Reagan's legacy is bad enough.
Note that Roberts benefitted from public funding.
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Under Kevin Roberts, the influential D.C. think tank has moved away from the Reagan legacy and toward Trumpism. But Roberts has bigger ambitions still.
www.notus.org
https://www.notus.org/david-montgomery
Under Kevin Roberts, the influential D.C. think tank has moved away from the Reagan legacy and toward Trumpism. But Roberts has bigger ambitions still.
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Roberts grew up in Lafayette, Louisiana, in a poor family that he has described as “besieged by the early signs of our nation’s social decay.” His grandparents helped raise him after his parents split when he was 4; his teenage brother took his own life when Roberts was 9. His mother qualified for subsidized housing, and Roberts received free or reduced-price lunches in the public schools.
I asked if his personal experience led him to value the social safety net that is typically associated with liberal policies. “As a conservative, not a libertarian, I believe — and we at Heritage believe — in the safety nets,” he said. “What became a real vital part of my conservatism — maybe the second most important part after my faith — is that those programs work really well when they work in conjunction with healthy institutions of civil society. Of course, the most important institution I didn’t have, which is the nuclear family. But I had the church, I had my extended family … the Boy Scouts. … My biggest motivation as a conservative, far more important than anything I have to say on national security, at least as far as I’m concerned, is rehabilitating those things. … That’s the America I want to rebuild, and that’s an America where I think very diverse peoples can flourish. … That’s my big passion as a conservative, from that boyhood experience.”
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The topic of Roberts’ dissertation wasn’t the first you’d guess of a future president of Heritage. “Kevin is literally the only conservative I know who has ever written about the culture of enslaved people,” Sidbury told me. Roberts’ 2003 study, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791-1831,” broke new ground in the field, Sidbury said, using novel evidence including Catholic baptismal records to show how enslaved people constructed forms of daily resistance within the confines of their oppression.
When Kevin went to Heritage,” said Greg Sindelar, who succeeded Roberts as head of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “what it signaled to me, as somebody outside the D.C. bubble, is a shift in the center of gravity of the conservative movement.
The work was strong enough to land Roberts a tenure-track position at New Mexico State University. In 2006, he published “African American Issues,” a volume in a series of ethnic studies texts for high school and college students. In it, Roberts takes up still-burning issues including reparations for slavery, criminal justice, affirmative action, school choice, standardized tests, welfare to work, and election reform. Each issue is framed in a formulaic both-sides structure. On the question of whether racism remains systemically present in parts of society, he cites opposing advocates and draws no conclusions.
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