The Battle for the Post-Trump Right – The New Yorker

“This is a civilizational moment for this republic,” Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, said.

“This is a civilizational moment for this republic,” Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, said. Illustration by Ben Hickey

A group of neatly dressed young people gathered in the auditorium of the Heritage Foundation headquarters this summer to observe the cherished rituals of the D.C. internship. Most of the girls had long skirts and updos; the boys wore suits that didn’t quite fit—still trying Washington on for size. From a low stage, Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage, bantered with them about the constants of D.C. life: their softball team, the ice-cream social scheduled for that afternoon. Then he launched into a professorial discourse about the nature of conservatism. The interns scribbled intently in Heritage notebooks, branded with the Liberty Bell.

For decades, a very specific kind of right-wing kid has dreamed about working at Heritage. “I would look at the building in awe,” a former member of the management team told me. The organization has an annual budget of about a hundred million dollars, and more than four hundred million in reserves. Its properties take up an entire city block on the Senate side of the Capitol. Heritage is the undisputed giant of the conservative-think-tank world—less a tank than an aircraft carrier.

When Roberts took over as leader, five years ago, he was eager to adopt an aggressive posture. Suddenly, managers were speaking in sports metaphors (We’re going to move the football!) or martial ones (We’re here to do battle!). A longtime Heritage scholar named Mike Gonzalez told me, earnestly, “What I say about Kevin—it’s kind of like watching ‘Braveheart’ every morning.”

Roberts is tall and bald, with the permanently gregarious manner of someone who, in another life, could have been a politician. Several people described him to me as a man’s man: he drives a black diesel pickup and wears cowboy boots to formal functions. When the Guardian reported old allegations that he had killed a neighbor’s noisy dog, he took to making jokes about knowing how to use a shovel (though he denies killing the dog). He is skilled at selling Heritage to donors, and also at cultivating right-wing staffers in Washington. Lately, however, the latter crowd has been causing him trouble.

As one former Heritage executive put it, the young people who came to D.C. used to be the good kids—teachers’ pets, class presidents, suck-ups. Now the right-wing dreamers deride their elders as “Reagan Zombies” and “BoomerCons.” They’re sick of the establishment program of forever wars and free trade, open borders and kowtowing to China.

Their movement—known as the New Right, or sometimes as the Realignment—is virulently antiwar, eager for mass deportations, and less interested in lowering corporate taxes than in helping families afford houses and cars and kids. “It’s Elizabeth Warren in the streets, economic nationalism and strong Christianity in the sheets,” one D.C. think-tanker told me. The kids these days don’t watch Hannity; they follow Tucker, or maybe Nick Fuentes, the young white nationalist who mocks women and calls Hitler “cool.” “Everyone in the mainstream on the right is puzzled about what to do about the angry young men,” a former Heritage scholar told me. “It creates nasty fractures in the coalition.”

An intern at the event this summer asked Roberts what he thought about Carlson and Fuentes. “Never heard of them,” Roberts joked, to laughter. Then he acknowledged that their appeal was something “we have tried to grapple with here.” He said that it was a reaction to “what is perceived to be the inauthenticity of institutions, that institutions can’t be trusted.” He mentioned colleges, churches, and the government—not think tanks, but perhaps it was implied. “The way some people, a few people, make sense of that is a burn-it-all-down mentality,” he said.

Once the midterms have passed, the conservative movement will have to reckon with its impending post-Trump reality.

Different factions want vastly different futures—and, in recent years, these factions have been fighting for control of Heritage. One important dividing line is whether you’re under or over the age of forty-five. Roberts’s hope is to influence the next generation: to disciple them, to direct their anger, to correct their excesses. “This is a civilizational moment for this republic,” he told me recently. “Whatever battles exist out there, whether they’re political battles, ideological battles—God forbid, more real battles—let them be in my lifetime, right now, so my kids don’t have to fight them.”

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