Ed Feulner, who died on July 18, was a big man in every sense. Tall and bulky, he had a largeness of spirit, a generosity of soul, and his ambitions were commensurately vast. When he started running the Heritage Foundation in the early 1970s, it had nine employees. Now it has 300, half a million registered supporters and a nine-figure budget.
If Feulner was bothered by Heritage’s swing to MAGA isolationism after 2020, he was too discreet to say so. Yet the think tank he leaves behind is very different from the one he helped found.
Feulner was one of the original fusionists. He believed that the Right needed to be a coalition of foreign policy hawks, Christians, classical liberals, nationalists, and strict constitutionalists. Feulner himself had libertarian leanings and was a moving spirit behind the Mont Pelerin Society, but he made a point of employing Russell Kirk, the ultraconservative who claimed to have less in common with libertarians than with socialists.
Being a fusionist emphatically did not imply moderation. On the contrary, Feulner can claim as much credit as anyone for ending the ideological drift of the Nixon-Ford years and enabling Reaganism. His 3,000-page policy manifesto, Mandate for Leadership, was published in the year Reagan was elected. The Gipper implemented two-thirds of it.
What was Feulner’s superpower? He was no orator, and never claimed to be an original scholar — he had people for those things. Rather, he was brilliant at reading others, building relationships, and understanding motives. It is no exaggeration to say that he determined the balance of the Republican caucus, especially after Newt Gingrich’s victory in 1994. By publishing scorecards that measured candidates’ ideological soundness — Reagan himself, in a bad year, scored only 62% — he switched the incentives for public figures.
How, then, did Feulner respond when those incentives were reordered by Trump, when it became career-enhancing for Republicans to demand tariffs or friendship with Putin? With a combination of pragmatism and principle. He knew he must shift with the times to keep his influence. Yet he tried to moderate the authoritarianism and protectionism that were coming into vogue.
To pull off that balancing act, he genuinely altered elements of his own outlook. I recall a conversation à deux in 2017, which he ended by declaring cheerfully, “Got to get back to draining the swamp!” There was no one else present, and he wasn’t being ironic — he had simply internalized the vernacular so as to remain relevant.
During the first Trump term, Heritage backed the administration, though not always its agenda. Feulner was careful not to criticize Trump or his personnel, but he continued to make the case for free trade, supporting allies and respecting the Constitution. All of that, naturally, enraged MAGA hard-liners, who loathe qualified support, recognizing only unconditional fealty. When Kay Coles James, then the president of Heritage, condemned the Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, it upset some donors and, more immediately, some commentators.
“You may have sent them money, hopefully for the last time,” Tucker Carlson told viewers on his Fox News show, opening a furious harangue against the think tank. As funders withdrew, Coles James stood down early, and Heritage began to change its tune. According to Kevin Roberts, the current president, “President Trump’s decision to pardon nearly all Jan. 6 defendants is a necessary corrective to the brazen weaponization of our justice system by the Left.”
Even the oldest of Heritage’s convictions have been altered for the sake of MAGA compliance. Tariffs, denounced for 50 years as poverty-inducing, are now “a tool of statecraft.” Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who got 10% on Heritage’s congressional scorecard as a Democratic representative, is now “excellent”, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is “taking on big corporations and big government.” Ukraine is suckering Americans into handing over aid. Indeed, the Ukrainian flag, which used to fly above Heritage’s Massachusetts Avenue headquarters, was not only hauled down — it was replaced, when Trump was convicted, by the upside-down Stars and Stripes.
THE THIRD-PARTY BREAKTHROUGH ALREADY HAPPENED — UNDER TRUMP
All organizations need to listen to their bases, of course. “Donor capture” is simply a pejorative way of saying that people will not hand their cash to outfits of which they disapprove. Yet think tanks exist to lead the debate, set the agenda, and plant the flag in advance of the vanguard. Feulner always understood how to get the balance right and, even at the last election, backed former Vice President Mike Pence for the nomination.
When voters go through an autocratic moment, conservative institutions, like politicians, respond. Then again, if think tanks now take the attitude attributed to the French revolutionary Auguste Ledru-Rollin — “I am their leader, I must follow them!” — what are they for?