A Generational Victory
The second term of President Donald Trump is a victory more than 30 years in the making, a culmination of the conservative movement’s work since the end of the Cold War.
Less than two years since Trump’s reelection, the border is secure. Violent crime has fallen to historic lows. Taxes are more pro-growth, pro-family, and pro-worker. Welfare benefits are more tied to work than ever before. The federal judiciary, from the Supreme Court on down, adheres to the Constitution more than it has in generations. Elon Musk’s DOGE project and Vice President J.D. Vance’s Task Force to Eliminate Fraud have opened new fronts in the fight against wasteful spending and the Deep State. Under President Trump, the United States is reorienting our international relationships to put America’s interests and workers first. He has cut regulations and shrunk the federal bureaucracy. He has ended the federal government’s support of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs and the Woke Industrial Complex. The Heritage Foundation is proud to have helped President Trump and his administration identify some of the personnel and policies that have made him the most successful American leader in a generation.
Like Ronald Reagan halfway through his second term, Donald Trump has addressed—or at least shown how to address—the principal problems that led him to run for president in the first place. It’s only natural for conservatives now to turn some of our attention toward the problems our movement should set out to solve next.
There are important questions America must debate and answer before 2029. The New Left, it’s increasingly clear, will bring no new ideas to the debate. They will march into the next general election campaign as the Party Against America, Western civilization, Science, and the Constitution. One way or another, America’s future will be decided by the Right.
Sadly, for months now, establishment Republicans and grassroots conservatives, Washington insiders and MAGA populists, globalists and nationalists have bitterly quarreled over everything from economics to the Culture Wars to America’s place in the world—all with an eye toward 2028 and beyond.
Such sniping ultimately benefits no one, not even the peanut gallery from which it comes. There is too much at stake—beyond 2026 and 2028—for the Right to indulge personal vendettas or self-defeating conflicts.
To bridge the disagreements now pulling at our movement, conservatives must stop fighting and start arguing. After all, there are good reasons for these disagreements. Good-faith, principled conservatives today are arguing for more populism, nationalism, protectionism, foreign interventions, decentralization, libertarianism…and against them. In the same way, there are good reasons for conservatives to prioritize national security over economic or cultural issues—and vice versa. But there are no good reasons for trying to shut down internal debates, least of all on the pretense that all such debates were permanently resolved in 1980, or in 2001, or for that matter, in 2016. The post-Cold War Washington establishment’s refusal to adapt to changing circumstances over the last generation led to catastrophic failures at home and abroad.
Like ideas, hubris has consequences.
As we have for more than five decades, The Heritage Foundation stands ready to help conservatives develop the ideas needed to meet America’s greatest challenges. But we also understand that no conservative agenda can meet America’s greatest challenges without the support of the entire conservative movement. The first step toward national renewal is movement consensus.
Heritage famously speaks with One Voice. Today, we are using it to invite the wide-open family conversation conservatives need to reunite our movement and our nation.
Dividing Lines
Conservatives of every stripe share the same aspirations for American society. Like the authors of the U.S. Constitution, we seek to:
“establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Conservatives also tend to agree that government can best help Americans achieve those ends—the common good—by implementing what Heritage’s mission statement calls:
“public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
Two generations ago, Ronald Reagan applied those principles to help America overcome the economic stagnation, inflation, and strategic waywardness of the 1970s. His conservatism “fused” economic libertarians, Cold Warriors, and moral traditionalists into a new national majority.
The divisions now besetting the Right come down to questions about how we should define, prioritize, and apply those principles today. These debates are essential because conservatism’s principles are always in tension with one another. As circumstances change and new challenges emerge, conservatives must update our agenda to meet them.
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The failure of the Republican Establishment to do this work between 1991 and 2016 is why it first lost its Cold War-era majority and then lost control of the GOP. Yet even after President Trump’s success, many Republican elites still lash out any time a conservative refuses to parrot the party’s 1980 or 2000 platform.
Freezing conservatism in amber serves neither the movement nor the country. Political relevance and national success depend on the Right meeting the moment when circumstances change. And updating our platform to fit new circumstances depends on an open debate, among all conservatives, about how to achieve our common goals in coming years.
How should we weigh the costs and benefits of free trade, when globalist corporations put profits over patriotism and our third-largest trading partner sees itself as a mortal enemy? Are international alliances and security guarantees established generations ago to contain Soviet communism still relevant to U.S. foreign policy decisions today? How should conservatives advance traditional values in a culture hostile to them? How should conservatives promote the nuclear family when fertility is cratering, or economic dynamism in an aging society?
Which goods should take precedence in the coming years? Economic growth? Technological innovation? Social solidarity? Fiscal prudence? Strategic independence? Moral renewal?
Finally, the question that most seems to divide the Right today: How urgent is the national situation? Are our $40 trillion national debt, unfolding entitlement crisis, retreat from marriage and children, offshored supply chains, sanctuary cities, unaffordable housing, health care, and education, the Deep State, and globalism ordinary political challenges or existential threats?
Conservatives today come down on every side of those questions. They have no obvious answers—let alone pat answers handed down from incumbent elites whose generation let all of these problems metastasize for decades. The Right needs a fulsome debate about all of these issues and more, to forge a consensus and cut a new path forward.
The New Left
This conversation is long overdue. And its necessity is growing more urgent by the day amid the Democrat Party’s takeover by anti-American belligerents. The self-described socialists winning Democrat primary elections this year offer a glimpse of the future of the American Left. DSA candidates are not New Dealers interested in blue collar unions, tax increases, and the social safety net. Their stated aim is to unmake the republic. They want to eliminate the Senate, the Electoral College, the presidency, and the independent judiciary. They want to empty our prisons and abolish the police, open our borders, outlaw capitalism, and socialize the means of production.
If, like U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), you thought “Woke One was crazy,” just wait till Woke Two’s boot is on your throat.
The next progressive electoral sweep is going to assert a mandate to eliminate the filibuster, add new blue states to the union to gerrymander the Senate, stack the Supreme Court, establish pro-trans, anti-Semitic, anti-Western wokeism as America’s unofficial state religion, centralize power in the Administrative State and corporate HR departments, and then weaponize both against the American people.
One hopes that the prospect of a Jacobin takeover of Washington helps conservatives put our intramural differences in perspective. Surely an era of wholesale constitutional arson would be orders of magnitude worse than one in which conservatism reoriented itself around the unsolved problems of the 2020s rather than the solved problems of the 1980s.
The rising generation of progressives is ready to party like it’s 1917. Conservatives have more important things to talk about than $20 burritos.
The Forum
In service to the movement and the country, then, this fall The Heritage Foundation is going to facilitate the conversations and debates the Right needs to come back together. The Forum will be an opportunity for the entire conservative movement to talk through our internal differences in person and at length—away from the snark and posturing of social media “discourse.”
And we mean the entire movement.
The Forum will bring together leaders, lawmakers, scholars, and activists from across the conservative philosophical spectrum—Old Right and New Right, libertarians and traditionalists, neo-cons and paleo-cons, grassroots and establishment, MAGA and pre-MAGA. The goal of The Forum is not to turn the page on fusionist conservatism, but to update fusionism, to forge a new fusionism to meet new challenges.
What are the biggest problems America faces today and will face in coming years? What are the equivalents of stagflation and Soviet aggression of the 1970s or the border crisis and woke jihad of the Biden era? Affordability? China? The national debt? AI and Big Tech? Globalism? The Deep State? The loneliness epidemic?
The Heritage Foundation certainly has some ideas about those problems and the best ways to solve them. And our scholars will participate in Forum discussions—even as we host and facilitate them. But right now, having these conservative debates is more important than winning them.
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The Forum will be inclusive of serious conservatives from every wing and faction of the broad American Right. On the other hand, it will not include the coalitional saboteurs who by their bigotry, grifting, and nihilism have shown themselves to be neither serious nor conservative. The Forum will not exclude legitimate allies because they may disagree on policy. But we also will not include illegitimate actors simply because they may agree on some policies.
The one perspective conservatives should not entertain is that all substantive questions have already been answered, and that deviation from settled dogma constitutes heresy. President Trump’s sustained success and popularity since 2015 should be evidence enough that Washington Republicans’ attempts to enforce outdated orthodoxy are as misguided as they are futile.
Indeed, the Swamp’s incessant finger-wagging has only fanned the flames of conspiracism and extremism. Young people skeptical of authority cannot be shamed and scolded away from online cesspools by the experts and insiders who presided over the very foreign and domestic catastrophes that made them skeptical of authority in the first place. They cannot be herded, they have to be heard. And there is no reason for a Big Tent conservatism, competing with an opposition openly hostile to faith, freedom and the founding, not to hear our fellow conservatives out, however unorthodox, idiosyncratic, or anti-establishment.
The new fusionism the Right needs—to meet the challenges of the 2020s and 2030s—must draw on the experience of Old Guard hawks, libertarians, and institutionalists. And it must include new insights from President Trump’s MAGA, America First New Right—especially those that can appeal to non-ideological Americans shocked by the extremism of the New Left.
The mission of The Forum is to identify the problems and forge consensus around the solutions that can fuse together a conservative coalition for a new era.
Onward
This new era will demand the best version of the conservative movement—our best new ideas and our best new leaders. In 2016 and 2024, Donald Trump gave the Right generational victories. Now he is giving us a generational opportunity—to build on his success, to conserve and adapt his agenda, and to forge together a new vision for the common good of our nation.
Seizing that opportunity will require the cooperation of the entire conservative movement. So it is the entire conservative movement The Heritage Foundation invites to join in this work.
