So much for not banishing people or dividing the sacred movement. “There is no such thing as a conservative cosmopolitan,” he said in a recent speech. While Heritage people didn’t sign the National Conservatism manifesto either, Roberts made his allegiance clear in a speech at last year’s convention of the faction: “I come not to invite national conservatives to join our conservative movement, but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.” Rather than sanctimoniously eschew hyphenated conservatism, the leadership has gleefully flayed the old establishment and emphasized populists and nationalists. Under Roberts, who took over in late 2021, the organization has rapidly changed its posture on a variety of issues where it used to get in trouble with conservative populists. It’s actually a pretty clever trap - create a document that says you love freedom, effectively dare your rivals not to sign it, at which point you can say, “Oh, so you’re against freedom?” The public unsigning enables Roy and his allies to cast themselves as free-speech martyrs against the Trumpy Political Correctness of the far-right.īut in terms of disingenuousness, the Heritage position is much wackier. So it makes no sense under the coalitional attitude to be allowing staff to sign on to a document trying to banish from the conservative movement a faction that they don’t like.” Given Heritage’s status as a “mothership,” Sharma said, “part of the goal is to have good relations with all factions of the conservative movement. “It’s for the organizers of that letter to establish the tent of acceptable opinion and therefore the tent of acceptable people.” “The point of the freedom conservatism statement is not for anyone to precisely tease out the hidden meaning,” said Saurabh Sharma of American Moment, a National Conservative-aligned group that sits on a Heritage advisory board. Heritage’s partisans put a more highbrow spin on it - saying it’s the “FreeCons” who are trying to decide who’s acceptable. In an internal civil war that has grown increasingly tribal, it’s less about the words in the statement than the names underneath it.Īnd in 2023, if you’re trying to stay out of hot water with donors and activists on the Trumpy right, best not to line up with the establishment crowd, even if their statement is a bunch of mom-and-apple-pie stuff.
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Rather than anything in the actual document - which populist types initially dismissed as anodyne claptrap - it appears to be a matter of the company the Heritage scholars were keeping: A bunch of mostly anti-Trump types created the statement as an implicit response to 2022’s National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles manifesto, a much more MAGA document full of culture-war broadsides and refrains against globalization that was signed largely by Trump-friendly bigwigs.
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Onge did not respond to a request for comment, and Griffith referred me to Heritage’s communications staff, who in turn pointed me to detailed explanations of the foundation’s “one voice” policy and cited recent statements from Heritage President Kevin Roberts decrying “ hyphenated conservatism,” the impulse to subdivide the movement and define rivals out of it. So what’s happened in that four-plus week period? Has Heritage’s position changed over those four weeks? If so, how?”
And here we are more than a month later and this order came through over the weekend. “Both Joel and Peter signed on after that, within several days. “We launched this document in mid July,” he said. Unlike many think tanks, Heritage has a longstanding policy requiring that employees vet their publications to make sure they don’t contradict the foundation’s official stance - a rule the pair had apparently fallen afoul of.īut what Roy said he couldn’t figure out was just what aspect of the manifesto represented a problem for Heritage, once the brightest star in Washington’s Reaganite policy firmament. “They both emailed me at the tail end of Labor Day weekend saying that they had been required by Heritage to take their names off the signatory list,” Roy told me.
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