Let's Check in on the Leading Conservative Think Tanks

No more dog whistles, just... dogs.

Photo by Kajetan Sumila on Unsplash

One of the arguments I made in the afterword to The Ideas Industry was that the Trump administration encountered severe problems with implementing its preferred policies because of a lack of know-how. It admittedly does not require as much information to destroy institutions as it does to create them, but some knowledge of politics, policy, and law is required. Despite a largely pliant Republican Party, the Trump administration repeatedly lost in the marketplace of ideas because it was pretty easy for, you know, actual experts to brand their proposed policy ideas as wrong, cruel, or just plain stupid.

With the passage of time, many of Trump’s supporters frame his first term as an administration that had the right impulses even if the implementation is poor. And there is certainly a grain of truth to that. If you like trade wars with China, for example, Trump was the first president to push hard on that policy lever — not that it worked terribly well.

As Trump runs for his second term, however, the difference this time around is the support he is getting from key conservative think tanks. Both the Claremont Institute and the Heritage Foundation are helping to lay the groundwork for Trump’s return to the White House.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has commented previously on Heritage’s intellectual devolution — just as the hard-working staff at Spoiler Alerts before it previously commented on the intellectual devolution of Claremont. As it turns out the New York Times recently checked in on both institutions with two items that merit further discussion. They highlight the new symbiosis between think tanks and the Trump campaign. They also highlight some more disturbing trends.

The first, by Nicholas Confessore, looks at the conservative movement to push back on diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] programs at universities. It turns out that the motives of some of these groups might not have been quite as noble as they articulated in public:

Centered at the Claremont Institute, a California-based think tank with close ties to the Trump movement and to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, the group coalesced roughly three years ago around a sweeping ambition: to strike a killing blow against “the leftist social justice revolution” by eliminating “social justice education” from American schools….

The Claremont effort seemed to diverge from others on the right who had long urged academic institutions to renew their commitment to ideological diversity. In one exchange, some of those involved discussed how to marshal political power to replace left-wing orthodoxies with more “patriotic,” traditionalist curriculums.

“In support of ridding schools of C.R.T., the Right argues that we want nonpolitical education,” [Claremont’s chairman Thomas] Klingenstein wrote in August 2021. “No we don’t. We want our politics. All education is political.”

Dr. [Scott] Yenor appeared to agree, responding with some ideas for reshaping K-12 education. “An alternative vision of education must replace the current vision of education,” he wrote back….

Dr. Yenor and his allies bristled at the conventions of academic life as overly solicitous toward female and nonwhite students. He sometimes shared routine emails from administrators at his home institution, Boise State, deriding them as examples of being “ruled by women.” On one occasion, he forwarded a Boise State email featuring a photo of a female computer science student with close-cropped hair and a plaid shirt. “Gynocracy update!” Dr. Yenor wrote.

Confessore also goes through Claremont’s myriad grant applications, which contain not-at-all hyperbolic rhetoric like, “Our project will give legislators the knowledge and tools they need to stop funding the suicide of their own country and civilization.”

For an organization that likes to paint the left as bereft of joy, they sure do sound like a dour bunch. And if Trump wins, their members will no doubt be helping to craft federal education policy. It will be conservative political correctness run amok.

Claremont could be characterized as a fringe right-wing organization. In an interview with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts says proudly, “This is Heritage, you know, not some fringe group on the right.” Let’s take his assertion at face value and excerpt from Roberts’ interview to find out what a mainstream right-wing think tank believes in 2024 (Garcia-Navarro’s questions are in bold):

Orban has become this darling of the right. You yourself have met with him. You’ve praised him on social media.

He’s a very impressive leader….

Orban brags about turning Hungary into an “illiberal democracy” — his words. He’s anti-L.G.B.T. He’s anti-immigrant. He said explicitly that he wants to prevent Europe from becoming “mixed race.” Over his four terms, he presided over a pattern of democratic backsliding in Hungary.

I’ve not seen that.

That is the estimation of members of the European Union.

They’re incorrect….

What is it exactly that he has done that you find laudable?

That actually gets to the heart of the question, rather than framing that I would disagree with. The focus on family policy broadly. The motivation to realize that Hungary has to do something, as most countries in the world outside Africa do, to reverse the decline in the birthrate….

In a recent podcast episode, you were speaking with Jesse Kelly, the right-wing radio host, and the episode was about, and I’m quoting here, “the secret Communist movement inside America.” And you were not talking about Chinese government infiltration. You said about those employed in the U.S. government, “These men and women, these Communists, really, are in positions where they’re dictating with the power, the authority of law, what other Americans do.” You use the word “Communist” a lot to describe those you might disagree with politically inside this country.

Well, at least a few of them must be Communists. I think there are far more Chinese Communists who’ve infiltrated our government than American Communists, but at the very least, they’re socialists. So if I were to revise that, I would say they were socialists, not Communists….

Do you believe that President Biden won the 2020 election?

No.

Can you tell me why?

Sure. I think there are unknowns. I don’t know the outcome, but that’s why I can’t say yes definitively. And I am no conspiracy theorist at all, as some of the election-integrity people on the right will tell you. Still a lot of unknowns about two counties in Arizona, multiple counties in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Is it possible he won? Sure. But can I say definitively that he won? No. Having said that, I was very vocal at the end of 2020 and early 2021 that that’s what we knew and the election needed to be certified. And so let’s move on.

Pretty much every bit of evidence has shown there was no substantial fraud.

We have an election-fraud database at Heritage that shows a lot of instances of fraud. What I’m not saying is that the examples in that database prove that Biden didn’t win. I’m not certain that he won.

Remember, Roberts insists that the Heritage Foundation is not a fringe group on the right. I agree. Which means that mainstream conservative think tanks now evinces a blinkered, maybe-kinda-racist view of demography, a McCarthyite conviction that there are communists in the U.S. government, and an abject refusal to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Little wonder that other think tankers are embarrassed by Roberts’ behavior.

In her introduction to the Roberts interview, Garcia-Navarro writes:

Roberts told me that he views Heritage’s role today as “institutionalizing Trumpism.” This includes leading Project 2025, a transition blueprint that outlines a plan to consolidate power in the executive branch, dismantle federal agencies and recruit and vet government employees to free the next Republican president from a system that Roberts views as stacked against conservative power. The lesson of Trump’s first year in office, Roberts told me, is that “the Trump administration, with the best of intentions, simply got a slow start. And Heritage and our allies in Project 2025 believe that must never be repeated.”

I agree with Roberts’ last sentence. If Trump wins in 2024, he will lean on the folks at Claremont and Heritage to staff out his administration. And at this point, both think tanks have discarded the pretense that they care about anything other than acquiring raw political power and using it to punish their enemies.