Kevin Roberts

Conservatives reject that.

We're always much more comfortable in sort of our larger conservative family of having those family conversations.

But the second thing is to lean on Burke from the late 1700s.

He'd say that conservatives always struggle being in power.

We're a movement that is very good on ideas, very good on the academic side of it.

But when – and I think this has been proven.

Struggle to stay in power.

To govern, which isn't to say that the policymakers who are conservatives right now are bad at governing.

It's that –

right now we're struggling as a movement to understand that this moment we have with donald trump in particular as president with a majority in the house albeit narrow but a really competent and and you know virtuous speaker and mike johnson and a senate leader who's actually playing ball with conservatives john thune those are fleeting in modern american history and so what we try to do at heritage to address that fracturing is to say

there's a time and place for those intellectual debates.

Heritage is always going to be part of that, right?

That's one of the chambers of our heart.

But when we're in power, let's be sure that while we continue to have those conversations, perhaps they are less vocal so that we can focus on taking advantage of the political opportunity we have.

I think the reason, Pat, that we say that at Heritage so naturally is because of the people we represent.

We don't represent any elected official.

We represent millions of Americans, several hundred thousand of whom support us.

And we understand that while they may have an interest in these intellectual debates, and I certainly do as a historian, that ultimately they want points on the board.

They want to see real policy change.

But that's a somewhat long-winded way of saying the fractured nature of the movement always concerns us, and we're always at heritage level.