https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=pR6DodpTrXI
And I think the key thing to home in on is that disagreement doesn’t have to be disagreeable. It may, and if it does, it may get into the zone of hurting people’s feelings. But as I’ve mentioned to more than one student in my teaching career, I don’t mean this to be offensive, but I care a lot less about your feelings than I do about your pursuit of truth. Hello everyone watching and listening. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with the sitting president of a think tank, conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts. We discuss the operations and practical utility of think tanks, the state of progressivism in the academic environment, how multiple generations of students have now been rendered incapable of facing adversity while claiming to fight it, and why intellectual combat is not something to shut down but to champion against all odds. So you know, I was much older than I should have been as an educated person to understand what a think tank was and how they operated. And you know, I’m probably not as clear about all the details still as I might be. I don’t know anything about their history or I don’t know who set up the first one. I don’t really know exactly who draws upon them and why and what effect they have on public policy at the local and state and national level. And so maybe we could start by just having you give everyone watching and listening a good description of what a think tank is and to put them in context before we start talking about your think tank and specifically. Great question. At its base, any think tank, whether it’s on the political left or the political right or in the center, starts with research. It may focus on a certain set of public policy issues. The purpose of that research is a little bit different, maybe even a lot different in some cases, than the research that you might do as a professor that I was doing as a history professor. And that is the purpose of the research at a think tank is to affect the outcome of public policy. Some think tanks will only focus on the research. Other think tanks, as we’ll no doubt discuss, will use that research and then hire people to go advocate, that is to say that they’re lobbyists, to directly influence the outcome of public policy, whether that’s at the federal level in the United States, obviously with Congress and the executive branch at the state level or even at the local level. So they are, to sum up, quasi-academic institutions. In fact, many people will leave academia, strictly defined, you know, the university to do work at a think tank, although there are many people who are professors full-time at universities who do project or contract-based work for think tanks. I understand as a concluding point to this definition of think tanks broadly that the United States has the most robust, vibrant system of think tanks across the political spectrum of any place in the world. So about how many high-end think tanks are operating in the U.S. and are they predominantly a conservative enterprise or a liberal or a progressive enterprise? Is it distributed across the political spectrum? It’s fairly distributed across the political spectrum, although in the last generation or so, say the last 25 or 30 years, the proportion of high-end think tanks, of which there are maybe a dozen, maybe 15 in the country, the proportion of them who are on the political right has increased and I think that’s a result of the conservative movement maturing, if you will. Many, if not most, of these think tanks are based in Washington, D.C., although a couple of them are based elsewhere in New York. There are some think tanks on the right, including one that I used to lead that’s based in Texas. There’s a growing number of state-based groups that are affecting not just their own state policy but also federal policy. So, well, it also may be that there’s been a need for conservative think tanks to emerge because, as is well known on statistical grounds, rather than merely being a consequence of a conspiracy theory, there are virtually no conservatives in universities at the faculty level and certainly vanishingly few in the social sciences and the humanities, which is where most of the research that pertains to policy would otherwise be conducted. And so you could imagine that the establishment of private enterprises that are devoted towards research on the conservative side might do something to redress that imbalance and I understand that Heritage Foundation, of course, certainly plays that role. Do you think that’s also a contributing factor to the emergence of the conservative think tanks in the U.S.? It’s huge. In fact, not that my story of how I became president of the Heritage Foundation is the most important or the most instructive, but that example that you just mentioned of professors who are politically conservative in the social sciences and the humanities being in small number is something I lived out. In fact, when I was in graduate school at the University of Texas, not known for its political conservatism, out of a few hundred graduate students in history, I was the only conservative I was aware of. Of those of us who were teaching assistants, 60, 70 of us, I absolutely was the only one. And so it was no surprise to me when I had my tenure track job at a southwestern public university that I was the only conservative. In fact, as would no doubt surprise you, in the entire College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, there was only one other right of center professor I was aware of out of a couple hundred faculty. And so the relationship between that fact, that reality, and the emergence of a growing number of conservative think tanks is very direct because many of us have said, forget the mistreatment, which is not an overstatement of conservatives in the social sciences and humanities and public policy. We’re just going to go directly, work directly for these public policy organizations, especially those that want to work on higher education policy or education policy writ large. So I’m going to ask you a bit of a meandering question. It’s partly a description of how I became aware of political corruption in the social sciences enterprise. So I trained as a clinical psychologist and a clinical researcher, and that’s actually a very different discipline than social psychology. And so social psychology is at the intersection, let’s say, of sociology and psychology. It has to do, it focuses on the effect of group affiliation, let’s say, on psychological processes. And it’s a radically leftist sub-discipline, and I would say it’s quite corrupt. And one of the ways I discovered that corruption was by beginning to investigate the technical structure of the belief system that makes up progressivism or left-wing thinking, especially left-wing authoritarianism. And as I delved into that, I learned much to my shock, I would say, that there was an insistence among social psychologists and then everyone that was influenced by them, that there was no such thing as left-wing authoritarianism, that authoritarianism in and of itself was only a conservative phenomena and a right-wing phenomenon. And I really couldn’t understand that at all, you know, because the evidence that there’s left-wing authoritarianism, to call it compelling, is to say almost nothing. I mean, you could make a very strong case, although it’s a vicious battle, that left-wing authoritarianism has been responsible for more misery and death in the 20th century than right-wing authoritarianism. It’s a, you know, it’s a rough contest, but when you have someone like Mao on your side on the left, it’s difficult to defeat him on the brutality scale. And, you know, social psychologists didn’t begin to admit that there might be such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism, literally, till 2016. We did some of the first research in that area. So one of the things I’m wondering about is what, if you can pull yourself out of your conservative proclivity, let’s say, and your role, at least in part, as a lobbyist, what did you see when you were operating within the university system that indicated the danger of an academic system dominated not only by liberal individualists, let’s say, but even more particularly by so-called progressivists? What did you see that doing to disciplines, say, you could speak more particularly to history, for example? Sure. Well, I’ll start with an anecdote from the time when I was a young tenure track, but still untenured professor, which, and you understand the vulnerability I had, especially given how outspoken I was in this episode. But then I will also speak to something that has happened in my field, which is early American history, but in particular, African American history. And for people who are listening to us, I am decidedly a middle-aged bald white guy, which means that I could no longer, according to the powers that be in academia, be a specialist or an expert in African American history. But let me start with the aforementioned anecdote. This was about roughly 20 years ago. I forget the exact year, but President Reagan had recently passed away. And my colleagues in the history department decided, now remember, as I’ve mentioned a few minutes ago, they’re all big libs. They decided they were going to host a symposium about Reagan’s legacy, and they were going to spend some money to market this around our campus. And, you know, prudence probably suggested that I just keep my mouth shut. But I just thought, while I don’t think anyone’s perfect, Reagan was a great but not a perfect president, there simply was not going to be a fair objective assessment of his legacy as President of the United States. And so I talked to my other conservative friend, the other conservative in the College of Liberal Arts, who was an economist, and I said, well, let’s go join this panel of four historians, and let’s offer a balanced opinion. Those four other faculty members had no reason to do anything other than proceed with their conversation. But because of the scheduled appearance of the two of us as conservatives, they canceled it. And they canceled it because, as you know well from your own experience, they can’t stand the disagreement. And frankly, although they wouldn’t admit it, I think they were fearful of the facts that we would bring to the table. And so that, if that anecdote’s helpful, it’s helpful in this way. That is just emblematic of everything that’s wrong with university. But in my field, what has happened is that someone, say today, in their early 20s, who wants to go to graduate school in history and wants to study American Indian history, African American history, the history of a particular culture, if they themselves are not members of that particular culture, they’re not even going to be allowed to study it. And so I was beginning to see the evidence of that when I was still in academia. And I saw that in terms of research grants. I saw it in terms of class assignments that was given by my history department. And Jordan, this was mild. I mean, it was the kind of thing that was just a mere annoyance. But it’s now become systematic, such that if my own children came to me and said, Dad, you know, we want to go study such and such field in history or political science or anthropology, barring just a handful of schools in North America, I would have to discourage them from doing that. Right, right, okay. So I want to delve into that a little bit too, you know, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about thinking about its nature and about its relationship to free speech and its relationship to conflict and disagreement. So let me lay out some propositions and you tell me what you think about them. Okay, so the first proposition has to do with why you should think at all. Now, people will avoid thinking because it is difficult, right? It’s technically complex and demanding. And so there’s reason right there not to engage in it. It’s emotionally challenging, right? Because if you already abide by a certain principle, and then you go at it even in your own imagination, hammer and tongs, and you start to shake the foundation, then, well, that exposes you to cognitive entropy and that produces anxiety. And that’s very well documented in the neuroscience literature. So there’s every reason not to question your own presuppositions on the emotional side. So it’s difficult and it’s emotionally demanding. And then on the social side, if you’re thinking with someone, which basically means that you’re exchanging verbal ideas, then there’s the possibility of eliciting disagreement and the emotional unpleasantness and possible conflict that goes along with that, right? As well as the fact that if you expose yourself to someone who thinks differently than you, they can challenge your presuppositions and make you anxious and leave you bereft of hope. So those are all the reasons you shouldn’t think. And then you might say, well, given all those reasons to not think, why should you think? And the answer to that, the best answer to that I’ve ever seen, is implicit in the ideas of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead said, and I think this is true from a biological and evolutionary perspective, that we learn to think so that we could allow our inappropriate thoughts, our impractical thoughts, to die instead of us. So you could think of a thought not so much as a description of the world, but as a fragmented virtual avatar. You send it out in an exploratory foray to see if it can withstand any trials. And if it can’t, then you dispense with it. Now, and there’s some cost to that, the emotional cost and so forth, but the advantage is you don’t act out the stupid ideas and die. And so I’m laying this out for the listeners and watchers so that they can understand why. Because they might be thinking, well, do you really have to engage in contentious disagreement at the academic level if you’re a thinker? Why can’t everyone just get along? And the answer is, well, some ideas are stupid and impractical, and it’s better to kill those suckers before they make themselves manifest in the world. And in order to do that, you have to be disagreeable and offensive. Now, no more than necessary. Now, I’ve really seen a difference there, for example, between the North Americans and the Brits, because the Brits at their best, their education system teaches them to engage in like blood sport, cognitive combat, and to do that in a very civilized manner, right? So that they keep the argument within the domain of rationality and abstraction. It doesn’t spill over into interpersonal conflict. And part of what universities were supposed to do was train people to do that, right? To think critically, to think in a manner that risks disrupting themselves and their interpersonal relationships without that spilling over into actual conflict, right? And to replace conflict with thought. Now, we seem to be dispensing with that. And interestingly enough, so there’s a bunch of things I want you to comment on, my experience in academia and in the broader political world has been, I have never talked to someone who is conservative once, and tried to set them up with a potential combatant, and had them refuse to participate or refuse to associate with that person. And that has happened to me, while trying to set up conversations, dozens of times with people on the left. I saw that starting at about 2010 at the University of Toronto. It just sort of crept into the discourse. So, well, so maybe I could get you to comment on the necessity of combat in thought. But then also, I’d be interested in your ideas about why this proclivity to cancel seems to be so manifest on the left. You’d expect there to be right wing, you know, tightly bound right wing thinkers who were also inclined to cancel and shun. But that hasn’t been how it’s been manifesting itself, at least for the last 15 years. Well, the intellectual combat is essential at the university level. In fact, the very etymology of the word university talks about or is based on the unification of thought. It doesn’t mean the unanimity of thought. It means that there has been a process in place, by the way, I agree with you, exemplified by British institutions and British scholars on the left and right, toward whatever capital T truth is. And in American institutions, especially since the 1940s, and accelerating in the 70s, there’s basically the absence of that. In fact, the opposite of that. So that if you go in and you say that I want to do intellectual combat, you know, somehow you’re committing some grave sin inside the American academy. But it’s essential because that’s where we refine our own positions. And I’ll just use an example of what think tanks do, just to go back to that question. The think tank at its height, I would argue, is one where, of course, it’s going to have a particular set of positions that it’s taking publicly. But the process of arriving at those positions internally is one where there is, as I like to call it here at the Heritage Foundation, creative conflict. And in my nearly two years here, in almost every meeting that I have with our policy people, I ask them, well, what would the competing, the alternative position be? And what case would we make for that? What evidence would we marshal for that? Because, first of all, we need to question our assumptions. But secondly, given that the reason we do research at Heritage is, in fact, to effect change in public policy, we ought to be better prepared for the attacks that will come. But to your second question, very related, which is why it is that on the political left there is this absence of that kind of conflict, I think it’s because ultimately the most radical part of leftism is one that undermines truth very actively. They’ve sort of lost, as Yeats would say in his famous poem, they’ve lost the center. There’s nothing cohering their mode of thought. And if you look at what’s going on in the political right, something that you’ve been talking about and researching more in recent years, there’s a very healthy, sometimes kind of fractious debate that’s going on about particular policies, about the relationship between the individual and the state. Those can be a little frustrating sometimes in terms of political outcomes, but on the intellectual level, they are important and they speak to the vitality, the intellectual vitality of the political right right now. Starting a business can be tough, especially knowing how to run your online storefront. Thanks to Shopify, it’s easier than ever. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. From the launch your online shop stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage, Shopify is there to help you grow. Our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items, ship products and track conversions. Shopify helps you turn browsers into buyers with the internet’s best converting checkout up to 36% better compared to other leading commerce platforms. 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So someone young might be thinking, well why should I bear up under the load of additional responsibility? And I would say, well if you, responsibility is going to be a challenge. It means you have to determine that you are going to lift something that you haven’t yet lifted. And then you might say, well why should I do that? And the answer is something like, so you get stronger and better. And so if you decide to take responsibility for yourself, then you put yourself through the paces that will discipline you enough so that all your idiocy and bad habits, all the ones that interfere with your ability to take care of yourself, disappear. Now often students do that to some degree when they go off to university because they have to learn how to live independently, right? Which is a big part of what university does. And that burns off the remaining childhood idiocy that they’ve carried with them, right? That dependence on their parents and maybe the dependence, over dependence on their initial peer group. So they have to mature. And the whole, the utility of taking on responsibility is that you confront yourself with necessity in a manner that forces beneficial change. You know, and you might say, well why does it have to be forced? And the answer is, well you know, we don’t know how much situational privation and necessity has to be there to motivate people to develop. Now you could take on just exactly the right amount of responsibility, you know, so it would feel like the challenge was optimized, right? But that also, that optimized challenge is also what puts you in the zone of proximal development and forces you to expand your horizons. And so you adopt responsibility, you can care for yourself, then you can care for other people better. But that also does genuinely make you a better person in that your domain of competent action expands in precise proportion to the amount of responsibility that you’ve been willing to undertake voluntarily, right? And it’s not surprising that that’s associated with meaning. So the conservatives can sell, the leftists can sell rights, rights, rights, which is what they’ve been doing forever. And the hedonic self-gratification goes along with that. But the right can sell the deep and abiding meaning that comes with the hoisting of voluntary responsibility. And that is, that’s not a free market argument, right? It is not. The free market is a consequence of that, exactly. The free market isn’t going to work. And this is where the social conservatives have an edge too. And I think this is becoming increasingly obvious. In the absence of that underlying ethos of responsibility, responsible conduct, you can’t have a free market, because people have to be able to trust each other before the free market can even get going. And you can’t trust your responsible people. That’s the precise rub. And I will tell you that any leader in a public policy organization has certain things that he or she does every day, every single day, either directly or indirectly, I’m dealing with that tension on the political right. Because part of what Heritage tries to do beyond the research and advocacy that we do is also play at this plane where you and I are having this conversation on the intellectual level. And when we do that, what we’re arguing for is, I like to say, an unhyphenated conservatism. We’re all of those things. But when you’re all of those things, you’re not trying to be something to everybody. We’re talking to our audience on the political right. It means that you’re also going to be aware of the limitations of some of the things that are goods, like the free market. The free market is good, but there are many higher goods. And as we’ve talked about, chronologically speaking, which is what I try to do almost every day in reminding more free market oriented friends on the right, is you have to have that healthy society, you have to have, as I often like to put it, healthy families, you have to have this moral system in place to even give birth to the free market. It was the monks of Salamaka in the 1200s who first came up with this concept. And even Adam Smith himself, I think, would be very comfortable in this exchange that you and I are having about the lack of primacy of the free market as it relates to human goods. Yeah, well, that’s a matter of putting everything in its proper place, right? And it is an open question, how far down the hierarchy of axiomatic primacy the free market rests. But yeah, and the more libertarian types, they’re going to say it’s right at the bottom. And Ayn Rand is a good exemplar of that, right? For her, the free market is the god out of which all other goods emerge. But I think the Adam Smith conceptualization, the classic British liberal conceptualization for that matter, is much more accurate, which is that once you have a society that’s essentially predicated on the Judeo-Christian axioms, one of those being responsible self-sacrifice and the trust that emerges from that, then you can instantiate a free market. And it can serve a governing function, but it can’t exist. See, I think the same thing’s actually true of science. This is something I want to talk to Richard Dawkins about, because I don’t think the scientific enterprise itself, the scientific enterprise is predicated on the idea that the cosmic order is good, that we can investigate it, that we can understand it, and that if we do that, that will be good. Those are all axioms of faith in my estimation, and they’re also specifically Judeo-Christian axioms. There’s a bunch of axioms of faith that are embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition that are also presuppositions of the free market, like fairness in weights and measure and honesty in mutual exchange, right? Because the free marketers have a hard time dealing with a simple question, like, if I can screw you over and make money doing it, why shouldn’t I? That’s a nine-rand principle, right? Self-interest is the most important thing. And the other thing, just to introduce this to this wonderful exchange that is so true about the free market in the 2020s, is that what most Americans think of when they think of the free market right now, rests, it almost requires collusion with what Heritage would call big government, right? And so what I try to do, all of us at Heritage try to do when we’re talking about the best aspects of the free market, is to place the emphasis not on those companies that are, they’re actually seeking regulatory favoritism actively by agencies in DC. Don’t put the emphasis on them. Instead, put the emphasis on small businesses, on entrepreneurs in America who actually are the ones creating the jobs. They’re much more in line with this proper understanding of where the free market falls in that list of axioms for the conservative dogma. Yeah, well, one of the places that the left and the right, the more socially conservative classical subsidiarity right could be aligned, and I see this emerging in people like Russell Brand and Joe Rogan, right? Is that there’s every reason to be skeptical of towers of babble, whether they’re corporate or government. Yeah, well, the thing is, is that once something gets so large that it can capture the environment in which it’s supposed to thrive, then it presents a danger. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s a corporation or a government. And that means that all of us left and right alike, like the lefties are always saying, oh my God, big corporations. And, you know, looking at the behavior of the pharmaceutical companies, for example, over the last 20 years, you can have some sympathy for their perspective. And then the libertarians say, oh my God, big government. And neither of them seem to notice that the unifying horror there is big, right? It’s out of control big and the danger of regulatory capture. And, you know, one of the things we’re trying to puzzle through, I started this organization, I’m involved in the origin of this organization called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. And we’re trying to work through these issues of subsidiarity, but also expressing great concern about corporate gigantism and fascist collusion at the highest levels of the of the hierarchical enterprise, right? And the true fascism, I would say. And so how have you at the Heritage Foundation grappled with this issue of the danger of regulatory capture? Like what policies do you think should be put in place? I mean, like on the YouTube front, for example, I mean, it’s one corporation now that controls the primary communication network for 7 billion people. And in the main, they’ve done a pretty damn good job, but YouTube’s got a bit heavy-handed on the censorship front, as has Facebook, you know, colluding with the Biden administration, as has come out in recent weeks. How do you guys grapple with the problem of emergent gigantism, say, within a free market framework? How do you conceptualize the solutions to that problem? Well, three things come to mind. The first is, and I don’t mean this to be just sort of academic think tank speak, it’s really important on the political right for us to be doing this as a first step. Because of this 30, 40 year long held position that the free market equates to conservatism, and that is to remind people that regulatory capture is a result of so-called, quote unquote, free market leaders going to government and asking for favorable treatment. The second thing, which is more substantial in terms of what we do on a day to day basis, is through our project 2025, roughly speaking, it’s a presidential transition project, where we’re coming up with policies, including deregulatory policies for the next conservative administration. But it’s also one, and this is vital, that as important as the policy is, we’re recruiting 20,000 people to go into the next conservative administration. And if that happens, then you’re going to see across the board from the Department of Energy to the Department of Education, which we’ve written the plan to completely destroy. We need that eliminated by the end of this decade to completely starting from scratch with the FBI. What this public policy organization, the Heritage Foundation does, isn’t just talk about those things, and we don’t just come up with the plans. We’re actually recruiting the men and women who will put that in place, hopefully as soon as 2025. But the third sort of kill shot, if you will, that one bullet that will be really helpful to ending regulatory capture is schedule F reform. It’s the civil service reform that will give the next president to the United States power to fire the bureaucrats who are part of the problem. But if that’s all you do, and you don’t take the first step, which is to explain on quote unquote our side, you know, the sort of business free market side, that we have to call out those businesses that are asking for this kind of treatment, then we’re not going to solve the problem. Okay, so I have two questions that arise from that. One is on the presidential candidate front. Vivek Gramaswamy has made comments about the destructuring of the so-called managerial deep state that are akin to the proposals, that seem akin to the proposals that you’re putting forward. Part of Trump’s attractiveness was his promise to do that. So let’s leave that aside for a moment. I want to return to Rand and Rand for a minute. I’ve just been rereading out the shrug, which I do oddly enough about every 15 years, and I figured out one of the core problems with her doctrine. It might be the core problem. So she assumes that self-interest is the appropriate governing principle. But she never really defines what constitutes self-interest. And that’s a big problem. So because you can have narrowly hedonic self-interest, and Rand actually wanders into that territory because her protagonists, Rourke and Dagny Taggart and so forth, do have and express quite continually their right to do whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to, and that they should be guided by no other principle in some sense than the gratification of their own desires. But that’s exactly what the hedonists on the left say. And so this begs the question of what constitutes the individual whose self-interest is at stake. And where Rand makes a mistake is she doesn’t understand that there’s a set of constraints that operate on what constitutes individual self-interest. So you don’t exist just right now. You exist out, say, decades into the future and in an attenuated form in your descendants. And what that implies is that every action you undertake right now has to be bound by the necessity of not betraying that sequence of future selves. And I don’t think there’s any difference in a game theory, from a game theory perspective, of the collective that is you across time and other people. So I think that enlightened self-interest and social interest are exactly the same thing. And I don’t think that Rand understood that, right? Is that she seems to believe that there’s this internal self, which is the part that’s self-interested, that’s almost like the internal self the radical leftists insist upon being able to establish such things as gender self-identification, right? That’s 100% autonomous and unmoored that can operate itself as an autonomous governing principle. It’s almost like a deity. And it’s the same, it’s the conservative version of the same mistake that the radicals on the progressive side are making. I think that’s exactly right. In fact, you talked about you yourself rereading Atlas Shrugged. I do that with about the same frequency. And the last time I did three or four or five years ago, it’s because I had a junior colleague at the policy organization I was leading prior to being at Heritage who was a capital O objectivist. And I thought, well, let me reread Rand and see if I’m missing anything and be a good colleague, a good mentor. And I realized this actually sort of come full circle rereading Atlas Shrugged four or five years ago, ironically, is what made me realize my own deficiencies in thought about the free market and a couple of other shibboleths of the right, which is to say that so many very thoughtful men and women who are devotees of Rand make the mistake that she’s making. And they haven’t thought through the consequences of that as it relates, for example, to regulatory capture. And so the exciting thing, this is all very troubling on kind of an intellectual level, but the exciting thing is that we’re finally having these conversations on the political right. And the exciting thing for us at Heritage, often referred to as a legacy organization, is that I wouldn’t say we’re necessarily driving those conversations, but we’re very active participants in them. And that is to the extent that we’ve got credibility with people on the center right in America. It’s it is we’re lending that credibility to that conversation, which must happen in order to achieve the public policy ideas that we’ve had for a few decades. Well, the way that Rand maneuvers around the complexity of those questions, say with regards to regulatory capture, is that she attributes to her protagonists a kind of a vague nobility of character, right? So that it’s distasteful for Rourke and Taggart, for example, to engage in any plaintive negotiations with government agencies, right? It’s beneath them to ask for favors from government. But she never establishes why it’s beneath them, right? It’s vaguely associated in principle with their self-interest and their implicit heroism, but it’s very difficult to derive that heroism from that narrow self-interest. And I think the reason it’s difficult to do that is because it doesn’t derive from that narrow self-interest. It derives from the necessity of a higher order self-interest that has the community as an intrinsic part of itself. And she’s very weak on that front, right? Because her characters, Taggart’s a good example, and so is Rourke, Rourke’s in a very unhappy marriage, and Dagny Taggart is single. Those people aren’t bound by, like they’re all noble individual heroes who stand alone. They’re not well-situated in happy marriages. They’re not as couples well-situated in functional families. And she’s almost, she’s almost Rousselian in that regard. She seems to regard any form of higher order social involvement as an impediment to the noble strivings of the disaggregated individual. And so it’s very strange to see that dovetail with the more radical ideas of the progressive left. And it’s definitely a flaw in her thinking, right? Both from the perspective of characterization, but also from the perspective of ethics, is that narrow self-interest, that’s not the highest self, that’s not the true self. It’s just the immature and impulsive self. And she tries to make that noble, and it’s not noble. It’s just immature. So I think that’s why her work never hits. It’s like Rand is not Dostoevsky, right? There’s a shallowness about her work that’s, I like reading it. It’s exciting. It’s adventurous. It’s a romantic adventure, you know? And it’s got a strong hero narrative element, but it’s definitely not literature. And I think the reason for that is that her characterizations are too, they’re too simplified. You won’t be expecting this reference, I’m sure, but I grew up reading Louis Lamour books, written in the 20th century, but they were 20th century versions of the Western dime novels of the late 1800s. I read them as a boy. And every time, I guess I’ve read Atlas Shug three or four or five times, I don’t mean to be too offensive toward Rand followers, but we’ve established that feelings are okay to hurt. Her characters are just as flat as the great heroes in Louis Lamour novels who showed up in these Western towns and they were rugged individuals, right? And there, as a 10 or 11 year old boy, those were good things to read in the same way that there’s a certain value to reading Rand’s work, but it’s not literature. It’s certainly not Dostoevsky. And in the great book schools that I’ve led, Rand had no part of the curriculum. And I’ll just make this final point, if I may, on this thread. The way this plays out in conservative politics, and by that, I mean, not elected officials, but to some extent, the donor class, but these are thoughtful men and women, most of whom have made their own wealth themselves, is that they think that those characters from Atlas Shrugged are the model. But in reality, I mean, almost without exception, as I think about these men and women in their own lives, they are living out that higher order thinking or set of values far better than Rand’s own characters. In other words, they themselves, these devotees of Rand personify the limitations of the book. It can be hard to explain that to them because they’re so committed to this mode of thought. But the point is, the more of those devotees of Rand who come to grips with those limitations, the quicker the American political right will be able to resolve this conundrum we have about the community and about the free market. Yeah, well, I think that your characterization of Rand’s books as sophisticated cowboy stories is exactly dead on. Because first of all, she was attracted to that rugged American individualism, not least because she was an escapee from communist hell. And so she had a reason to hero worship that pattern of rugged individualism. And it is associated in a genuine sense with the great American dream, which is a real phenomenon and something to be reckoned with. But the fact that her characters and some of her characters, they’re almost literal cowboys. I mean, in Atlas shrugged, I can’t remember the gentleman’s name, but Wyatt, that’s his name. He’s even got a cowboy name, Wyatt. He runs a sequence of oil rigs and oil explorations in the frontier state of California. Right. And he’s definitely a cowboy in every sense of the word. And so are the rest of her male characters. And so you can also understand that that admiration for rugged individualism has a place if the rugged individuals are already nested inside like a stable couple and a stable family and a stable community and so forth. If all those preconditions are met, then you should go out on your individual adventure. But if none of them are meant, if you’re that sort of cowboy, you’re almost indistinguishable from a psychopath. And so, yeah, so that’s a big problem. It’s the same problem on the free market side, right? The free market doesn’t work unless it’s in the embedded in an underlying ethos. And that rugged individualism doesn’t work unless for exactly the same reasons, unless the underlying preconditions of stabilization are already in place. And it’s very much related to the excellent point you made about meaning and responsibility, right? Because part of that responsibility, part of freedom, properly understood, not in a Randian way, is the moral duty that’s conferred. That for those of us who emphasize the natural law over what the left likes to talk about rights, that moral duty is to the community, it’s to the other as much as it is to ourselves. And those two things, more often than not, can actually not be in tension. They can be resolved and exist harmoniously. And it’s in that gap, just to be kind of simplistic here, where properly ordered government, a properly limited government exists. As I like to tell people, the Heritage Foundation is a conservative, not a libertarian public policy organization. We see a very proper role for government, and we look forward to getting it back into that box. Well, I would say mature identity is the balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the extended individual and the collective. That harmony, that harmony as well, is what people mean when they say sanity. Like sanity isn’t something you carry around within you. Sanity is the harmonious balance between your interests and the interests of you in the long term and other people. It’s actually the manifestation of that balance. You know, and I’m going to say something in favor of Rand too, because there are elements of her thought that are subtle. You know, so if you say that the individual has an obligation to the community, then that obligation can be twisted and bent by people who will use moral guilt as a cudgel. And she does a nice job of outlining that. So she tells the story, for example, of a factory that decided to run on the principle of to each according to his need and from each according to his ability. And she shows how that was foisted upon the workers, right? So she shows how that immediately degenerates into a competition of victimization and slavery to that self-described victimization. But she fails to make a distinction between me being burdened by force with the needs of other people and me taking on the responsibility as a voluntary choice to address the needs of other people. And so that would be the difference between being a slave, let’s say, and having a family. I mean, you’re both working for in both situations, you’re working for someone else, the good of your children, let’s say. But in the case of a well-constituted family, you’re doing that voluntarily. And that makes all the difference. It makes all the physiological difference, too, because a burden undertaken voluntarily is much less stressful physiologically than the same burden foisted upon you involuntarily. The data on that are very clear. So she does a nice job of insisting that whatever responsibility is undertaken has to be undertaken voluntarily. But that’s also the same as that call to responsibility that we were discussing earlier. She makes a she makes a great reminder about that. And I think, again, that kind of swerve into what we do every day or every week at the Heritage Foundation. What we try to do is acknowledge these tensions in our movement, a broad intellectual movement, resolve them in a way that allows people to have the creative conflict. But ultimately, we’re not just having those conversations, right? We’re trying to do that, to resolve those tensions so that we can develop popular support for public policy solutions. And I would be remiss if I were not to say that rather than just being headquartered and supported here in the Imperial City of D.C., we’re distinctive, if not unique, among public policy organizations on the right because of how we’re supported, which is hundreds of thousands of people across the country. I say that not at all to make a fundraising pitch, but to explain that we are, as I like to say, the everyday American’s outpost. And so it’s I mean, it’s highly, highly improbable that the Heritage Foundation would be captured by these these excesses of the nation’s capital. I mentioned that in reference to what you said about Rand, because I think she herself would appreciate that greatly about how we work, even though we obviously have some points of contention with some of her key points. Yeah, well, that was actually another thing I was going to hassle you about. Maybe I’ll do that to close. I mean, there are clearly dangers, and I’ll talk to you about this more, I think, on the daily wire side of this conversation. There are clearly dangers posed to educational institutions and other institutions as a consequence of taking federal money, government money. And I think that that proclivity for universities to accept federal money has now finally corrupted the scientific enterprise itself. And because it’s gone downhill in quite a catastrophic manner in the last 10 years. I know that you’ve had qualms, to say the least, about accepting government money, but then the same accusation can be levied, let’s say, against conservative think tanks who derive their funding from gigantic corporations. How do you avoid becoming an instrument of the same regulatory capture that you protest against? Now, you just said quite clearly, but I think it’s worth reiterating, tell me your funding model and how Heritage has protected itself against capture, let’s say, by the giants of the corporate world. Well, in two ways. The first is, from the very beginning, Heritage was funded primarily by small donors. We have a membership model and the average donation given to Heritage each year is, I think, $82, as it was in 2022. We do have some individuals who make larger contributions than that, obviously, but we receive very little, I mean, a minuscule amount of corporate money. That’s always been the case, but it’s especially true over the last few years as Heritage has sharpened its criticism of regulatory capture. So that inoculates us, the membership model that we have, but also the explicit position we have not to receive corporate money from most businesses. We receive a little bit of that, but it’s tiny. And of course, this is coming from me, because when I was at Wyoming Catholic College, we, like Hillsdale and a few other schools, decided that the Department of Education could keep its money. We didn’t want to be captured by their ideas. So in other words, Heritage has always had this philosophy, but I’ve underscored it because of my hostility to that entire system. Okay, so two closing questions. The first is, how has Heritage managed to fund itself successfully, given its unwillingness to rely either on government or corporate money? I mean, that’s a lot of sources of money gone. How have you appealed to ordinary people, let’s say, and why has that worked? And along with that, maybe you could explain to everyone what they would have to do in order to learn more about how the Heritage Foundation operates and to participate in that if they, or at least to learn more if they chose to do so. Thanks for asking those questions. On the first one, we have been one of the few organizations on the right that has perfected a particular model of, most importantly, the work that we do in DC. It’s not for our sake, it’s not for the sake of the researchers, the policy leads, but we really see ourselves as the advocacy organization for the everyday American. And when we’re able to report successes in that realm, which we’ve been able to do a lot, and convey that to individual Americans through direct mail and all the means that organizations use to raise money, it’s been extremely successful for us over many, many years. The second way is, or the answer to your second question is, you can go to our website, heritage.org. There you will see, most importantly, the research we do. Also, we’re very good, or we’ve become better at giving individual Americans talking points, sort of messaging that’s linked to that research, because we don’t just want them to read the research, we want them to be part of the solution, right? We’re not just here ourselves to do the work and then ask them to support financially what we’re doing. A vital part of our business model, and it speaks to the success that we’ve had, is having individual Americans participate in what we do, such that 10 years ago, we founded, we created our own kind of campaign arm, Heritage Action for America, which gives our enterprise the ability to do more direct lobbying, more involvement in particular campaigns. Most importantly, it also is the kind of currency that elected officials understand, which is the ability to, as is the parlance in our work, key vote a particular vote on a particular piece of legislation, yay or nay, and hold those elected officials accountable. They don’t like it, but between the research that we have, the hundreds of thousands of supporters we have, and the power of that scorecard that we keep, we’ve become very influential in DC. As I like to say, we’re sort of the people’s advocate behind Enemy Alliance. Okay, well I’ll close with a question on that front then. There are a number of candidates for president on the Republican side. I have no doubt that your organization is watching that completely surreal race intensely. Are there particular candidates, or how are you working with candidates so that your plan to restructure the corporate deep state or the government deep state dovetails with their campaign offers? Is that happening formally? Does it happen informally? Where do you see an alignment of interests or a conflict of interest for that matter? Great question. It happens both formally and informally. Formally, because of our tax designation from the IRS, we can’t endorse in a political race, and so we don’t. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have any influence over it, and the influence that we try to have over it, I think we are, is in ideas and policy. And so I mentioned a couple of times earlier this Project 2025, the policies and personnel for the next administration. We have shared those policies with all of the major conservative aspirants, and for that matter, a couple of candidates left of center, including RFK, because we are ultimately nonpartisan in our tax designation. The informal part of that is we provide policy briefings to any candidate who accepts our invitation for that. We’ve made that invitation across the political spectrum this year. I personally have done the briefing for a handful of the, I guess, more likely nominees for the Republican nomination. There are a few candidates who are probably misaligned with Heritage, but those who are highest ranking in the polls are those we’re closest to. I will say this, the most important thing for the Heritage Foundation and our members, as it relates to 2024, is not just that the most conservative candidate who can win the general election becomes our standard bearer. It’s that he or she, even before they take the oath of office on January 20th, 2025, is ready to govern in the most aggressive, ambitious, audacious way to destroy the deep state and devolve power back to the individual Americans. That’s a good place to bring this to a close. So for everyone who’s watching and listening, thank you as always for your time and attention to the Daily Wire Plus folks for facilitating these conversations and working so effectively on the production quality front. That’s much appreciated. The film crew here up in Northern Ontario. Thank you very much for talking to me today. We’re going to switch now to the Daily Wire Plus side. I’m going to talk, our discussion now will turn to more autobiographical matters, as they usually do on that side of the platform. And so those of you who are watching and listening who are interested might give some consideration to casting some attention the Daily Wire Plus way. And other than that, thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today. And thank you to all of you who’ve been watching and listening.