For the past several weeks, the American conservative movement has been publicly embroiled in a bitter, existential conflict between factions seeking to win control of its future. And after speaking with a number of people on the right, including a well-placed source who describes seeing some ugly events at the Heritage Foundation, one of the most influential think tanks in the conservative movement, I’ve come to think this is not a one-off struggle.
Rather, it’s a harbinger of the post-Trump future to come.
The Fort Sumter moment of this particular civil war came in late October, when Tucker Carlson — arguably the MAGA right’s most influential journalist — hosted Nick Fuentes, a gutter antisemite with a large online following, on his podcast for a friendly interview. The subsequent attacks on Carlson pulled in his ally Kevin Roberts, Heritage’s president, who vehemently defended Carlson and his decision to platform Fuentes from the "venomous coalition” on the right attacking him.
Then the backlash began in earnest, with some Heritage scholars and even Republican senators speaking out publicly. Chris DeMuth, one of Heritage’s most prominent recent hires, quit in protest. In a November staff meeting, video of which leaked to the press, more than one staff member told Roberts to his face that they expected him to resign.
And the conflict is escalating well beyond Heritage.
In early November, two board members of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute — the oldest right-wing campus organization in America — resigned in protest over what they saw as an unacceptable drift toward Carlson-style politics. Afterward, the two men published a letter calling on conservatives to “choose to fight on the side of William F. Buckley, Jr. and give no corner to those preaching white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and bigotry.”
When you hear this rhetoric, you may think that this is a simple struggle between the honorable conservative old guard and the insurgent online right. And yet, there is an obvious problem with this framework: The remaining “old guard” on the right today is almost uniformly pro-Trump. Those Buckleyite conservatives who opposed him, warning of precisely the kind of degradation we’re seeing today, have functionally left the movement; their institutions-in-exile, like The Bulwark, now make up the right flank of American liberalism.
What is happening now, then, is less about preserving the genteel Buckley-and-Reagan right (which itself was always more dependent on extremists than many conservatives are willing to admit). Rather, it is about defining what comes next — or, more precisely, what comes next after Trump. And the leaders of right-wing institutions no longer have the power to police their own and say, “We will go this far, but no farther.”
The result is that the right is going through its own version of the left’s 2020, when ideas from its most radical factions broke containment and became debated in the traditional halls of power. Only, instead of police abolition and “white fragility,” the ideas in question are pushing women out of the workplace and executing “perfidious Jews.”
The “rot” at Heritage
Given the anti-Roberts furor among some of Heritage’s staff, you might think that the organization is a bastion of principled conservatism reflecting on its recent choices. But one Heritage insider I spoke to painted a different, and more worrying, picture of its internal culture.
This person is quite familiar with both Roberts and Heritage’s upper echelons; were I to publish their name, there is a very real chance their career would be over. But nonetheless, they felt the need to speak out, so we’re not disclosing their name in order to protect them from retaliation.
The source had only kind words for Kevin Roberts as a person — "nothing but a gentleman" — and professed deep appreciation for the organization Roberts leads and its importance for the American right.
"If I didn't care about Heritage," they said, "I would not be doing this at all."
You can read the rest of Zack's story on Vox.com.
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