The Heritage Foundation Must Be Destroyed
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you. When we come to The Heritage Foundation,” Angolan warlord Jonas Savimbi greeted his audience in Washington on October 5, 1989, “it is like coming home.” He thanked the right-wing think tank for repealing Congressional blocks on aid, which would enable him to fight on for a “free market economy” and democracy. Eventually a ceasefire was reached in Angola, and elections were called. When Savimbi lost in 1992, he plunged the country into war yet again. The next decade of Angolan history was defined by broken ceasefires, mass killing of civilians, and diamond-funded insurgency until the country’s government finally caught and killed him in 2002. The Guardian’s Peter Beaumont wrote upon his death that “his fighters laid siege to a country's cities, starved and enslaved its people, and sowed its fields with mines. In 30 years they drove a third of the population from their homes in their battle with the government.”
Savimbi closed his 1989 speech by thanking Heritage for its “great support. No Angolan will forget your efforts.” I am not sure Americans remember those efforts enough.
Today the Heritage Foundation is running roughshod over American democracy. Russ Vought, formerly a Heritage lobbying head, is now using his power as director of the Office of Management and Budget to cut funding Congress has already appropriated. This is a flagrant violation of both the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 and the Constitution more generally. If you listened only to what Heritage said for the last few decades, this could come as a surprise.
But if you listened to what they did, it was obvious. The Heritage Foundation has always pursued far-right power, across the world. When Savimbi died, foreign policy scholar Piero Gleijeses wrote in the LA Times that Savimbi “never deviated from his overriding goals or principles. . . absolute power.” The Heritage Foundation, and the “constitutional conservative” posture more broadly, has followed the same principle.
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Founded in 1973, it took time for Heritage to gain steam. The think tank is practically synonymous with the Reagan administration. On their website, their first boast is pushing the Reagan administration into “implementing nearly two-thirds of the 2,000 policy recommendations from our first ever ‘Mandate for Leadership.’” While he was a horrible and far-right President, Reagan did not always satisfy American conservatives. Heritage’s role in the Reagan administration was to pressure the President from the right– a role it has happily taken up since. The 2025 Mandate for Leadership is something you probably know better as “Project 2025.”
Next on this list is nuclear policy. Heritage claims credit for pushing the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s much-derided “Star Wars” program to shoot Soviet nukes down with satellite weapons. Popular memory today casts SDI as a huge waste of money. That it was! But even worse than SDI’s failure was its possible success.
There is no such thing as a defensive weapon. Israel’s missile defenses (backed by America and regional allies) have enabled it to constantly escalate conflicts, safe in the knowledge that it cannot be harmed in retaliation. The moment America became invulnerable to nuclear attack, the Soviet Union would become uniquely vulnerable. Since no weapons system is developed with perfect speed or secrecy, this means the long years or months between its beginnings and its implementation are a dangerous time of increased tension too.
Reagan announced SDI in March 1983. Six months later, the world nearly ended when a Soviet warning system reported a missile launch from the United States. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Petrov correctly deduced it was a false alarm, and we all avoided a cataclysmic nuclear exchange. But “defensive” escalation continues to be right-wing policy on nuclear weapons. Heritage boasts of taking the US out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which restricted the development of missiles meant to shoot down nuclear weapons. We left that in 2002.
I don’t claim to know the right answer to nuclear policy– and in general I’m trying not to overstep my expertise with this newsletter, since that’s a common and unfortunate pitfall for academics. But I do know that answer must seriously consider the catastrophic risks of nuclear war. Heritage instead promotes aggression, expansion, violence. Their nuclear policy could have offered early warning of three ideological features behind Heritage’s malevolence in America today: first, an utter lack of care for human life, especially but not exclusively outside the U.S. Second, a desire to punish their enemies no matter the cost. Third, an unwillingness to compromise, with anyone over anything.
And this is just one facet of a broader Cold War hawk ideology that defines Heritage and the broader right’s orientation to international affairs. Savimbi was one of Heritage’s favorite warlords, but the foundation, and the right more broadly, never found an aspiring right-wing autocrat they didn’t like. Anyone who stood up against communism, no matter how violent they were, was a potential ally. Among the organizations Heritage supported arming were anti-Soviet Afghan partisans like Osama Bin Laden.
A phrase you might have heard lately is “imperial boomerang”— the notion that techniques of tyranny used to control colonies, like Britain’s, are eventually used to control people back in the homeland. The war, as they say, always comes home. This is a great way to analyze things like counterterrorism and policing. And it applies to values and beliefs as well as weapons and strategies. During the Cold War, the American right taught themselves how to justify atrocities and anti-democratic coups in the name of “free markets.” That ideology was always going to turn against America itself eventually.
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I grew up around self-described small government conservatives. Like most children, I had values but I didn’t have politics except what I had inherited from my parents. That was enough to make me the token liberal in spaces like, say, the Boy Scouts. Long arguments about the Electoral College and immigration filled my childhood.
Their worst fears of Democratic malevolence sound a lot like what Republicans are doing now. A sinister billionaire (but it’s Trump, not George Soros) is working with evil international powers (but it’s Russia and the Gulf States and Israel) to make himself rich. The President is taking away our healthcare (but it’s Medicaid, not private insurance) and deciding how we can raise our children (by pulling books from schools) and learn in our universities. He’s installing officials in media companies to ensure they comply with his agenda and report what he likes. And I’m not even going to bother with more than a mention of the Epstein thing.
Right-wing fears of tyranny have become a projection. One of the classic fascist moves is imagining yourself as a victim so that you can justify any and all acts of aggression. Only five weeks after January 6th, Heritage’s Mike Gonzalez wrote that the “nauseating invasion of the Capital on Jan. 6 wasn’t the only time the building has been attacked. There were three previous acts of aggression, all perpetrated by leftist activists.” The most recent of these was a bombing forty years ago.
All of these acts are worthy of condemnation– each was violent– but none of them were nearly as severe as January 6th, because none of them had a chance of overthrowing the government. Gonzalez threw them out to condemn bad people on “both sides” in order to downplay the importance of Trump’s attack on our democracy. On January 20th, 2025, Trump pardoned the mob he sent to the Capitol. Heritage praised the move.
The Heritage Foundation’s President, Kevin Roberts– who has a Ph.D. in History, something I intend to write about later– wrote a book in 2024 arguing conservatives must “fight fire with fire.” It starts by claiming that our country “went up in flames” in 2020, claiming that arson cause over a billion dollars in damage in American cities. Leftists were causing minor property damage (mediated by insurance) out of outrage against police violence. And the California wildifres that year were, somehow, related– not because police violence and climate change are both manifestations of capitalism or something, but because Black Lives Matter and the Bureau of Land Management (god, you know this man thought he was so clever with this) are part of the same “Uniparty” “conspiracy against nature.” To “escape our current darkness,” conservatives “must be brave enough to go on the offense, strike the match, and start a long, controlled burn.”
Russ Vought puts this into action. “Deadwood” cleared out by this burn includes public broadcasting, school funding, and money for the NIH– which helped develop a life-saving drug that Vought’s own daughter takes! Roberts and Vought defend Trump’s tyrannical rule with the same reasoning that Savimbi’s defenders used decades ago: against the radical left, fighting with principles means giving up. Sure, Savimbi’s UNITA killed civilians, but they were fighting communists. Could anyone ask them to fight with one hand behind their backs? In 2022, Vought claimed America had already abandoned the Constitution. Why should Republicans be bound by it if Democrats aren’t? You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.
In reality, it’s Democrats who are fighting with one hand behind their back. President Biden’s catastrophic appointment of Merrick Garland as Attorney General is part of the reason we are in this position at all. Terrified of appearing partisan, Garland dragged his feet on Trump prosecutions until they no longer mattered. He didn’t even appoint Special Prosecutor Jack Smith until November 2022. Republicans are threatening to imprison Democrats, while Democrats are still, God knows why, voting to approve Republican nominees.
Our elected officials and our institutions should be doing better, and we have to elect and pressure them to make that happen.The punishment for a leader who would be king, in a democracy, must be so overwhelming that no one would dare consider trying it. And institutions like Heritage, which have supported war crimes, insurrection, and presidential tyranny, should be destroyed.
If that’s satisfying to imagine– for me it is– you should also be a little afraid of your own satisfaction there. The answer is not to become like Heritage. To be clear, I don’t think liberals and the left are at any risk of going too far. On the contrary, a focus on justice and hope rather than revenge and punishment will help make sure America goes far enough to defend our democracy. Revenge is easy: one administration punishes a few easy targets and you’re done. Justice is harder. We need laws, movements, and institutions that stop a future Trump, not just punish the current one. In other words: like the title says, Heritage must be destroyed, but this has to be the beginning, and not the end, of a program of renewal.