The Ghost of Paul Weyrich in the Halls of Heritage

At least one of the reasons there has been a revolt at the Heritage Foundation has less to do with Tucker Carlson and more to do with a gentleman many young policy people will not have heard of, the great Paul Weyrich.

What many have forgotten is that Paul Weyrich founded the Heritage Foundation alongside Ed Feulner, with a generous grant from conservative beer baron Joseph Coors. Feulner went on to be the driving force and face of Heritage for the next several decades.

While Heritage was founded to promote anti-communism, smaller government, and business deregulation, a crucial internal debate centered on Heritage’s stance toward social issues, also known as the Culture Wars. This tension over whether Heritage would support social conservatism, alongside national security and economic conservatism, led Paul Weyrich to leave just a few years after its founding.

Long-time Weyrich aide Connie Marshner points to the various Family Protection Acts debated in Congress in the late 1970s. She says, “[they] represented the first systematic effort across the pro-family movement (such as it was at the time) to assemble all the grievances against federal policy and attempt to remedy them.” “Heritage wouldn’t touch a social issue with a ten-foot pole,” she says. And she is right. But Paul Weyrich would.

Weyrich went on to found many influential organizations that championed life, faith, and family, including the Free Congress Foundation, the Council on National Policy, and the American Legislative Exchange Council. He is credited with co-founding and coining the “Moral Majority.” His work ensured that social conservatism would become a driving force in the Republican Party. Heritage stuck to its own small-government, anti-communist knitting. Over the years, social conservatives were frustrated that Heritage would not get involved, but they continued to respect the organization.

And then, bit by bit, Heritage did get involved, first in the debate about homosexual marriage. Ryan Anderson did yeoman work from his Heritage perch on that issue. His was one of the most important voices, and it was amazing he did it from Heritage. 

Ryan decamped to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Heritage brought in scholar Jay Richards to take over just in time for the trans debate, where he has had a national, even international, impact on women in sports. And Heritage allowed this, championed this.

I wonder how many of the old anti-communist, small-government crowd at Heritage could feel Paul Weyrich’s ghost walking the halls of Heritage?

Kevin Roberts arrived, a Catholic warrior-intellectual who believes social issues are foundational to America’s health. In recent months, under his guidance and with Richards and Roger Severino leading the way, Heritage produced the paper “Saving America by Saving the Family,” which has pointed Heritage in a whole new direction and possibly caused some consternation in the building.

The Tucker Carlson issue may have sparked the initial revolt, but the real catalyst for some small-government advocates leaving has been the organization’s new focus on previously forbidden social issues. This was not the Heritage they knew. The paper could have been written by Paul Weyrich in 1979.

The paper proposes using government power to encourage marriage between men and women, not same-sex couples. It supports tax credits for married men and women who have children, then more children, and so on. Some green eyeshade libertarians at Heritage opposed this.

As The Washington Post reported, “the paper represents a pivot for Heritage away from its tradition of small government and free market conservatism toward an ideology that embraces government intervention in affairs as private as procreation.”

Severino said, “For family policy to succeed, old orthodoxies must be re-examined, and innovative approaches embraced, but more than that, we need to mobilize a nation to meet this moment.”

The paper proposes nothing scarier than encouraging young people to get married and have babies—and that the government can have a role in encouraging them to do this. It calls for ways that allow young mothers to stay at home with their children, something most women want to do. The paper mentions the scourge of pornography a whopping 61 times. It mentions the Pill, alas, only once, but it criticizes divorce more than 100 times.

Yes, there is something of a revolution going on at Heritage, but it is more interesting than the Tucker Carlson kerfuffle. It is about who we are as a nation and a people. And it is good to see a great man, Paul Weyrich, resurrected at this important time.