly advocating that conservatives hold their nose and vote for Dems.
Recognizing that this is a small group, but they are influencers of a portion of the MAGAt coalition.
@Steven L. Taylor: I agree that the conservative coalition contains multitudes that are forced to work together. (That’s true of the more progressive coalition as well, of course.) Trump was managing to hold them in line in a way no politician in my memory has been able to do. That seems to be fading.
@Steven L. Taylor: No, that’s right. There have been so many of these incidents that they’ve congealed into on in my mind.
@Sleeping Dog: That’s the open question. Either they try to reclaim leadership of the conservative coaliton or they join the center-left coalition and try to steer the Democratic Party in their direction. Whether there are enough of them to do either is hard to say.
All those No’s are encouraging. But what about Turning Point USA? And when push comes to show will Heritage and Advanced American freedom line up to support a MAGA like morphed group, the way Pense did in 2015?