Heritage Foundation
Conservative think tank; Washington DC; founded 1973; flagship policy institution of Reaganism; turned sharply rightward under Jim DeMint (2013); stabilized under Kay Cole James (2017); fully converted to MAGA New Right under Kevin D. Roberts (October 2021); author of Project 2025
What It Is
The Heritage Foundation is the largest and most influential conservative think tank in Washington. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors, it was for decades the institutional anchor of Reagan-Buckley establishment conservatism — the policy infrastructure of Fusionism. Its “Mandate for Leadership I” (1981) inaugurated its tradition of publishing policy recommendations for incoming administrations — much of Ronald Reagan’s policy platform derived from it. By 2018, Trump (like Reagan) had “embraced nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations from the Heritage Foundation’s ‘Mandate for Leadership.’”
Heritage’s Self-Reversal: 2007 → 2025
The clearest single document of Heritage’s pre-MAGA self-conception is The Conservative Consensus (Lee Edwards, 2007), a Heritage report calling for “a renewed fusionism based on limited government, the free market, individual freedom and responsibility, a balance between liberty and law, and a commitment to moral order and to virtue, both private and public.” Edwards canonized Frank Meyer as fusionism’s intellectual father, Barry Goldwater as its first political apostle, and Ronald Reagan as its master practitioner. The 2007 essay’s prescription was explicit: more fusionism, more Meyer, more Reagan.
Sixteen years later, the same institution published Project 2025 (2023), a 920-page operational program for state-led cultural restoration, Schedule F reclassification of the federal civil service, and dismantling of the Administrative State — exactly the politics Edwards’s “renewed fusionism” was structured to forestall. Edwards’s prescription assumed virtue would be cultivated through a balanced civic order; Project 2025 deploys virtue as a substantive policy goal pursued through executive power.
Heritage’s 2007-to-2025 trajectory is the wiki’s clearest single piece of evidence for the systemic shift the MAGA New Right represents at the institutional level. The same think tank, with substantial continuity in donor base and physical building, has switched between two structurally incompatible frameworks. The shift is not just a generational change of leadership; it is the abandonment of one set of operating premises (Fusionism) for another (Postliberalism-adjacent statist conservatism — Common Good Constitutionalism is Heritage’s de facto jurisprudential tendency under Kevin Roberts).
DeMint and Radicalization (2013-2017)
In 2013 Heritage took a distinctively activist and ideological turn under Jim DeMint, a Tea Party senator who became president. One trustee: “DeMint has not only politicized Heritage, he’s also trivialized it.” The organization still had some harsh words for Trump prior to the 2016 election, but in the end helped with the transition and staffed the new administration.
Behind the scenes, DeMint was forced out in early 2017.
Kay Cole James and the Attempted Normalization (2017-2021)
DeMint was replaced by Kay Cole James — the first African American and first woman to hold the position. She was joined in 2018 by Kim Holmes as executive vice president. Both were decidedly anti-Trump and antinationalist. James published an op-ed decrying American racism in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
This “return to normalcy” approach led to departures among the think tank’s more radical staff — including Matthew Spalding, David Azerrad, Arthur Milikh, and Ryan T. Anderson. James and Holmes retired simultaneously in March 2021. Their exit — right as the “Lost Cause” narrative around January 6 was gaining momentum rather than fading — signaled what came next.
(Note: During the attack on January 6, 2021, Darren Beattie had tweeted that Kay Cole James “needed to learn her place and take a knee to MAGA.”)
Kevin Roberts and the MAGA Turn (October 2021-Present)
Heritage named Kevin Roberts as president in October 2021. Roberts came from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (president since 2016) and had worked with Ryan Williams and others on the 79 Days Report (October 2020) — the Claremont/TPPF pre-election wargame that a critic called “a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries.”
At NatCon 3 in Miami (September 2022), Roberts gave a speech that symbolized Heritage’s complete surrender to the New Right. He thanked Yoram Hazony for his wise counsel and credited Christopher DeMuth for suggesting he “give National Conservatism a chance.” He pledged:
“I come to this convention as president of the Heritage Foundation to extend my gratitude for the ideas and energy National Conservatives have injected into the national debate and my fellowship with the principles you advanced to rescue America from the barbarians inside the gates of our very own institutions. I come not to invite the National conservatives to join our conservative movement but to acknowledge the plain truth that Heritage is already part of yours.”
Roberts also noted that as a high schooler he had volunteered for Pat Buchanan’s 1992 presidential run — “my people knew what time it was in America before most even knew the clock was ticking.”
The choice of Roberts meant the Heritage board believed Trump-style right-wing populism was the future of American conservatism. The New Right’s “Lost Cause” narrative around January 6, far from waning, was only gaining force.
Project 2025
Heritage’s newest iteration of “Mandate for Leadership” was Project 2025 — a 900+ page governing blueprint for a second Trump administration. It cooperated with AFPI, the Conservative Partnership Institute (DeMint’s post-Heritage lobbying group), America First Legal (Stephen Miller), and American Moment.
Roberts’s introduction, in Thomas Zimmer’s description, “oozes the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that is fueling the Right and animating the plans for a second Trump administration.” Roberts wrote of the “long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions” and called “The Great Awokening” a totalitarian cult. “We have two years and one chance to get it right.”
The dismantling agenda:
- Eliminate the federal Department of Education
- Install a “conservative” Environmental Protection Agency
- Limit the CDC’s capacity to make recommendations
- Remove job protections for civil servants, replacing them with political appointees and loyalists (“Schedule F”)
The mobilization agenda:
- Use the CDC to collect abortion data at state level as part of efforts to end “abortion tourism”
- Use state power to advance conservative moral purposes
Zimmer’s analysis: Project 2025 “was always, at its core, an anti-left project, an attempt to prevent any leveling of established discriminatory hierarchies.”
The Conservative Ecosystem Around Roberts
Roberts’s Heritage cooperated with and incubated a cluster of New Right organizations:
- Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI): DeMint’s post-Heritage lobbying group; received 36.4M the next year (Jason Wilson, The Guardian). Incubated: Greta Mitchell’s “election integrity” org; American Accountability Foundation (opposition research); American Moment (Saurabh Sharma, “on a mission to recruit and train the next generation of Republican elites”); America First Legal (AFL, legal office directed by Stephen Miller).
- America First Policy Institute (AFPI): New think tank serving as holding ground for eight former Trump cabinet members; close ties to Charlie Kirk/Turning Point USA.
Significance
Heritage’s conversion is the clearest single indicator of how completely the New Right captured the conservative institutional infrastructure between 2016 and 2024. Roberts’s NatCon 3 speech — in which the president of the largest right-wing think tank in America declared his institution “already part of” National Conservatism — was a moment of open institutional capitulation. Project 2025 is what that capitulation looks like as policy.
Cross-References
- Kevin Roberts — current president
- Jim DeMint — president 2013-2017; radicalized Heritage
- National Conservatism — the movement Heritage has formally joined
- Claremont Institute — allied institution in Project 2025; Roberts co-authored 79 Days Report with Ryan Williams
- Christopher Rufo — key culture warrior in the Heritage ecosystem
- John Eastman — another Claremont figure in the same network
- Darren Beattie — tweeted “take a knee to MAGA” about Kay Cole James on January 6
- Longmarcherism — the ideology Roberts’s Project 2025 introduction embodies
- Stephen Miller — runs America First Legal, incubated by CPI
- MAGA New Right — the movement Heritage now serves
- Integration from Within — the strategy Project 2025 implements