When American conservatives abandon free-market principles, there’s no telling what follows. The Heritage Foundation has been illustrating this the past few months.
One of the largest conservative think tanks in D.C. has been bleeding talent. Three members of its board of trustees resigned. Longtime conservative movement leaders such as Chris DeMuth and Stephen Moore cut ties.
Then, on Monday, three of Heritage’s research divisions moved almost as entire units to Advancing American Freedom (AAF), the conservative group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. The heads of the legal, economics and data analysis teams at Heritage defected to AAF, and they took many of their employees with them. This nearly doubles AAF’s staff, and the organization says to expect more hires. AAF also says it has raised at least $12 million in the past two weeks to support the new staffers and the projects they will be working on.
The proximate cause of these shifts was a video in October by Heritage President Kevin Roberts defending Tucker Carlson’s softball interview of antisemitic and racist influencer Nick Fuentes. If this sounds like an esoteric reason for such upheaval, that’s because it’s not the only reason. For years now, Heritage has been straying from free-market principles it once championed, causing much consternation among scholars who genuinely believe in those ideals.
Departures are not limited to the last few months. Some, such as financial regulation expert Norbert Michel and tax policy expert Adam Michel (they’re not related), now work for libertarian organizations. Others, such as budget scholar Paul Winfree, left to found new groups. Many of Heritage’s scholars who supported free trade left sporadically over several years.
Since its founding in 1973, Heritage had supported free trade. In 1993, Heritage hailed NAFTA as the realization of Ronald Reagan’s vision, since he had negotiated the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement that preceded it and supported free trade with Mexico as well. The group continued to support free trade during Trump’s first term.
When Roberts became president in December 2021, he brought a hostile attitude to free trade and a lower opinion of free markets generally. While he talks about the need for unity among conservatives and extolls the big-tent nature of Trump’s coalition, it has long been clear that there’s more room in Roberts’ tent for populist skeptics of free markets than those who are enthusiastic about them. Monday’s mass exodus confirms that.
Many of these fellows previously reasoned that they could be more helpful to the free-market cause by holding the line within the organization than by leaving. When the day-to-day battles became more about whether they’d face consequences for posting “Nazis are bad” online than about the finer points of budget policy, this position became untenable.
Support for free markets historically has been part of the glue that held the conservative movement together. That was the conviction of conservative leaders such as William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan and Heritage founder Edwin Feulner. They believed any long-term political movement needed to embrace free markets as foundational.
Monday’s most striking move might have been former attorney general Ed Meese, one of Reagan’s closest advisers as California governor and later president, throwing his full support behind the defections. AAF will now host a Meese Institute for the Rule of Law.
“Conservatives must resist the temptation to abandon their defense of free enterprise in pursuit of short-term victories,” Feulner and Pence wrote in an article together for National Affairs that ended up being Feulner’s last published work before his death in July. Heritage’s descent into chaos shows what can happen when that temptation is indulged.
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