The Hard Conversations at the Heritage Foundation

The core mission of right-wing politics since 2015, especially of its propaganda apparatus, has been to avoid wrestling with hard conversations.

That’s the closest I can come to finding an excuse for Roberts’ whitewashing of Carlson. If the Heritage chief was too quick to dismiss valid moral criticism of an influential postliberal goblin, perhaps it’s only because he and the rest of the Republican Party have spent the last 10 years doing that every day. It’s muscle memory at this point.

Choose any unlawful, unethical, or immoral thing that Donald Trump has done during his reign over the GOP and you’ll find right-wingers barfing up all the same excuses that Carlson allies like Kevin Roberts vomit up for Tucker. “We can’t let the left win by dividing the right.” “I don’t agree with him on everything but at least he fights.” “Don’t import ‘cancel culture’ into the GOP.”

The Trump era has been a sustained exercise in suppressing hard conversations, with too many examples to count, although one will suffice to illustrate the point. If ever there was a moment for right-wingers to do a little soul-searching, it was after their hero very nearly staged the first successful coup in U.S. history. How Tea Party “constitutional conservatives” arrived at the point of supporting a conspiratorial paranoiac’s plot to end American democracy was a subject that, dare I say, warranted some hard conversations.

But we didn’t get those conversations, not even from the party’s leadership. When Sen. Mitch McConnell and members of his Republican conference had an opportunity to convict Trump for high crimes and banish him from returning to the White House, they contrived an excuse to acquit him on the nonsense pretext that the Senate lacked jurisdiction over a president who had already left office. GOP lawmakers didn’t want a hard conversation about authoritarianism. Four years later, their branch of government functionally no longer exists.

As for Kevin Roberts, can you guess how eager he’s been to have a hard conversation about January 6? I bet you can.

His tenure at Heritage mirrors the wider right’s hostility to dissent. A few days ago, Jonah Goldberg reminded us that Roberts’ organization is unusual among think tanks in insisting on a “one voice” policy that requires staff to “always publicly advocate for a single, unified position.” That is, not coincidentally, also how Donald Trump runs the GOP, ruthlessly “canceling” any party official who challenges his policies by threatening to fire them or primary them out of their job. But message discipline in a political party, particularly a highly authoritarian one, is to be expected.

In a think tank, whose experts should be having all sorts of interesting disagreements over law and policy, it’s downright weird. It should welcome illuminating “hard conversations” among its employees, and usually think tanks do—except for the Heritage Foundation, whose highest purpose under Roberts appears to be supplying ideological cover for Republicans’ drift toward Peronism.

Even the precipitating factor in this PR nightmare demonstrates the new right’s aversion to hard conversations. One Heritage scholar informed Roberts at yesterday’s staff meeting that it wasn’t Carlson’s willingness to talk to Nick Fuentes that offended so many on the right, it was the kid-gloves treatment that Tucker gave him. Carlson is perfectly capable of having “hard conversations” with right-wingers whose views he finds offensive—when he wants to.

The fact that he didn’t want to have those discussions with a white supremacist says something about how offensive he finds Fuentes’ beliefs, no?

Needless to say, I’m skeptical that Kevin Roberts will ever be moved to “challenge” Tucker Carlson by having a hard conversation with him.

As enjoyable as it’s been to watch Roberts squirm over the past week, his core point has remained consistent: Heritage will not turn its back on Tucker, no matter what. It’ll turn its back on Fuentes, a more obscure and obnoxious figure, to soothe angry donors and Reaganites. But Roberts will not abandon Carlson, still a “friend” in good standing despite … everything.

There’s no other way to read that logic except as an affirmation that Tucker’s views deserve a place in the conservative movement, at least as Roberts conceives of it. All of the agita around Heritage lately boils down to a simple question: If someone insists that Israel knew 9/11 was coming or that anxiety over Zohran Mamdani is some sort of Zionist ploy, should that be grounds for angry cancellation by the right or grounds for a cheerful chat among “friends”?

Roberts’ position is clear—and it seems, on the one hand, awfully short-sighted. Carlson will only get worse as 2028 draws closer, you know. God only knows what sort of antisemitic dreck he’ll be serving up in the next few years to test Heritage’s “friendship.” Roberts may yet feel obliged to wash his hands of him, and if he does, he’ll look like a galactic schmuck for having tried so hard to legitimize Tucker in the first place.

But on the other hand, from the perspective of an amoral careerist who cares only about cozying up to right-wing power brokers, Roberts’ position seems like a shrewd one to take. Ask yourself: Could he “cancel” Carlson even if he wanted to?

That’s the flaw in Robert Rector’s point about conservatives having excommunicated illiberal factions like the Birchers and Buchananites from the right in the past. Buckleyites were able to do that because, at the time, their wing of the GOP was ascendant; the party’s leadership and the activist class were recognizably classically liberal. Those in Reagan’s GOP who favored isolationism or protectionism could be persuasively disparaged as heretics because they were in fact deviating from the right’s ideological party line.

Our current president isn’t antisemitic (not the way Fuentes is, anyway) but he’s as amoral a creature as ever crawled from the sea and cares not a bit for classical liberalism as an ideology or an American political tradition. The idea of banishing anyone, including Tucker Carlson, from Donald Trump’s party for being “offensive” is comically ridiculous.

And it’s no longer the Buckleyites who supply the right’s intellectual energy, such as it is. It’s postliberals like Adrian Vermeule, Curtis Yarvin, and Patrick Deneen. Carl Schmitt, not Antonin Scalia, is in vogue among new right legal thinkers. That’s what I meant when I said that Roberts’ quote is preposterous for more than one reason: When he calls on the conservative movement to have hard conversations about its direction, he’s implying that a “conservative” movement still meaningfully exists and that it retains the power to cancel postliberals if it so chooses.

It doesn’t. Rather the opposite: As Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Liz Cheney, Jeff Flake, and a gajillion other Reaganites might tell you, all of the canceling being done in the modern GOP is of conservatives by ascendant postliberals. The only “cancellation” power traditional Republicans retain is withholding their votes from a party whose base seems to think more highly of Tucker Carlson than it does of, say, Jonah Goldberg. And as we saw last November, most of those traditional Republicans are too dogmatically partisan to exercise that power.

So when Roberts declines to cancel Carlson, he’s really only being prudent. He has no way of hurting Tucker, but Tucker certainly has enough grassroots juice to hurt him and Heritage. And if the day comes when Fuentes accrues a similar amount of juice, rest assured that Roberts will have a “hard conversation” with himself about whether Fuentes maybe doesn’t belong inside the tent after all.

The Birchers won, and Roberts, for one, welcomes his new crank overlords. 

And so we come to a mystery: Why did Roberts feel obliged to apologize in the first place for not having been harder on Fuentes initially?

It’s very unusual to see a prominent leader in Trump’s orbit apologize for anything. Come to think of it, it’s unusual to see major players in either party apologize anymore. In a post-shame society, public contrition usually isn’t necessary unless one’s offense is as grievous as, say, fantasizing about an opponents’ children dying violent deaths.

But it’s especially rare to see a member of the MAGA base express regret. In Trump’s party, shame is shameful. Apologizing is evidence of weakness, an unmanly unwillingness to “fight” for your position. (The president himself almost never says sorry, even to the Almighty.) I’d bet multiple internal organs that Roberts has been swamped with hate mail since he reversed course and anathematized Fuentes—and not just by Fuentes’ groyper fans. Plenty of mainstream Republicans will bristle at him for having “handed the left a win” by daring to suggest that any moral criticism of a right-winger might be valid.

Only suckers apologize! So why did Roberts do it?

I think he came to understand, albeit a day or two too late, that antisemitism has special moral and political salience on the right. Jew-baiting isn’t the only type of prejudice that’s rising in the GOP (ask Dinesh D’Souza) but it’s one that Republicans have unusually strong incentives to oppose.

There’s room for earnestness here. I’m skeptical that Kevin Roberts is capable of feeling remorse, or feeling much of anything, after years of apologizing for Trump, but I’m sure that many of the conservatives who browbeat him last week were sincerely mortified at seeing Tucker play pattycake with Fuentes. Antisemitism is a smoking-gun symptom of terminal moral rot in a political movement, the equivalent of spotting a grapefruit-sized tumor in a CAT scan of someone’s head. And the right’s educated class, which Heritage nominally serves and from which its scholars and donors are drawn, knows it.

It’s an “abandon ship” moment for any Enlightenment enthusiast. Roberts may have concluded that if he didn’t throw Fuentes overboard, the passengers were headed for the lifeboats.

There are more pragmatic possibilities. For instance, antisemitism is potentially a real electoral liability for the GOP (J.D. Vance is thinking hard about it, I promise), first with swing voters but secondarily with evangelical Republicans who staunchly support Israel. It remains to be seen whether the modern right will tolerate contempt for Indian Americans among its members, but I’m reasonably confident that Carlson’s contempt for “Christian Zionists” won’t play well.

Antisemitism has also been a useful political cudgel for the president and Republicans against the left, often with plenty of justification. It’s a handy moral equalizer whenever Trump accepts a barely veiled bribe, indicts a political enemy for no good reason, or deploys troops to some new Democratic-run city he dislikes: He may be an authoritarian, but would you rather be governed by Jew-bashing progressives?

That argument has an obvious problem if the right-wing alternative to Jew-bashing progressives is Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, so Republicans leaned on Roberts to do what little he can to make sure it isn’t. The fact that his spiritual leader, Donald Trump, has allied himself staunchly with Israel despite the right’s creeping groyper-fication provided the political cover he needed to do so.

If we want to get cynical, though, we might also wonder how much the pummeling of Heritage’s head honcho is about conservatives needing to feel better about the moral compromises they’ve made to remain on Team Red during the dark journey of the last 10 years and the darker journey of the next three.

In politics as in life, no one wants to believe they’re “the baddies.” Even partisans who, despite their better judgment, continue to support a reactionary, anti-intellectual, populist party as it slides toward fascism need to feel that they’re not in league with bad people. They’ve worked strenuously for 10 years to develop “lesser of two evils” rationalizations for Donald Trump. And now the new right is going to repay them by demanding that they do the same for … Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes?

It’s just too much. Fuentes in particular is such a gleeful, boorish antisemite that he can’t be rehabilitated the way Carlson sometimes is as merely “confronting the Israel lobby” or whatever. For some right-wingers, the backlash to Roberts’ first video may have been a sort of ethical valve bursting under immense pressure from 10 years of degradation. First Trump, then Tucker, now Fuentes?!

In the end, Roberts met them halfway. We must keep Carlson—but he’ll give them Fuentes. The morally denuded right can sleep well knowing that the movement to which they’ve pledged allegiance hasn’t accepted the groypers, at least. Euphemistic pseudo-intellectual Jew-baiting will be tolerated, but vulgar antisemitism is a red line.

We’re not the baddies. Any “hard conversations” suggesting otherwise can, as usual, be postponed.