Notes from the Revolution That Changed America

I miss Ed Feulner. You should, too.

Edwin J. Feulner, the man who grew the Heritage Foundation from a duct-taped start-up into the most important think tank in the world, died earlier this year. In one of our last conversations, we were commiserating over the fractious state of the conservative movement — our proximate frustration caused by a national conservative mistaking the toxic brew of nationalism and socialism for a serendipitous form of political synergy — when Ed snapped back into his congenital optimism. “Don’t worry, we’ll pull out of it. We still have the crown jewels — ISI, NR, and Heritage.”

Ed died this past July. By November, ISI had been “lost” to the natcons — in the word used by three long-serving and deeply disappointed board members, all of them grounded Buckley-Reagan conservatives. Over at Heritage, the board is now in week four of its apparently agonized deliberations over the question, “Should America’s premier policy shop be cozying up to people who platform antisemites?”

Deaths have consequences.

I was recruited by Ed to the ISI board during equally parlous times, and I can say with confidence that, had he remained involved, the hijacking at ISI would not have happened. And it seems likely that at Feulner’s Heritage, whose board members I counseled whenever Ed asked me to do so, the existential question would have gone unanswered for no more than a stunned moment.

No pressure here, National Review leadership, but you now have custody of the last crown jewel.