Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the sitting president of a think tank, conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts,
We discussed the operations and practical utility of think tanks, the state of progressivism in the academic environment, how multiple generations of students have now been rendered incapable of facing adversity while claiming to fight it, and why intellectual combat is not something to shut down, but to champion against all odds.
So, you know, I was much older than I should have been as an educated person to understand what a think tank was and how they operated. And, you know, I'm probably not as clear about all the details still as I might be. I don't know anything about their history or who set up the first one. I don't really know exactly who draws upon them and why and what effect they have on
public policy at the local and state and national level. And so maybe we could start by just having you give everyone watching and listening a good description of what a think tank is and to put them in context before we start talking about your think tank and specifically.
Great question. At its base, any think tank, whether it's on the political left or the political right or in the center, starts with research. It may focus on a certain set of public policy issues. The purpose of that research is a little bit different, maybe even a lot different in some cases than the research that you might do as a professor or that I was doing as a history professor. And that is the purpose of the research at a think tank is to affect the outcome of public policy.
Some think tanks will only focus on the research. Other think tanks, as we'll no doubt discuss, will use that research and then hire people to go advocate, that is to say that they're lobbyists, to directly influence the outcome of public policy, whether that's at the federal level in the United States, obviously, with Congress and the executive branch at the state level or even at the local level. So they are to sum up
quasi-academic institutions. In fact, many people will leave academia strictly defined the university to do work at a think tank, although there are many people who are professors full-time at universities who do project or contract-based work for think tanks. I understand as a concluding point to this definition of think tanks broadly,
that the United States has the most robust, vibrant system of think tanks across the political spectrum of any place in the world. So about how many high-end think tanks are operating in the US and are they predominantly a conservative enterprise or a liberal or a progressive enterprise? Is it distributed across the political spectrum?
It's fairly distributed across the political spectrum, although in the last generation or so, say the last 25 or 30 years, the proportion of high-end think tanks of which there are maybe a dozen, maybe 15 in the country.
The proportion of them who are on the political right has increased. And I think that's a result of the conservative movement maturing, if you will, many, if not most of these think tanks are based in Washington, D.C. Although a couple of them are based elsewhere in New York, there are some think tanks on the right, including one that I used to lead that's based in Texas. There's a growing number of state-based groups that are affecting not just their own state policy, but also federal policy.
So, well, it also may be that there's been a need for conservative think tanks to emerge because, as is well known on statistical grounds, rather than merely being a consequence of a conspiracy theory, there are virtually no conservatives.
in universities at the faculty level and certainly vanishingly few in the social sciences and the humanities, which is where most of the research that pertains to policy would otherwise be conducted. And so you could imagine that the establishment of private
Enterprises that are devoted towards research on the conservative side might do something to redress that imbalance and I understand that heritage foundation course certainly plays that role. Do you think that's also contributing factor to the emergence of the conservative think tanks in the US?
It's huge. In fact, not that my story of how I became president of the Heritage Foundation is the most important or the most instructive, but that example that you just mentioned of professors who are politically conservative in the social sciences and humanities being in small number is something I lived out. In fact, when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas, not known for its political conservatism, out of a few hundred graduate students in history,
I was the only conservative I was aware of, of those of us who were teaching assistants, 60, 70 of us, I absolutely was the only one. And so it was no surprise to me when I had my tenure track job at a Southwestern public university that I was the only conservative. In fact, as would no doubt surprise you, in the entire college of liberal arts and sciences, there was only one other right of center professor I was aware of out of a couple hundred faculty.
And so the relationship between that fact, that reality and the emergence of a growing number of conservative think tanks is very direct because many of us have said forget the mistreatment, which is not an overstatement of conservatives and the social sciences and humanities and public policy. We're just going to go directly or work directly for these public policy organizations, especially those that want to work on higher education policy or education policy at large.
So I'm going to ask you a bit of a meandering question. It's partly a description of how I became aware of political corruption in the social sciences enterprise. So I trained as a clinical psychologist and a clinical researcher.
And that's actually a very different discipline than social psychology. And so social psychology is at the intersection, let's say, of sociology and psychology. It focuses on the effect of group affiliation, let's say, on psychological processes. And it's a radically leftist, sub-discipline. And I would say it's quite corrupt. And one of the ways I discovered that corruption
was by beginning to investigate the technical structure of the belief system that makes up progressivism or left-wing thinking, especially left-wing authoritarianism. And as I delved into that,
I learned much to my shock, I would say, that there was an insistence among social psychologists and then everyone that was influenced by them, that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism, that authoritarianism in and of itself was only a conservative phenomenon and a right-wing phenomenon.
that, and I really couldn't understand that at all, because the evidence that there's left-wing authoritarianism to call it compelling is to say almost nothing. I mean, you could make a very strong case, although it's a vicious battle that left-wing authoritarianism has been responsible for more misery and death in the 20th century than right-wing authoritarianism. It's a rough contest, but
When you have someone like Mao on your side on the left, it's difficult to defeat him on the brutality scale. And you know, social psychologists didn't begin to admit that there might be such a thing as left wing authoritarianism, literally till 2016. We did some of the first research in that area. So one of the things I'm wondering about
is what, if you can pull yourself out of your conservative proclivity, let's say, and your role at least in part as a lobbyist, what did you see when you were operating within the university system
that indicated the danger of an academic system dominated not only by liberal individualists, let's say, but even more particularly by so-called progressives. What did you see that doing to discipline say you could speak more particularly to history, for example?
Sure. Well, I'll start with an anecdote from the time when I was a young tenure track, but still untenured professor, and you understand the vulnerability I had, especially given how outspoken I was in this episode. But then I will also speak to something that has happened in my field, which is early American history, but in particular,
African-American history, and for people who are listening to us, I'm decidedly a middle-aged bald white guy, which means that I could no longer, according to the powers that be in academia, be a specialist or an expert in African-American history. But let me start with a four-mentioned anecdote.
This was about roughly 20 years ago. I forget the exact year, but President Reagan had recently passed away. And my colleagues in the history department decided, remember, as I've mentioned a few minutes ago, they're all big libs, they decided they were going to host a symposium about Reagan's legacy. And they were going to spend some money to market this around our campus. And Prudence probably suggested that I just keep my mouth shut.
But I just thought, while I don't think anyone's perfect, Reagan was a great, but not a perfect president, there simply was not going to be a fair objective assessment of his legacy as President of the United States. And so I talked to my other conservative friend, the other conservative in the College of Liberal Arts, who was an economist. And I said, well, let's go join this panel of four historians and let's offer a balanced opinion.
Those four other faculty members had no reason to do anything other than proceed with their conversation. But because of the scheduled appearance of the two of us as conservatives, they canceled it. And they canceled it because as you know well from your own experience, they can't stand the disagreement. And frankly, although they wouldn't admit it, I think they were fearful of the facts that we would bring to the table.
And so if that anecdote is helpful, it's helpful in this way. That is just emblematic of everything that's wrong with university. But in my field, what has happened is that someone say today in their early 20s who wants to go to graduate school in history and wants to study
American Indian history, African American history, the history of a particular culture. If they themselves are not members of that particular culture, they're not even going to be allowed to study it. And so I was beginning to see the evidence of that.
when I was still in academia, and I saw that in terms of research grants, I saw it in terms of class assignments that was given by my history department. And Jordan, this was mild. I mean, it was the kind of thing that was just a mere annoyance, but it's now become systematic, such that if my own children came to me and said, Dad, we want to go study such and such field in history or political science or anthropology,
barring just a handful of schools in North America, I would have to discourage them from doing that. Right. Right. Right. Okay. So I want to delve into that a little bit too. You know, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about thinking about its nature and about its relationship to free speech and its relationship to conflict and disagreement. So let me lay out some propositions and you tell me what you think about them.
Okay, so the first proposition has to do with why you should think at all. Now, people will avoid thinking because it is difficult, right? It's technically complex and demanding. And so there's reason right there not to engage in it. It's emotionally challenging, right? Because if you already abide by a certain principle,
and then you go at it even in your own imagination hammer and tongs and you start to shake the foundation, then well that exposes you to cognitive entropy and that produces anxiety and that's very well documented in the neuroscience literature. So there's every reason not to question your own presuppositions on the emotional side.
So it's difficult and it's emotionally demanding. And then on the social side, if you're thinking with someone, which basically means that you're exchanging verbal ideas, then there's the possibility of eliciting disagreement and the emotional unpleasantness and possible conflict that goes along with that.
as well as the fact that if you expose yourself to someone who thinks differently than you, they can challenge your presuppositions and make you anxious and leave you bereft of hope. So those are all the reasons you shouldn't think.
And then you might say, well, given all those reasons to not think, why should you think? And the answer to that, the best answer to that I've ever seen is implicit in the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead said, and I think this is true from a biological and evolutionary perspective, that we learn to think
so that we could allow inappropriate thoughts or impractical thoughts to die instead of us.
So you could think of a thought, not so much as a description of the world, but as a fragmented virtual avatar. You send it out in an exploratory foray to see if it can withstand any trials. And if it can't, then you dispense with it. Now, there's some cost to that, the emotional cost and so forth, but the advantages, you don't act out the stupid ideas and die.
And so I'm laying this out for the listeners and watchers so that they can understand why, because they might be thinking, well, do you really have to engage in contentious disagreement at the academic level? If you're a thinker, why can't everyone just get along? And the answer is,
Well, some ideas are stupid and impractical, and it's better to kill those suckers before they make themselves manifest in the world. And in order to do that, you have to be disagreeable and offensive. Now, no more than necessary. Now, I've really seen a difference there, for example, between the North Americans and the Brits.
Because the Brits at their best, their education system teaches them to engage in like blood sport, cognitive combat, and to do that in a very civilized manner, right? So that they keep the argument within the domain of
Rationality and abstraction doesn't spill over into interpersonal conflict and part of what universities were supposed to do was train people to do that right to think critically to think in a manner that risks disrupting themselves and their interpersonal relationships without that spilling over into. Actual conflict right and to replace conflict with with thought now we seem to be dispensing with that and interestingly enough.
So there's a bunch of things I want you to comment on. My experience in academia and in the broader political world has been, I have never talked to someone who is conservative once.
and tried to set them up with a potential combatant and had them refuse to participate or refuse to associate with that person. And that has happened to me while trying to set up conversations dozens of times with people on the left. I saw that starting at about 2010 at the University of Toronto. It just sort of crept into the discourse.
Well, so maybe I could get you to comment on the necessity of combat in thought, but then also I'd be interested in your ideas about why this proclivity to cancel seems to be so manifest on the left. You'd expect there to be right wing, you know, tightly bound right wing thinkers who were also inclined to cancel and shun, but that hasn't been how it's been manifesting itself, at least for the last 15 years.
Well, the intellectual combat is essential at the university level. In fact, the very etymology of the word university talks about or is based on the unification of thought. It doesn't mean the unanimity of thought. It means that there has been a process in place. By the way, I agree with you, exemplified by British institutions and British scholars on the left and right toward whatever capital T truth is.
And in American institutions, especially since the 1940s and accelerating in the 70s, there's basically the absence of that. In fact, the opposite of that, so that if you go in and you say that I want to do intellectual combat, somehow you're committing some grave sin inside the American Academy.
But it's essential because that's where we refine our own positions. And I'll just use an example of what think tanks do, just to go back to that question. The think tank at its height, I would argue, is one where, of course, it's going to have a particular set of positions that it's taking publicly. But the process of arriving at those positions internally is one where there is, as I like to call it here at the Heritage Foundation, creative conflict.
And in my nearly two years here, in almost every meeting that I have with our policy people, I ask them, well, what would the competing, the alternative position be? And what case would we make for that? What evidence would we marshal for that? Because first of all, we need to question our assumptions. But secondly, given that the reason we do research at Heritage is, in fact, to effect change in public policy, we ought to be better prepared for the attacks that will come.
But to your second question, very related, which is why it is that on the political left, there is this absence of that kind of conflict. I think it's because ultimately, the most radical part of leftism is one that undermines truth very actively. They've sort of lost, as Yates would say, in his famous poem, they've lost the center.
There's nothing cohearing their mode of thought. And if you look at what's going on in the political right, something that you've been talking about in researching more in recent years, there's a very healthy, sometimes kind of, fractious debate that's going on about particular policies, about the relationship between the individual and the state.
Those can be a little frustrating sometimes in terms of political outcomes, but on the intellectual level, they are important and they speak to the vitality, the intellectual vitality of the political right now.
So we did some research in 2016 looking at predictors of politically correct authoritarianism. First of all, we did a factor analytic study that showed that there was clearly a set of ideas that were associated with one another that you could identify as political correct authoritarianism. So it wasn't just some right-wing delusion that that coherent system of ideas existed.
And then we looked at, we did that by asking a very large number of participants a very large number of political questions and then subjecting them to statistical analysis so that we could see which opinions clumped together and how. And so there was a liberal contingent of ideas and a conservative contingent and a authoritarian left-wing contingent. And so then we looked at what predicted that.
And the best predictor was low verbal intelligence. And I think the reason for that was that the radical leftists basically offer a unidimensional solution to a very complex problem, which is that all human motivation can be reduced to power, which is technically incorrect and preposterous and also an extremely harmful
what would you call it, a harmful insistence, but it's very easy to understand, and it does provide for universal explanatory power. But we also found that the personality trait, agreeableness, was also a predictor, and agreeableness is associated with compassion. The thing is, if you engage in the blood sport of critical thinking,
you do risk hurting other people's feelings, right? At least in the moment. Now, there might be long-term advantage to that for both players, as there often is when you settle a fractious issue, say between wife and husband or between family members, there's some combat that's required to set things straight, but then you get an interlude of peace.
afterward, it might also be that the radical leftists are also temperamentally predisposed to avoid conflict, because as they do say themselves, they prioritize compassion above all. In fact, they make it a universal virtue, let's say, and they don't understand the necessity of having to at least, however, irregularly, tolerate periods of
emotional discomfort to set things straight.
So, you know, I've been trying to puzzle out. I mean, liberals, they don't like borders because they're high in openness, they're creative, and they're low in orderliness. So they don't necessarily find satisfaction in keeping things in their proper place. So that's part of the reason they have a hard time drawing borders and distinctions, you know? So it's why the moderate leftists, I think, have a hard time contending with the radicals. But then there's also this proclivity to prioritize emotional comfort
over everything else, even in the moment. And that isn't commensurate with healthy debate of the discriminatory kind that has to occur if you're going to refine your ideas. And then that does expose people in the way that you already said, if you formulate policy.
And you don't hash the hell out of it in intramural debate within your own institution. And you launched those ideas out there in the world. They're going to get torn into shreds. You bloody well better be your own worst enemy when you're thinking so that you're well protected against what the actual world, social and natural is going to throw at you. Another reason to think.
Well, it is, and two things come to mind, at least initially. The first is, I think, as I listened to the last part of what you said in reference to public policy, I think one of the frustrations that Americans, presumably Canadians and Brits and many people around the world have with politics is the absence of what they perceive to be a real debate, right? And this is true on the political right. There's a frustration among
grassroots activists who are conservatives in the United States about the absence of a real debate, whether it be about specific policy issues or even about the sort of social, economic, cultural diagnosis of the malaise that has beset the Western world.
people, especially younger voters, who have a certain bias increasingly towards center-right politics, are looking for those men or women who are candidates for elective office, who are at least asking the right questions, even if they made themselves decide that they disagree with that person's answer. They just want the questions asked. And as we then
focus on public policy. I don't know how public policy organizations can be prepared for the media that their scholars do, the testimonies, say for example, that our scholars in heritage do without having just a vibrant internal process of disagreement. And I think the key thing to hone in on is that disagreement doesn't have to be disagreeable. It may, and if it does, it may get into the zone of hurting people's feelings, but
As I've mentioned to more than one student in my teaching career, I don't mean this to be offensive, but I care a lot less about your feelings than I do about your pursuit of truth, the intellectual rigor that goes into not just the particular field that we might be teaching.
in your case, the behavioral sciences and my case history, but even more importantly, your relationship as a human person, as a citizen of the polity in which you live to everyone else, to the state itself. And ultimately to sum up here, I think one of the problems with radical leftism is that this radical emphasis on the individual creates a radical emphasis on the individual's feelings. Okay, so let's delve into that a little bit too, because
The thing is that radical emphasis on the individual is predicated on a very strange acceptance of what constitutes the individual. Because what you see with the hedonistic radicals is their insistence that their immediate emotional or motivational whim defines their individuality.
I want what I want right now, and no one has any right to stand in my way. Now, the problem with that is that it's a pretty low order conception of what it means to be an individual. It's also extremely immature, and I can speak about that technically. So the more immature you are,
The more you are ruled by motivations that want to attain gratification right now, regardless of medium to long-term cost. And so actually what happens is that as you mature and you learn to, quote, delay gratification, which is an oversimplification, you learn to subordinate the demands of immediate motivational and emotional states
to long-term social harmony and your own long-term well-being. That requires the sacrifice of the immediate gratification. One of the weird things about the Left is that the individual who they make sacrosanct is an individual defined by his or her subjugation to their own hedonic motivations. That's a pretty low-order conceptualization of the self.
And so I don't see it as a true individuality as well. And then on the feeling front, see, one of the things you're trying to do with students at a university is to make their idea, their conception of themselves as an individual less dependent on their unconscious axioms.
So I saw this very frequently. I'll take an example that might not be obvious given the tenor of our conversation. I took a very biological approach to psychology in my lectures, and it wasn't that uncommon for me to have a very fundamentalist Christian student who had been raised
in a household that insisted that the theory of evolution was incorrect and that the world was relatively new, 6,000 years or 4,000 years old. And my insistence on an evolutionary approach, especially combined with the fact that I also gave credence to, let's say, Judeo-Christian tradition, was very hard on them. And it was partly because
Their faith and their vision of themselves and their vision of the future was predicated on the assumption that you couldn't have that faith or that vision without accepting a non-evolutionary account of creation. And that was where their feelings came into it. Because by upsetting that presupposition,
They make that risk exposing those students. They risk exposing themselves to anxiety and hopelessness. So it's not feelings per se that are at stake. It's the automatic and unquestioned assumption that the integrity of your psychological integrity
rests necessarily on the acceptance of certain axioms. Now, when you go to university, those axioms are supposed to be questioned.
Now, and what that implies is that you help the student replace their self conceptualization. They stop seeing themselves as the static adherent of a set of dogmatic beliefs, and they start to see themselves as someone whose stability is partly predicated on their ability to dynamically transform and to learn and to engage. So they become more of a dancer than a rock, let's say, and a good
University can guide them through that process so they don't identify with those dogmatic ideas to the same degree they can detach themselves from the ideas and not also can help them. Allow the necessary death of their stupid ideas to occur without undo psychological suffering.
right right and that's the debates you have in seminars and so far they're practiced for that right under relatively civilized conditions where the stakes are comparatively low and now we've insisted that everybody become a you know a delicate snowflake and that you're never to step on anyone's toes and all we're doing is great luke enough has demonstrated quite clearly on the clinical front all we're doing is
removing the possibility from our students of exposing themselves to the sort of challenges that would actually make them strong, or actually making them weaker, more hopeless, and more anxious by protecting them in that manner.
And we've been doing that long enough that those hypothetical students, although you've had real students who fit that profile as I have, have become members of Congress. They become members of the United States Senate. And so they lead with their field. They lead
journalists, sure, they lead with the belief that you can't even ask them a fair but difficult question. And that, of course, is exacerbating the problems that we see in the political sphere. But I just want to respond to your excellent example of you leading with biology in your lectures and encountering a student who believed that the theory of evolution was incorrect.
As you may remember, I've led, founded, and then led another college of faith, founded a K through 12 school. And there, because it was a classical great book school, and we had our particular faith dogmas as a Roman Catholic school, we made sure that our students were in classes that were questioning those assumptions, even about our faith.
before they went into apologetics. So even for someone who is a very devout member of a particular denominational faith, it doesn't mean that we should be hostile to the hard questions about what we believe. In fact, speaking as someone of faith who believes in the mysteries of my faith, we ought to really encourage that. And so that's a way of saying
that even for those of us who are politically conservative, you know, perhaps religiously conservative as well, that we ought not develop the same hostility to this creative conflict, these questions about the assumptions of our belief that the left, of course, personifies every day. Well, I think you could make a very strong case that
your genuine faith is actually directly proportionate to the degree that you're willing to allow that faith to undergo the most stringent of challenges. I mean, if you have to hide away and never be
called to account for what you presume, there's no faith there. There's just a blind abandonment of reason and the necessity of hiding from reality in order to keep those axioms intact. I think this is partly why, for example, there's a powerful biblical injunction in the New Testament to do what you can to even love your enemies, which is a hell of a thing to ask. But if you understand that,
one of the advantages to adversarial enmity is the refining of your own beliefs. Then you can also understand how it might be possible if you could manage it to welcome the most dreadful of challenges in the hope that
See, I've thought about this in terms of, you know, you remember in the Genesis story, when Adam and Eve are barred from paradise, God places cherubim at the entry to paradise and they wield swords that are on fire that turn every which way. And I've been thinking about that image. It's very dramatic and powerful image and a strange one. And it also begs the question of why God would do such a thing. And I think the answer is this, is that
If the goal is re-entry into something approximating a paradisal state, then obviously everything that isn't fit to be there has to be cut away.
But that also indicates another issue, which is that if you confront an adversarial enemy and in their adversarial argumentation, they can demonstrate to you where you're weak and unworthy, even though that'll be painful because you have to let that go. And that might be a lot of you. The net consequence could be that what grows
as a replacement in consequence is much better for you and for everyone else. And it does seem to me that that's inevitable. It follows the same logic in some sense as the necessity for critical thinking itself.
No, you have to think critically so you can put your ideas to the test. And this is also why free speech is so necessary. In the same manner, you're not good enough thinker to think up all the objections to your idiocy by yourself. You have to allow other people to call you out, but the net benefit of that in principle, and this is what we hoped in universities obviously, is that if you exposed yourself enough to the eradication of your stupidity,
then what would be left would be something much more solid and flexible and dynamic and adapted and sophisticated and beneficial and productive all of that. And I think all of that solid in terms of psychological doctrine. And so that's partly why it's so appalling to see the universities take this false, compassionate turn and hyper protect their students instead of trying them by fire, so to speak.
It's solid as psychological doctrine. It's also solid in terms of doctrine in civil society, right? Because what happens is that, especially with the advent and popularity of social media, going back to your principal about thinking at its base, eliminating those really kind of dumb thoughts that we have, inappropriate things that should never be put into practice, people aren't thinking.
but they're exercising their free speech in a rather messy way on social media and then ironically to kind of come full circle in our conversation. Their feelings are hurt because in the absence of their thinking, which would eradicate some of their dumbest thoughts, their posting ideas, some of them are elected officials at very high offices,
maybe even the president of the United States or the vice president of the United States. And their feelings get hurt because of all of the pushback that's created as a result of how dumb their comments are. All of this goes back to what's lacking in our secondary schools or elementary schools, our universities, which is creating not just the habit of thought, but creating the physical space. I mean, literally the classroom where this is practiced and where
Our feelings become harder to hurt because we've had a lot more experience mentioning some kind of dumb thoughts and people explaining why they are. Well, we're also in a community there. We're also in a community there. This is one of the things that's quite different from the online world, you know, like, and I'll ask you how your think tank is constructed because of this. So if you're in a seminar, let's say,
There's the possibility of developing interpersonal relationships. So that would be a means of communication and potential friendship that would iterate across time. And that broader container that's community-based can help buttress you against the fractiousness of momentary disagreement, right? You can think
This used to happen politically, too, when people actually lived in Washington instead of just so journeying there, say, as congressmen. You know, 40% of congressmen sleep in their offices now. So it used to be that you could have a scrap with the guy across the aisle and then go for a beer with them afterwards or meet them on the golf course or, you know, go play baseball, go to a baseball game with him and his kids. And a lot of that's disappeared from Washington. The problem, partly the problem with the online discourse is there's no
community of reciprocal interaction that binds people together at the same time the expression of their random opinions divides them. And so I wanted to ask you about that on the think tank front. How is the Heritage Foundation actually set up? How is it constituted? How often do you people meet? How do you establish the preconditions for fractious thought?
Well, maintaining the social, the underlying social community and keeping people united in vision, let's say, as they move forward. Well, our first rule to your point about being in person and being living in community is that any conversation that may have a difference of opinion, which at least in our think tank would be many, has to be in person, that we're not going to have that conversation via email. We're not going to have that conversation by phone. We're also
not going to have that conversation via video conference. And because we, the purpose of our research isn't just to write a white paper, but for that white paper's ideas, the ideas of the author to actually take shape and ultimately become law,
We have to do that work in person. It's very difficult to advocate for these ideas without being in the office of a member of the House or a member of the Senate. So that's how we live out that first rule. But the second rule is that as long as the debate doesn't become personal,
Everything is fair game. The assumptions, the principles, the applications of what we would call the permanent things, timeless conservative principles to our particular circumstances. And I will say in the last two years at the Heritage Foundation, in part, if not in large part because of getting past some of the COVID nonsense,
We're really living that out in a vibrant way. In fact, we often have friends, whether they're financial supporters or just supporters of another kind who will visit and they find it remarkable at the intensity of the debates that we have here while also recognizing
The third thing, which is that for us, culture is everything. By that, we mean internal culture. That is to say that when you walk in the doors here, we want this to be the most cheerful place in Washington, DC. I understand that's a low bar, but for us, our cheerfulness, our hospitality goes hand in hand very fittingly, as you know, with our willingness to be engaged in a very intense debate with our friends and colleagues.
So, you know, I just did a seminar on Exodus in Miami. It was 16 two-hour sessions. They've been released on YouTube and we did one eight-day session and then we broke for six months and did another eight-day session. And one of the things we did, we brought together nine people and we kind of knew each other, but not that well.
And there was a wide range of opinions on the panel from moderate left to pretty socially conservative, no real progressive types, but certainly people on the moderate left. And we found we were really attempted to be hospitable to all of our guests.
In addition to having the seminar lay itself out for two hours each evening, I hosted people continually at an Airbnb that I rented there and we barbecued together and I rented people some jet skis and we had some fun and like each night was a party and
At the same time that that was happening, it was also while we were walking through Exodus and through other elements of the Old Testament, and I was struck by the immense emphasis in those texts on the absolute sacred nature of hospitality as a duty.
And I came to understand thinking that through, but also watching what was happening with this seminar was that if you're hospitable to people, and this is partly speaks to the necessity of an actual localized community, then they begin to trust each other at a fundamental level. There's a core of consensus and trust there, mutual regard for mutual well-being that then enables
experimentation to take place at the cognitive fringes in an atmosphere of trust and humor. And so I've really been struck in Washington. I've been talking to people there, people involved with the presidential prayer breakfast. And one of the things they've said repeatedly is that the civil society in Washington has broken down in the last four decades, partly because of virtualized communication. So people don't have to be present.
partly because under Newt Gingrich, there was incentives for congressmen to spend more time in their district and less time in Washington, which might have had some benefits, but also helped undermine the Washington society because of the difficulty in having congressmen bring their entire families to Washington for what can be a relatively brief career, right? They have to disrupt the career of their spouse, for example. And so one of the things
And so many of them, as I said, don't even have apartments in Washington now. They don't make friendships or establish social relationships, even with the people in their own party, much less talking across the aisle to Republicans, for example, if they're Democrats. So now you said at the Heritage Foundation that you have fostered an atmosphere, you said it with a bit of irony.
because it's a low bar in Washington, but that it's a very cheerful enterprise. And so what do you think you've done right to foster that atmosphere, the atmosphere that enables robust debate to occur without it degenerating into ill will?
Well, the most important thing is that our mission, which is focused on revitalizing self-governance in this country and across the world, is very unifying and motivating. And so the people who want to work at Heritage are people who are animated by that. And our selection process of how we hire someone, whether at the junior level or the senior level, is not just about philosophical or political alignment.
but it's as much about cultural alignment. That is to say, a lot of the interview process is focused on how this potential colleague is going to fit into our process of creative conflict. And that creative conflict, as we've discussed, being something that never swerves into the personal and is so focused on the ideas and our love for the ideas. But I also want to mention that that's very much related to your excellent and accurate point about the
sort of demise of Washington society. I mean, I've heard from so many long-term members of the Senate, so many long-term members of the House. And these are stalwart conservatives who don't wake up each day looking to compromise with the left.
They say that they and their spouses have seen a huge deterioration in even members of the Republican Party spending time together. Now, as you said, there are certain benefits to that, being home in your district or your state. But there are also benefits to the people who do the good work in Washington, D.C. And there are some to having community. And I'll just give you an example that is that's self-critical. When I first got here about two years ago,
I was always talking about DC being a terrible place to live and no doubt there are parts of DC that are. But at the same time, sometimes in the same paragraph, I was encouraging relatively young conservatives to join our presidential transition project, which we call Project 2025.
And one of them mustered the courage after one of these talks to come up and say, Kevin, you know, those two things don't go hand in hand. If you want people to leave their communities, their hometown, you know, their lives, as they have established them, wherever home is, and come to DC and in your words, tithe,
two or four or eight years to the next conservative administration, maybe heritage needs to spend some time helping to revitalize that society, helping to revitalize that community. And that was a really good constructive criticism that we've taken to heart because of the culture that we have here at Heritage.
Yeah, well, it points to a broader problem, too. I would say on the conservative side, practically and philosophically. I mean, there are plenty of reasons for conservatives, for example, to engage in the kind of dialogue that we've been engaging in in this conversation, for example, to
uh level substantive criticisms at the universities as institutions and of course we've taken the odd side shot at the washington establishment let's say in the political process per se and that's very problematic on the conservative side because the progressive mantra is that all institutions are so corrupt they should be
demolished and replaced. And to the degree that conservatives engage in incautious social critique, it seems to me that we play, they play, we play, to the degree that I'm conservative into the hands of those very progressives, right? And the bigs, another question too, is that, you know, you're, it's a matter of drawing lines, always a matter of drawing lines, where and how.
to include and exclude. Now, you want to produce a culture that's hospitable and unified, but that's also capable of fractious debate. And you said that for clues, for example, hiring people who are of the progressive left. How in the world do you think you managed to determine
when it is that someone has ideas that are sufficiently different and novel so that they can add to the utility of the fractious debate, but not so disruptive in novel that they violate the tenets of the community. If you answered that, that would also allow you to expound on the central ideals of the Heritage Foundation you said,
revitalizing self governance is part of the heritage mission. And I assume that the people you hire have to accept the validity of the central message at least, right? There's got to be some core axiom that unites everyone. But how do you differentiate? Well, how do you solve that conundrum? And what do you think? What is the central axis around which the entire heritage foundation rotates? Let's say, what are you guys aiming at and why?
Yeah, great question, especially as it relates to hiring people, which we've been doing a lot of over the last couple of years because of growth. The focus of heritage in terms of policy is that we need a much more limited federal government.
And not just because limited government is an end unto itself, but because it is a symptom of flourishing by individuals who are living in community, who are also, of course, enjoying greater self-governance. But in terms of specific policy that we're looking for, there's the typical list that people would expect that if you're going to have a more limited government, you're going to have a fairer in taxation system that's probably lower. States are probably going to have
more authority to make decisions that are closer to the people they're governing. There's a certain belief on the foreign policy side that America should be strong, although in the heritage view, that strength needs to be more restrained and less expensive and less adventuresome than the neocons of the last generation we're arguing for. And we also believe
to speak about, not surprisingly to you, the policy I care most deeply about in education, that every dollar that Americans spend on government-funded schools should follow every child to the school of his or her parents' choice. That's just a brief smattering of the specific policy issues, but they all, if you think about it, speak to the preeminence of the individual and his or her community
working at the local level and eventually the state level, having great authority over the federal government. And so ultimately, to be succinct about this, the Heritage Foundation exists to devolve power from Washington back to the states and ultimately back to the people themselves. Now, if you pause and think about that,
There's room for a lot of differences of opinion, at least at the very least, differences in priority, right? And so to your question about people coming in, job applicants coming in, there's going to be some difference of opinion. But what we're looking for is the absence of a disagreement on some of the core principles. And now I'll speak to them. Probably the best
The best summary of these, in addition to heritage products, would be the historian Russell Kirk's great essay on the 10 Principles of Conservatism, which emphasized things like continuity, prudence and change, community,
If someone's wanting to work at the Heritage Foundation, and they don't understand or appreciate those, or they don't have a concern about what I think is the greatest problem in America today, which is fatherlessness, the deterioration of the family, and that if we fail to address those on the social and cultural and maybe even policy fronts, that where everything else we're working on is almost moot, then there's going to be a philosophical misalignment.
But there's also still even within that set of positions that we have opportunity for great differences. We have some economists here who are going to say that as it relates to the so-called family policy, public policy arena, that the only thing that we need to do is to make sure that we're ending the disincentives to marriage and family formation in American tax law.
There are others of us who might more commonly be called social conservatives who say there may be a role for the state, whether it's the federal government or a state government, as the nation of Hungary and the nation of Israel have done to actually proactively aid marriage and family formation for the sake of saving society. All of that to say, because we're a think tank,
In the interviews with policy people or prospective policy people, we have these conversations. And it has become in the last several years in conservative public policy pretty easy to ferret out when someone's not completely on the reservation, if you will. And perhaps the most common conundrum that we have, just to give a precise example, would be on the nature of the free market. For so many years, I mean, my entire upbringing
to be conservative was to believe that the free market was some sort of altar. That in fact, free market belief was tantamount to being conservative. And while the free market is a good, free market is a symptom of a healthy society, healthy families, good public policy. It isn't the end unto itself. And so I mentioned that example because it's the most common conversation that we have internally.
when we're interviewing potential policy colleagues, but also when we're having conversations internally about how to help the American political right navigate this reality that so many leaders of the so-called free market aren't even in the free market themselves. The most leaders of Fortune 500 companies actually hate conservatives and hate conservatism. The Heritage Foundation is, I would like to think, leading in the way and beginning to resolve that conflict.
Okay, well, I have a bunch of questions about that. So the first comment and question, I suppose, is one on the strategic front. So I think the conservative movement has weakened its argument for the decentralization of power by aligning that argument too closely with libertarian, neo-con, and free market principles, because it often devolves into a
like a proclamation that a government that's too large is too dangerous, which I do believe, but that's not the crucial issue as far as I'm concerned, that if the government was smaller, the tax burden would be less. If the tax burden would be less, that would be better because people should be economically free and they should be economically free because, well, the free, because the society functions better when the free market is as untrammeled as possible.
And so it's kind of a, in some ways, it's an inran philosophy of rugged individualism conjoined with libertarian admiration for the free market.
There are some problems with that. One you pointed to, and we'll get back to that later. I think when we discuss neo-conservatives, one is that the free market itself is probably not the only basis for an equitable and just and moral polity. It's not the thing that's at the bottom. And I think that's where the libertarian types have it wrong. And I think there are good reasons for that. But more importantly,
There is a better reason to discuss the necessity of devolving power down the hierarchy to lower levels. The first thing I would say is it's not power. When we shouldn't use that language, because that's the language the leftists use, it's meaning and responsibility. And those things are aligned. And so what happens, and I've really found this idea of striking a chord with audiences as I've talked around the world, is that
If you deprive people of local responsibility, you deprive them of all the meaning in their life. Because the meaning in their life is actually a consequence of taking responsibility for themselves, taking responsibility for their marriage, for their family, for their local community, for their business enterprises, for their town, for their state, for their country, in that order, right? And then maybe to God and
Responsibility obtains at every one of those levels. That's the subsidiarity idea, of course. But the purpose for that is that if you devolve that responsibility down the hierarchy, you reinstil the meaning in people's lives, the meaning that sustains them through catastrophe. Because you've got to ask, why should the typical young person listen to a conservative who says, well, you should take more local responsibility?
It sounds like a lot of work, a lot of duty, and something that's not particularly hedonically gratifying. But if the answer is, well, if you forego that responsibility, you have nothing to sustain you when you suffer and you forego the possibility of
formulating the extremely tight and reciprocal social interactions that buttress you through life and you deprive your life of intrinsic meaning then that seems like a very bad idea for you and i found very striking everywhere i've gone to talk if i make that connection between responsibility and meaning the audiences fall completely silent.
It always happens because no one, so we haven't had a good discussion about the relationship between meaning and responsibility in the West for like 60 years, right? Since the mid 60s. It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. People assume that there's no meaning outside of a kind of a narrow hedonism or that there's no meaning at all. And that's a very dismal, that's a very dismal set of propositions. And it is a weak place in the progressive enterprise because
sustaining meaning is found in responsibility and really in self-sacrifice, or at least the sacrifice of the narrow self. Now this insistence that your enterprise has on this subsidiary vision, is that grounded at least in part in Catholic social doctrine? Because that principle of subsidy, it is, okay. Can you elaborate on that a bit? Sure, and the Heritage Foundation's non-sectarian
but we're animated by the Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition. And as we discussed earlier in reference to education, I'm Roman Catholic, but the effect of subsidiarity on heritage is mission. Of course, long predates me. We've been around 50 years. And it's just because it's a vital part of our Western intellectual tradition, as you explained so well. And I think it's an excellent way
given the conversations on the political right right now to talk about the issues we're discussing here about meaning and responsibility. It's related very much to something that has become a more common parlance in conservative circles, which is to say that the reason we want a more limited government
Is it because of some doctrinaire belief that the free market is always better than government? That's not the case. It's because there is an inherent dignity that comes from work or put more broadly. There's a dignity that comes from responsibility and therefore we have greater meaning. It's no surprise to me that you've gotten that wonderful response and all of those talks when you emphasize those points because
people not only know that that's true, just intuitively, right? Naturally. The second thing to come back to my constructive criticism of free marketism, conservatives, myself included years ago, have done a very poor job
of taking advantage of that great vulnerability of the political left that you identified, which is this very issue, because our response to that for 20 or 25 years was, well, the free market will take care of it, pull yourself up from your bootstraps, read Enran, it's all going to be okay, just work a little bit harder. Well, in reality, that isn't true in the first place, but this is really key.
It's especially not been true since the mid 1960s with the ill-named War on Poverty, because what that has done is actually eradicate for two generations of Americans the meaning and responsibility that every human person should have. Therefore, in order for just to kind of swerve into the sidewalk level, as I like to say, if conservatives are going to succeed in safety net reform,
and so-called welfare reform, we first have to get better at talking about the limitations of the free market and the necessity of conservative principles, conservative political dogma, to be associated with our long tradition of living in community, which actually has a longer history in conservatism than even free market principles.
Well, that also points to a place where social conservatism and the more free market end of conservatism, the libertarian end could be unified, right? So, okay, so let's concentrate on responsibility for a moment. So I'm gonna speak about that psychologically. So someone young might be thinking, well, why should I bear up under the load of additional responsibility? And I would say, well, if you, responsibility is gonna be a challenge.
It means you have to determine that you are going to lift something that you haven't yet lifted. And then you might say, well, why should I do that? And the answer is something like, so you get stronger and better.
And so if you decide to take responsibility for yourself, then you put yourself through the paces that will discipline you enough so that all your idiocy and bad habits, all the ones that interfere with your ability to take care of yourself disappear. Now, often students do that to some degree when they go off to university because they have to learn how to live independently, right, which is a big part of what university does.
And that burns off the remaining childhood idiocy that they've carried with them, right? That dependence on their parents and maybe the dependence over dependence on their initial peer group. So they have to mature. And the whole, the utility of taking on responsibility is that you confront yourself with necessity in a manner that forces beneficial change.
And you might say, well, why does it have to be forced? And the answer is, well, we don't know how much situational privation and necessity has to be there to motivate people to develop.
Now, you couldn't take on just exactly the right amount of responsibility, you know, so it would feel like the challenge was optimized, right? But that also, that optimized challenge is also what puts you in the zone of proximal development and forces you to expand your horizons. And so you adopt the responsibility.
You can care for yourself, then you can care for other people better, but that also does genuinely make you a better person in that your domain of competent action expands in precise proportion to the amount of responsibility that you've been willing to undertake voluntarily, right? And it's not surprising that that's associated with meaning. So the conservatives can sell, the leftists can sell rights, rights, rights, which is what they've been doing forever. And the hedonic self
gratification goes along with that. But the right can sell the deep and abiding meaning that comes with the hoisting of voluntary responsibility. And that is, that's not a free market argument. Right? It is free market is a consequence of that. Exactly. The free market isn't going to work. And this is where the social conservatives have an edge to. And I think this is becoming increasingly obvious.
In the absence of that underlying ethos of responsibility, responsible conduct, you can't have a free market because people have to be able to trust each other before the free market can even get going and you can't trust your responsible people. That's the precise rub and I will tell you that
Any leader in a public policy organization has certain things that he or she does every day. Every single day, either directly or indirectly, I'm dealing with that tension on the political right. Because part of what Heritage tries to do beyond the research and advocacy that we do is also play at this plane where you and I are having this conversation on the intellectual level.
And when we do that, what we're arguing for is, I like to say, an un-hyphenated conservatism. We're all of those things, but when you're all of those things, you're not trying to be something to everybody. We're talking to our audience on the political right. It means that you're also going to be aware of the limitations of some of the things that are goods, like the free market. The free market is good, but there are many higher goods. And as we've talked about,
Chronologically speaking, which is what I try to do almost every day in reminding more free market oriented friends on the right, is you have to have that healthy society, you have to have, as I often like to put it, healthy families, you have to have this moral system in place to even give birth to the free market. It was the monks of Salamaka and the 1200s who first came up with this concept, and even Adam Smith himself.
I think would be very, very comfortable in this exchange that you and I are having about the lack of primacy of the free market as it relates to human goods.
Well, that's a matter of putting everything into proper place, right? And it is an open question. How far down the hierarchy of axiomatic primacy, the free market rests, but in the more libertarian types, they're going to say it's right at the bottom. And Ayn Rand is a good exemplar of that. For her, the free market is the god out of which all other goods emerge.
But I think the Adam Smith conceptualization, the classic British liberal conceptualization for that matter is much more accurate, which is that once you have a society that's essentially predicated on the Judeo-Christian axioms, one of those being responsible self-sacrifice and the trust that emerges from that, then you can instantiate a free market and it can serve a governing function.
But it can't exist. See, I think the same thing's actually true of science. This is something I want to talk to Richard Dawkins about because I don't think the scientific enterprise itself, the scientific enterprise is predicated on the idea that the cosmic order is good.
that we can investigate it, that we can understand it, and that if we do that, that will be good. Those are all axioms of faith in my estimation, and they're also specifically Judeo-Christian axioms. There's a bunch of axioms of faith that are embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition that are also presuppositions of the free market, like fairness in weights and measure and honesty in mutual exchange, right?
Because the free marketers have a hard time dealing with a simple question, like, if I can screw you over and make money doing it, why shouldn't I? It's an Iran principle, right? Self-interest is the most important thing. And the other thing, just to introduce this to this wonderful exchange that is so true about the free market in the 2020s, is that what most Americans think of when they think of the free market right now, rest, it almost requires
collusion with what Heritage would call big government, right? And so what I try to do, all of us at Heritage try to do when we're talking about the best aspects of the free market, is to place the emphasis not on those companies that are actually seeking regulatory favoritism actively by agencies in D.C.
Don't put the emphasis on them. Instead, put the emphasis on small businesses, on entrepreneurs in America who actually are the ones creating the jobs. They're much more in line with this proper understanding of where the free market falls in that list of axioms for the conservative dogma. Yeah, well, one of the places that the left and the right
the more socially conservative, classical, subsidiarity, right, could be aligned. And I see this emerging in people like Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, right, is that there's every reason to be skeptical of towers of Babel, whether they're corporate or government. Yeah, well, the thing is, is that
Once something gets so large that it can capture the environment in which it's supposed to thrive, then it presents a danger. And it doesn't matter whether it's a corporation or a government. And that means that all of us left and right alike. Like the lefties are always saying, oh my God, big corporations. And you know,
Looking at the behavior of the pharmaceutical companies, for example, over the last 20 years, you can have some sympathy for their perspective. And then the libertarians say, oh, my God, big government. And neither of them seem to notice that the unifying horror there is big. It's out of control big and the danger of regulatory capture. And one of the things we're trying to puzzle through, I started this organization
I'm involved in the origin of this organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and we're trying to work through these issues of subsidiarity, but also expressing great concern about corporate gigantism and fascist collusion at the highest levels of the hierarchical enterprise, and the true fascism, I would say.
How have you at the Heritage Foundation grappled with this issue of the danger of regulatory capture? What policies do you think should be put in place on the YouTube front, for example? It's one corporation now that controls the primary communication network for 7 billion people.
And in the main they've done a pretty damn good job, but YouTube's got a bit heavy handed on the censorship front as has Facebook, you know, colluding with the Biden administration as has come out recent weeks. How do you guys grapple with the problem of emergent gigantism, say within a free market framework? How do you conceptualize the solutions to that problem?
Well, three things come to mind. The first is, and I don't mean this to be just sort of academic think tank speak, it's really important on the political right for us to be doing this as a first step. Because of this 30, 40 year long held position that the free market
equates to conservatism and that is to remind people that regulatory capture is a result of so-called quote-unquote free market leaders going to government and asking for favorable treatment.
The second thing, which is more substantial in terms of what we do on a day-to-day basis, is through our project 2025. Roughly speaking, it's a presidential transition project where we're coming up with the policies, including deregulatory policies for the next conservative administration. But it's also one, and this is vital, that
as important as the policy is, we're recruiting 20,000 people to go into the next conservative administration. And if that happens, then you're going to see across the board from the Department of Energy to the Department of Education, which we've written the plan to completely destroy. We need that eliminated by the end of this decade to completely starting from scratch with the FBI.
What this public policy organization, the Heritage Foundation does, isn't just talk about those things and we don't just come up with the plans. We're actually recruiting the men and women who will put that in place, hopefully as soon as 2025. But the third sort of kill shot
you will, that one bullet that will be really helpful to ending regulatory capture is Schedule F Reform. It's the civil service reform that will give the next president of the United States power to fire the bureaucrats who are part of the problem. But if that's all you do and you don't take the first step
which is to explain on quote, unquote, our side, you know, the sort of business free market side that we have to call out those businesses that are asking for this kind of treatment, then we're not going to solve the problem. Okay. So I have two questions that arise from that. One is on the presidential candidate front. I mean, Vivek Rameswamy has made comments about the destructuring of the so-called managerial deep state that are akin to the
proposals that seem akin to the proposals that you're putting forward. Part of Trump's attractiveness was his promise to do that. So let's leave that aside for a moment. I want to return to Rand for a minute. I've just been rereading out the shrug, which I do oddly enough about every 15 years. And I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine. It might be the core problem. So she assumes that self-interest is the appropriate governing principle.
But she never really defines what constitutes self-interest. And that's a big problem. So because you can have narrowly hedonic self-interest.
And Rand actually wanders into that territory because her protagonists, Rourke and Dagnitagar and so forth, do have and express quite continually their right to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to, and that they should be guided by no other principle in some sense than the gratification of their own desires. But that's exactly what the hedonists on the left say.
And so this begs the question of what constitutes the individual whose self-interest is at stake? And where Rand makes a mistake is she doesn't understand that there's a set of constraints that operate on what constitutes individual self-interest. So you don't exist just right now.
you exist out say decades into the future and in an attenuated form in your descendants. And what that implies is that every action you undertake right now has to be bound by the necessity of not betraying that sequence of future selves. And I don't think there's any difference in a game theory from a game theory perspective of the collective that is you across time and other people.
So I think that enlightened self-interest and social interest are exactly the same thing. And I don't think that Rand understood that, right? Is that she seems to believe that there's this internal self
which is the part that's self-interested. It's almost like the internal self, the radical leftists insist upon being able to establish such things as gender self-identification, right? That's 100% autonomous and unmoored that can operate itself as an autonomous governing principle. It's almost like a deity. And it's the conservative version of the same mistake that the radicals on the progressive side are making.
I think that's exactly right. In fact, you talked about you yourself rereading Atlas Shrugged. I do that with about the same frequency. And the last time I did three or four or five years ago, it's because I had a junior colleague at the policy organization. I was leading prior to being inherited. She was a capital O objectivist. And I thought, well, let me reread Rand and see if I'm missing anything and be a good colleague, a good mentor. And I realized this actually sort of come full circle.
rereading Atlas Shrugged four or five years ago, ironically, is what made me realize my own deficiencies in thought about the free market and a couple of other shibbleness of the right, which is to say that so many very thoughtful men and women who are devotees of Rand make the mistake that she's making, and they haven't thought through the consequences of that as it relates, for example, to regulatory capture. And so,
The exciting thing, this is all very troubling on kind of an intellectual level, but the exciting thing is that we're finally having these conversations on the political right. And the exciting thing for us at Heritage, often referred to as a legacy organization, is that I would say we're necessarily driving those conversations, but we're very active participants in them. And that is to the extent that we've got credibility with people on the center right in America. We're lending that credibility to that conversation, which must happen
in order to achieve the public policy ideas that we've had for a few decades. Well, the way that Rand maneuvers around the complexity of those questions, say with regards to Regent's her capture, is that she attributes to her protagonists a kind of a vague nobility of character, right? So that it's distasteful for Rourke and Taggart, for example,
to engage in any plaintiff negotiations with government agencies. It's beneath them to ask for favors from government. But she never establishes why it's beneath them. It's vaguely associated in principle with their self-interest and their implicit heroism, but it's very difficult to derive that heroism from that narrow self-interest.
I think the reason it's difficult to do that is because it doesn't derive from that narrow self-interest. It derives from the necessity of a higher order self-interest that has the community as an intrinsic part of itself. She's very weak on that front, because her character's tagger is a good example, and so is Rourke. Rourke's in a very unhappy marriage.
and Dagny Taggart is single. Those people aren't bound by, like they're all noble individual heroes who stand alone. They're not well situated in happy marriages.
They're not as couples well situated in functional families. She's almost russellian in that regard. She seems to regard any form of higher order social involvement as an impediment to the noble strivings of the disaggregated individual.
And so it's very strange to see that dovetail with the more radical ideas of the progressive left. And it's definitely a flaw in her thinking, right? Both from the perspective of characterization, but also from the perspective of ethics, is that narrow self-interest, that's not the highest self, that's not the true self. It's just the immature and impulsive self. And she tries to make that noble, and it's not noble, it's just immature.
So that's exactly why I think that's why her work never hits. It's like Rand is not Dostoevsky, right? There's a shallowness about her work that's, I like reading it. It's exciting. It's adventurous. It's a romantic adventure, you know, and it's got a strong hero narrative element, but it's definitely not literature. And I think the reason for that is that her characterizations are too, they're too simplified.
You won't be expecting this reference, I'm sure, but I grew up reading Luyola Moore books, written in the 20th century, but they were 20th century versions of the Western dime novels of the late 1800s, who read them as a boy. And every time, I guess I've read Atlas Shug three or four or five times,
I don't mean to be too offensive toward Rand followers, but we've established that feelings are okay to hurt. Her characters are just as flat as the great heroes in Louis Lamour novels who showed up in these Western towns and they were rugged individuals, right? And there as a 10 or 11 year old boy, those were good things to read in the same way that there's a certain value to reading Rand's work, but it's not literature. It's certainly not Dostoevsky. And in the great book schools that I've led,
Rand had no part of the curriculum. And I'll just make this final point, if I may, on this thread. The way this plays out in conservative politics, and by that I mean not elected officials, but to some extent the donor class, but these are thoughtful men and women, most of whom have made their own wealth themselves, is that they think that those characters from Atlas Shrugged are the model,
But in reality, almost without exception, as I think about these men and women in their own lives, they are living out that higher order thinking or set of values far better than Rand's own characters. In other words, they themselves, these devotees of Rand, personify the limitations of the book.
It can be hard to explain that to them because they're so committed to this mode of thought. But the point is, the more of those devotees of Rand who come to grips with those limitations, the quicker the American political right will be able to resolve this conundrum we have about the community and about the free market.
Yeah, well, I think that your characterization of Rand's books as sophisticated cowboy stories is exactly dead on. Because first of all, she was attracted to that rugged American individualism, not least because she was an escapee from communist hell. And so she had a reason to hear a worship that pattern of rugged individualism. And it is associated in a genuine sense with the great American dream, which is a real phenomenon and something to be reckoned with.
But the fact that her characters, and some of her characters, they're almost literal cowboys. I mean, in Atlas Shrugged, I can't remember the gentleman's name, but Wyatt, that's his name. He's even got a cowboy name, Wyatt. He runs a sequence of oil rigs and oil explorations in the frontier state of California, right? And he's definitely a cowboy in every sense of the word, and so are the rest of her male characters.
You can also understand that that admiration for rugged individualism has a place if the rugged individuals are already nested inside like a stable couple and a stable family and a stable community and so forth. If all those preconditions are met, then you should go out on your individual adventure. But if none of them are met, if you're that sort of cowboy, you're almost indistinguishable from a psychopath.
And so that's a big problem. It's the same problem on the free market side. The free market doesn't work unless it's embedded in an underlying ethos. And that rugged individualism doesn't work for exactly the same reasons, unless the underlying preconditions of stabilization are already in place.
And it's very much related to the excellent point you made about meaning and responsibility, right? Because part of that responsibility, part of freedom, properly understood, not in a Randian way, is the moral duty that's conferred.
that for those of us who emphasize the natural law over what the left likes to talk about rights, that moral duty is to the community, it's to the other as much as it is to ourselves. And those two things more often than not can actually not be intentioned. They can be resolved and exist harmoniously. And it's in that gap just to be kind of simplistic here.
where properly ordered government, a properly limited government, exists. As I like to tell people, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative, not a libertarian public policy organization. We see a very proper role for government and we look forward to getting it back into that box.
Well, I would say mature identity is the balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the extended individual and the collective. That harmony, that harmony as well is what people mean when they say sanity. Like sanity isn't something you carry around within you. Sanity is the harmonious balance between your interests and the interests of you in the long term and other people. It's actually the manifestation of that balance.
You know, and I'm going to say something in favor of Rand too, because there are elements of her thought that are subtle. You know, so if you say that the individual has an obligation to the community.
then that obligation can be twisted and bent by people who will use moral guilt as a cudgel. And she does a nice job of outlining that. So she tells the story, for example, of a factory that decided to run on the principle of to each according to his need and from each according to his ability. And she shows how that was foisted upon the workers, right? So she shows how that immediately degenerates into a competition of victimization.
and slavery to that self-described victimization. But she fails to make a distinction between me being burdened by force with the needs of other people.
and me taking on the responsibility as a voluntary choice to address the needs of other people. And so that would be the difference between being a slave, let's say, and having a family. I mean, you're both working for, in both situations, you're working for someone else, the good of your children, let's say, but in the case of a well constituted family, you're doing that
voluntarily, and that makes all the difference. It makes all the physiological difference too, because a burden undertaken voluntarily is much less stressful physiologically than the same burden foisted upon you involuntarily. The data on that are very clear. So she does a nice job of insisting that whatever responsibility is undertaken has to be undertaken voluntarily, but that's also the same as that call to responsibility that we were discussing earlier.
She makes a great reminder about that. And I think, again, to kind of swerve into what we do every day or every week at the Heritage Foundation. What we try to do is acknowledge these tensions in our movement, a broad intellectual movement, resolve them in a way that allows people to have the creative conflict. But ultimately, we're not just having those conversations, right? We're trying to do that to resolve those tensions so that we can develop
popular support for public policy solutions. And I would be remiss if I were not to say that rather than just being headquartered and supported here in the Imperial City of DC, we're distinctive, if not unique, among public policy organizations on the right because of how we're supported, which is hundreds of thousands of people across the country.
I say that not at all to make a fundraising pitch, but to explain that we are, as I like to say, the everyday Americans outpost. And so it's highly, highly improbable that the Heritage Foundation would be captured by these excesses
of the nation's capital. I mentioned that in reference to what you said about Rand, because I think she herself would appreciate that greatly about how we work, even though we obviously have some points of contention with some of her key points. Yeah, well, that was actually another thing I was going to ask for you about. Maybe I'll do that to close.
There are clearly dangers, and I'll talk to you about this more, I think, on the daily wire side of this conversation. There are clearly dangers posed to educational institutions and other institutions as a consequence of taking federal money, government money. And I think that
that proclivity for universities to accept federal money has now finally corrupted the scientific enterprise itself, and because it's gone downhill in quite a catastrophic manner in the last 10 years. I know that you've had
qualms to say the least about accepting government money. But then the same accusation can be levied, let's say, against conservative think tanks who derive their funding from gigantic corporations. How do you avoid becoming an instrument of the same regulatory capture that you protest against? Now, you just said quite clearly, but I think it's worth reiterating, tell me your funding model and how Heritage has protected itself against capture, let's say, by the
By the giants of the corporate world. Well, in two ways, the first is from the very beginning, Heritage was funded primarily by small donors. We have a membership model and the average donation given to Heritage each year is, I think, $82 as it was in 2022.
We do have some individuals who make larger contributions that obviously, but we receive very little, I mean, a minuscule amount of corporate money that's always been the case, but it's especially true over the last few years as heritage has sharpened its criticism of regulatory capture. So that inoculates us, the membership model that we have, but also the explicit
position we have not to receive corporate money from most businesses. We receive a little bit of that, but it's tiny. And of course, this is coming from me because when I was at Wyoming Catholic College, we like Hillsdale and a few other schools decided that the Department of Education could keep its money. We didn't want to be captured by their ideas. So in other words, heritage has always had this philosophy, but I've underscored it because of my hostility to that entire system.
Okay, so two closing questions. The first is, how has Heritage managed to fund itself successfully given its unwillingness to rely on government or corporate money? That's a lot of sources of money gone. How have you appealed to ordinary people, let's say, and why has that worked?
And along with that, maybe you could explain to everyone what they would have to do in order to learn more about how the Heritage Foundation operates and to participate in that, or at least to learn more if they chose to do so.
Thanks for asking those questions. On the first one, we have been one of the few organizations on the right that has perfected a particular model of most importantly, the work that we do in DC. It's not for our sake, it's not for the sake of the researchers, the policy leads, but we really see ourselves as the advocacy organization for the everyday American. And when we're able to report successes,
in that realm, which we've been able to do a lot, and convey that to individual Americans through direct mail and all the means that organizations use to raise money, it's been extremely successful for us over many, many years. The second way is, or the answer to your second question is, you can go to our website, heritage.org.
there you will see most importantly the research we do. Also we're very good or we've become better at giving individual Americans talking points sort of messaging that's linked to that research because we don't just want them to read the research we want them to be part of the solution right. We're not just here
ourselves to do the work and then ask them to support financially what we're doing. A vital part of our business model, and it speaks to the success that we've had, is having individual Americans participate in what we do. Such that 10 years ago, we founded, we created our own kind of campaign arm heritage action for America, which gives our enterprise the ability to do more direct lobbying, more involvement,
in particular campaigns. Most importantly, it also is the kind of currency that elected officials understand, which is the ability to, as is the parlance in our work, key vote a particular vote on a particular piece of legislation, yay or nay, and hold those elected officials accountable. They don't like it.
But between the research that we have, the hundreds of thousands of supporters we have, and the power of that scorecard that we keep, we've become very influential in DC. As I like to say, we're sort of the people's advocate behind enemy alliance.
Okay. Okay. Well, I'll close with a question on that front then. There are a number of candidates for president on the Republican side. I have no doubt that your organization is watching that completely surreal race intensely. Are there particular candidates
or how are you working with candidates so that your plan to restructure the corporate deep state or the government deep state dovetails with their campaign offers? Is that happening formally? Does it happen informally? Where do you see an alignment of interests or conflict of interest for that matter?
Great question. It happens both formally and informally, formally because of our tax designation from the IRS. We can't endorse in a political race, and so we don't. But that doesn't mean that we don't have any influence over it. And the influence that we try to have over it, I think we are, is in ideas and policy. And so I mentioned a couple of times earlier, this project 2025, the policies and personnel for the next administration,
We have shared those policies with all of the major conservative aspirants. And for that matter, a couple of candidates left of center, including RFK, because we are ultimately nonpartisan in our text designation. The informal part of that is we provide policy briefings to any candidate who accepts our invitation for that.
We've made that invitation across the political spectrum this year. I personally have done the briefing for a handful of the, I guess, more likely nominees for the Republican nomination. There are a few candidates who are probably misaligned with heritage, but those who are highest ranking in the polls are those who are closest to. I will say this.
The most important thing for the Heritage Foundation and our members as it relates to 2024 is not just that the most conservative candidate who can win the general election becomes our standard bearer. It's that he or she, even before they take the oath of office on January 20th, 25, is ready to govern in the most aggressive, ambitious, audacious way to destroy the deep state and devolve power back to the individual Americans.
That's a good place to bring this to a close. So for everyone who's watching and listening, thank you as always for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating these conversations and working so effectively on the production quality front. That's much appreciated film crew here up in Northern Ontario. Thank you very much for talking to me today. We're going to switch now
To the daily wire plus side, I'm going to talk. Our discussion now will turn to more autobiographical matters as they usually do on that side of the platform. And so those of you who are watching and listening who are interested might give some consideration to casting some attention, the daily wire plus way and other than that. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And thank you to all of you who've been watching and listening.
