Foundation appeal goes off the rails

This may seem a bit niche, but bear with me. After my time in the

Navy, I took a job at a defense think tank in Washington, D.C. Our clients included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an Undersecretary of Defense, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), NATO, and the CIA.

Our company researched operational concepts. We would read through guidelines, manuals, warfare publications, afteraction reports, lessons-learned documents, “vision” statements, historical texts, in short, anything we could lay our hands on that might touch on the specific subject we were researching.

Once we compiled our bibliography, we would try to pull together the common key concepts, and then formulate ways to measure how much those concepts impact the performance of command-and-control structures. Our clients would use these measures to conduct studies — sometimes with our help — during joint exercises and simulations, and so we would nudge our understanding of how to manage the battlespace forward a little bit.

This is how some think tanks work. Some think tanks, though, are advocacy-oriented. Instead of using evidence to find a conclusion, they already have a well-defined objective and are looking for ways to convince others.

The Heritage Foundation is one such group. It was founded in the early 1970s to advance a pro-business, Christian Conservative, small government agenda. It was highly influential in the administrations of Reagan and both Bushes, worked with Newt Gingrich on his Contract with America, and dozens of current and former employees at Heritage took posts in Trump’s White House.

Whatever you think of its positions, the Heritage Foundation has made its reputation by defining and defending the conservative agenda with persuasive argumentation, surpassing even the vaunted conservative American Enterprise Institute.

So it came as a complete surprise last week when I received a fundraising letter from the Heritage Foundation (with a quarter glued to it) that started off with this sentence: “It is time to purge government of the people and policies that have made life miserable for decent, hard-working Americans.” It gets immediately worse, urging the reader to “go after the radical Left — the MARXISTS — who have corrupted our children with critical race theory, forced vaccines and masks onto them,” and to “strip tyrants like Joe Biden of the power they’ve stolen.” “Close the borders! Open the pipelines! Jail the criminals! Stop the spending! Lower the taxes!”

It reads less like the studied and steady words of a reputable policy think tank — the kind whose PhD laden staff once helped Reagan craft policy — and more like a collection of febrile bumper stickers on a conspiracy theorist’s car.

There was a time, not too long ago, when conservatives and liberals used to debate each other using numbers, history, theory, and occasionally soaring rhetoric. The tone could get heated, but generally voters were able to pick between two people who could navigate from the beginning of a sentence to the end without erupting into frantic and fatuous fanaticism.

If Heritage, one of the most influential think tanks in America, shifts from a tradition of wellcrafted wordsmithing to something indistinguishable from social media rants in its direct-mail fundraising campaign, they have done so because they believe it will resonate with their donors. Which leaves me wondering who that target audience is.

For certainly those that believe that Biden stole the election, that our children are being corrupted by school teachers, that masks and vaccines are the problem (not the 1,000,000 American deaths), certainly people who have these beliefs have no need for a think tank. And certainly conservatives who would contribute their own money to a think tank to give voice to long-held conservative beliefs would be repulsed by this kind of base and baseless jingoism.

Heritage has remade itself over the years to maintain its relevance and influence. This recent turn mirrors the rapid and dramatic devolution of our national dialogue. I will keep the quarter Heritage sent and use it for 10 minutes of parking somewhere, but if we as a country want to exorcize this poisonous zeitgeist, we must use our votes, our voices, our wallets, and our pens, we must be the better angels of our nature. We are the best and only guardrails of our democracy.