Much to my bemusement as a scholar of these institutions, conservative think tanks made an unexpected appearance in the 2024 presidential election. My history of these entities was published almost a decade ago, but my interest was nonetheless piqued when suddenly almost everyone was discussing the premier right-wing think tank in the United States: The Heritage Foundation. Specifically, Heritage’s Project 2025 was being beaten like a drum by Democrats, and especially by the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris.
Others have written capably about the ways in which Project 2025 represented a departure from the past. When I examined the document, what struck me was how utterly conventional it was.
During the final months of the 2024 campaign, Democrats presented Project 2025 as a harbinger of new types of right-wing destruction to come should Donald Trump be elected to the White House again. For their part, Heritage, along with other conservative institutions in the United States, had made their peace with the possibility of a second term for Trump. In contrast with the lead-up to 2016, these institutions wanted to be better situated to seize and wield power should Trump return to power. Project 2025 set forward a clear governing ideology and became a central node for policymakers who might want to work in a new Trump administration. For his part, Trump disavowed any knowledge or interest in the massive study. It is not hard to believe this last fact given that such manifestos have historically played important roles in Republican administrations despite little direct foreknowledge on the part of candidate himself. Alternatively, the efforts by Democrats to make Project 2025 politically toxic could have also entered into Trump’s calculations.
Others have written capably about the ways in which Project 2025 represented a departure from the past. When I examined the document, what struck me was how utterly conventional it was. Such documents are nothing new in the world of right-wing think tanks, and though there were some important divergences here from previous Heritage policy manifestos—on trade, antitrust enforcement, immigration and some foreign policy, most notably U.S. support for Ukraine—in the end, the book contained an awful lot of material that looked like a basic rehash of conservative movement priorities going back to the 1980s. This material included: tax cuts targeted at higher earners without concern for the debt; more militarism almost everywhere; a slashed federal workforce; an anti-labor orientation; and a scaled-back social safety net. These ideas were the bulk of the manifesto. For all the talk of a newly populist Republican Party capable of appealing to its emergent working-class base, Project 2025 in no way speaks to this new constituency. At bottom, the current orientation of The Heritage Foundation—and other conservative think tanks of its age and type, like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)—is more about reinforcing conservative ideologies and policies of old than innovating for the present and future.
At bottom, the current orientation of The Heritage Foundation is more about reinforcing conservative ideologies and policies of old than innovating for the present and future.
Making and Breaking the Old Guard
Conservative think tanks haven’t always failed to speak to emergent political constituencies or coalitions. Indeed, such efforts are part of their origin story. Right after World War II, AEI formed within a New Deal liberal order that was hostile to business lobbying associations (as AEI was originally classed). In the 1960s, the organization re-formed as an “institute” and took on the shape of what we now know as a think tank. AEI came to see itself as an activist organization, one populated by conservative intellectuals and policymakers, dedicated to making, promoting and marketing conservatism and conservative policies to both lawmakers and the public at large. By the late sixties and early seventies, those who ran AEI understood themselves as a counterforce opposing the liberal intellectual monolith in America’s marketplace of ideas. They saw a monolith in the symbiotic operations of academia, liberal think tanks like the Brookings Institute, and liberally oriented foundations like the Ford Foundation. By the early seventies, AEI was marshalling corporate leaders against this network, urging them to support institutions like AEI that were inserting new ideas, policies, and political identities into the public discourse.
In the 1970s, wealthy individuals and corporate leaders followed the advice of the new think tanks and set the stage for what we now know as neoliberal ideology and practice.
Their efforts were very successful. In the 1970s, wealthy individuals and corporate leaders followed the advice of the new think tanks and set the stage for what we now know as neoliberal ideology and practice. AEI was ground zero for such formation. It was instrumental in developing the policies that led to the deregulation of major industries in the United States and in developing new pro-business theories of antitrust enforcement, which were enacted during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. It also provided the intellectual legwork for supply-side tax cutting, which would eventually be enacted under the Reagan presidency. Finally, as it pertained to foreign policy, AEI was instrumental in the development of a neoconservative ideology that would eventually find a bipartisan home and consensus in elements of both the Republican and Democratic parties. For better or worse, AEI offered something fresh and led to new political coalitions.
Heritage, formed in 1973, developed policy that had much of the same ideological underpinning. However, Heritage worked at developing new ways to directly influence policy should a conservative Republican ever be elected to the White House. Thus, in the early eighties, Heritage produced the first precursor to Project 2025. Entitled Mandate for Leadership, the massive tome was intended to serve as a policy blueprint for a Reagan presidency. Reagan’s victory then launched Heritage to the top of the pecking order within the think tank world. They helped to staff up both of Reagan’s terms in office as well as that of George H.W. Bush. Just as importantly, Heritage became a go-to source for members of the media who wanted a conservative opinion on matters of policy.
From the 1980s through the beginning of Trump’s first term in office, conservative think tanks continued to operate in their traditional ways and gained enormous power and prestige from this mode of operation. They were always ready to staff up and provide ready-made policy frameworks to new Republican administrations or congressional majorities should either come to power. In the wider public sphere, they were ready to provide easily digestible arguments for public consumption within the mainstream media and right-wing media such as Fox News and talk radio. However, Trump’s election in 2016 seemed to signal that something new was happening in American politics to which the conservative think tank world would have to adapt. At the time, old-guard conservative institutions like Heritage held Trump at arm’s length, preferring more conventional GOP standard bearers. Additionally, a new and more fractured media environment was also forming—one that de-centered the traditional media organizations, and even right-wing media orgs where think tanks held court.
Trump’s rise seemed to portend a new type of right-wing populism that was antithetical to the worldviews propagated by Heritage, AEI, and others. By 2024, the vast majority of old-guard Republican individuals and institutions had made their peace with Trump.
Thus, during Trump’s first term, the future of the conservative think tank really remained in doubt. Trump’s rise seemed to portend a new type of right-wing populism that was antithetical to the worldviews propagated by Heritage, AEI, and others. Moreover, their ability to influence public opinion in a new social-media-driven environment seemed suspect. Finally, policymaking and policy debates themselves seemed antiquated in a new hyper-partisan environment where Democrats and Republicans engaged in endless trench warfare that prevented much of anything in terms of genuine policy substance from emerging out of Congress.
Peace with Trump, Policy Continuity
By 2024, the vast majority of old-guard Republican individuals and institutions had made their peace with Trump—including Heritage, as is shown by their production of Project 2025. But the bulk of Project 2025 is hardly innovative in the way that characterized think tank activity in the seventies and eighties. Rather than work to build something new in an obvious moment of political liminality, Project 2025 is more interested in shoring up old GOP orthodoxies while paying lip service to emerging fissures on the Right on trade, antitrust, and foreign policy.
Indeed, 90 days into his second term, Trump’s policy moves seem to be largely in line with this orientation. Though Elon Musk’s role at DOGE is certainly novel, and the direct attacks on higher education are dramatic and new, at the ideological level what has characterized his administration in these early days is consistent with any Republican administration of my lifetime and hardly “populist” in a way that would benefit his party’s new working-class base. Attacks on workers and consumers, indiscriminate cuts in the federal workforce, extending the tax cuts from his first term (which targeted the wealthy and corporations), attacks on social security and Medicaid: these are nothing new for a Republican president. The fact that these actions are taken in concert with Musk, the richest man in the world, further highlights their elitist nature.
At the ideological level, Trump’s second administration, in these early days, is consistent with any Republican administration of my lifetime and hardly “populist” in a way that would benefit his party’s new working-class base.
Trump’s implementation of tariffs seems like they’re an outlier with regard to standard GOP free trade orthodoxy, but on closer inspection, even that claim is uncertain. The new tariffs and tariff pullbacks are announced on social media in a haphazard fashion, which suggests that there is no underlying political-economic rationale here, but rather a crude, almost 19th-century, imperial mindset. Moreover, Trump’s unwillingness to tackle the financialization of the U.S. economy means that any moves towards the production of real things on American soil once again will be undermined—this too points to the superficiality of Trump’s populism. Indeed, Trump himself is all-in on financialization, including schemes like crypto. The one issue where Trump’s second term seems to have taken on a populist framework is in antitrust enforcement, but signs point in both directions on this issue.
Zombie Politics
This is all so tragic. The American people are obviously searching for someone who will enact a new kind of policy agenda, one that deviates from the half-century-long consensus of neoliberal political economy and neoconservative foreign policy. The people are clearly ready for someone to usher in something new, and think tanks—even conservative ones—should be uniquely situated to build just such a project. Instead, institutes like Heritage and AEI exist to buttress the foreign and domestic policy consensus that has dominated the past five decades or more. Such a consensus has left the United States with an economy dominated by the power of finance and large corporations and a foreign policy with a seemingly insatiable appetite for new and more wars.
The American people are obviously searching for someone who will enact a new kind of policy agenda, one that deviates from the half-century-long consensus of neoliberal political economy and neoconservative foreign policy. Institutes like Heritage and AEI exist to buttress the foreign and domestic policy consensus that has dominated the past five decades or more.
The obvious antidote to this consensus would be a truly pro-worker political economy and a foreign policy focused on peace. To the extent that think tanks, conservative or otherwise, could have any relevance beyond reinforcing a discredited status quo, it would be in outlining and fleshing out this agenda. Is anyone trying? Right-leaning think tanks like American Compass and left-leaning think tanks like the American Economic Liberties Project are trying, but both seem wedded to the idea that Americans are stuck with the two parties as they stand. Think tanks like American Compass yearn for a truly populist Republican Party to materialize despite all evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, antiwar and populist Democrats seem to hope that their party will “come back home” to these positions, despite the neoliberal orientations of the last two two-term Democratic presidencies. President Biden may have made some populist noises now and again, but he was too enfeebled to make a coherent case for them while the U.S. economy continued its unending financialization.
Instead of clinging to these two parties as the only options, individuals and institutions, including think tanks, need to be crafting something radically new.
Instead of clinging to these two parties as the only options, individuals and institutions, including think tanks, need to be crafting something radically new. Real policy innovation would recognize that only a third way that includes a commitment to workers and peace can innovate and reinvigorate the American political system. Until such a movement comes along, we’ll likely continue to be subjected to a zombie policy consensus propped up by the individuals and institutions that benefit from its continuation.
Jason Stahl is a historian of American politics and author of Right Moves: The Conservative Think Tank in American Culture since 1945. He is now working full-time on organizing college football players into their own players’ association. You can find him on Twitter @JasonStahl__
Image made by Aaron Irion using “J. D. Vance,” by Gage Skidmore licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. All other images used are in the public domain.
