Cracks in the Foundation: Heritage and Ruling Class Strategy [ThreeWayFight]

[This article is mirrored from ThreeWayFight.org, where it was originally published on January 1, 2026.]

When more than a dozen Heritage Foundation staffers recently quit, it highlighted the Trump coalition’s growing internal debate over white nationalist antisemitism. But it also points to a crisis of strategic direction for the US ruling class.

The Heritage Foundation, arguably the most important think tank in Trump’s orbit, is losing about fifteen staffers, including the heads of its legal, economic, and data analysis divisions, all of whom are moving over to a much smaller think tank founded by Mike Pence in 2021, called Advancing American Freedom (AAF).

This shift is partly about the Trump coalition’s internal debate over antisemitism, which intensified a month ago when Tucker Carlson gave a friendly interview to white nationalist and open antisemite Nick Fuentes. Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts defended Carlson’s interview, which alienated some Trump supporters—and led three Heritage board members to resign in protest even before the recent staff resignations. Roberts himself later backtracked under pressure. The question of whether Fuentes’s views are legitimate and should be given a hearing has become a flashpoint for ideological differences in the MAGA movement. However, it’s not really a debate between those who are okay with antisemitism and those who reject it, but rather a debate over which form of antisemitism is acceptable. While anti-Zionist versions of antisemitism are being debated, Christian Zionism—which has long propagated anti-Jewish stereotypes and conspiracy theories, and which supports Israel only for its role in the End Times, when they believe all Jews will die or accept Christ—has been integral to MAGA from the beginning.

But antisemitism aside, the staff exodus from Heritage is also about the question, what’s the best strategy for US capitalism? The think tank to which the staffers are moving, Americans Advancing Freedom, upholds a lot of the neoliberal, multilateralist principles that Heritage promoted for decades but has since jettisoned in service to Trump. AAF board chair Marc Short argued that the Heritage staffers were moving to his foundation because “they’ve seen Advancing American Freedom stand firm on conservative principles, which is a role that Heritage used to play.” He criticized Heritage not just for “perhaps…tolerating antisemitism” but also supporting “big government populism”—for example having the federal government directly invest in Intel or other corporations. A Wall Street Journal editorial commented, “Heritage once supported free trade; now it is protectionist. It once supported a robust American foreign policy; Heritage purged its defense hawks two years ago. Heritage was a supporter of the originalist judicial revolution and the rule of law; now it defends Mr. Trump’s expansion of executive power whether or not it has a constitutional basis.” Meanwhile, Donald Trump, Jr. retorted on X, “I think it’s great news for Heritage that a bunch of Trump-hating RINOs are leaving. Anyone who would want to go work for Mike Pence’s globalist never-Trump organization isn’t MAGA and definitely doesn’t put America First!”

“The Wall Street Journal commented, ‘Heritage once supported free trade; now it is protectionist. It once supported a robust American foreign policy; Heritage purged its defense hawks two years ago.’”

A quick look at the Heritage Foundation’s historical trajectory helps put all this in perspective. The organization was founded in 1973 by three key figures: Paul Weyrich, Ed Feulner, and Joseph Coors. Weyrich, who also cofounded the Moral Majority, Free Congress Foundation, and American Legislative Exchange Council, was arguably the single most important strategist in rebuilding the US conservative movement following Barry Goldwater’s landslide loss to Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential race. Beer magnate Coors, who gave millions of dollars to an array of right-wing organizations, helped shift a major section of the US ruling class toward the right and into a new form of aggressive corporate activism. Political scientist Feulner, who headed the Heritage Foundation for almost four decades, built the organization into the most influential think-tank on the US right, with an annual budget of over $100 million.

Heritage was a leading shaper and proponent of Ronald Reagan-style conservatism, some of whose elements included:

• neoliberal economic policies, including deregulation of business, privatization of government functions, free trade, tax “reforms” that widen structural inequality, and relatively unrestricted immigration
• an aggressive foreign and military policy framed by anticommunism and a system of international alliances among capitalist nation-states
• a backlash against progressive social movements including the labor movement, feminism, civil rights, environmentalism, etc., generally within a framework of individualism rather than explicit endorsement of social hierarchies.

Reaganism represented a shift of ruling class strategy. From the 1930s to the 1970s, the dominant sector of US big business supported the New Deal system, which included social welfare programs, government regulation of the economy, accommodation of organized labor, and (from the 1960s on) various moves to reduce or abolish social inequality. Reaganism broke with all that, while broadly keeping in place the system’s international dimension: a network of political and economic pacts, foreign aid, large-scale overseas troop deployments, and periodic military interventions to enforce US dominance.

Reaganism dominated US politics throughout the 1980s and reshaped not only the Republican Party but the Democratic Party as well. By the 1990s, neoliberalism in one form or another had gained control of both major parties. This was reflected for example in Bill Clinton’s support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and his successful drive to “end welfare as we know it” by abolishing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which had been one of the cornerstones of the New Deal system. The Heritage Foundation endorsed both of these measures.

Following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, the anticommunist glue that had held US conservatism together began to dissolve, and a significant minority faction known as paleoconservatives began to challenge “globalist” policies such as free trade and multilateral alliances, advocate an “America First” (non-interventionist) foreign policy, and emphasize anti-immigrant nativism. The Heritage Foundation did not join this shift. Unlike paleocons such as Patrick Buchanan, Heritage strongly supported both US wars against Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the open-ended (and multilateralist) War on Terror as a replacement for global anticommunism.

“What’s at stake here is a contest not just between different factions of the Republican right, but between different strategies of capitalist rule. The strategy based on neoliberalism, multilateral alliances, and individualist ideology has been in crisis for years, but it hasn’t disappeared yet.”

The Heritage Foundation was initially critical of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, and it didn’t fully align itself with Trump until Kevin Roberts became the organization’s president in 2021. In 2023, Heritage published Project 2025, which became a blueprint for the second Trump administration’s efforts to transform the federal government. Several of the key authors of Project 2025 now hold powerful positions within the administration.

Donald Trump attracted mass support in large part because he attacked both the liberal and conservative political establishments, and (implicitly) because he rejected key elements of Reaganite conservatism. So to have the Heritage Foundation, conservatism’s top think tank, come over to Trump’s camp was a major political win for him, complementing his successful drive leading up to the 2024 elections to seize full control of the Republican Party. As in the GOP, some old-school conservatives were silenced but not won over, and the staff exodus from Heritage almost a full year into the second Trump administration reflects this.

What’s at stake here is a contest not just between different factions of the Republican right, but between different strategies of capitalist rule. The strategy based on neoliberalism, multilateral alliances, and individualist ideology has been in crisis for years, but it hasn’t disappeared yet, and even if it’s unraveling it’s not yet clear what will replace it. Trump is pushing a populist authoritarianism wedded to high tariffs, a unilateralist foreign policy, and a return to the open celebration of dominance and privilege. He’s gained support from important sections of the business community (notably high tech and fossil fuels), but he’s far from building a ruling class consensus behind his politics. This debate could interact in important ways with the Trump coalition’s widening fault lines over the Middle East, the Epstein files, and other issues. Capitalists can’t just dictate political winners and losers, but neither Trump nor his opponents can ignore them, either.

Photo credit

STOP PROJECT 2025 Rally across from Heritage Foundation at Triangle Park, Washington DC, 27 January 2024. Photo by Elvert Barnes Photography. CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.