[Y]ears of insurgency, civil war, and general chaos emanating from Iraq emboldened Hulsman to finally vocalize his dissent. Last summer, he and Lieven penned a National Interest essay contending that the neconservatives — and, implicitly, Bush — were “expending blood and treasure for problematic gains such as Iraq” and “significantly retarding America’s ability to act against the true barbarians at the gate.” In March, Hulsman vociferously argued against the arch-neocon Michael Ledeen during a House International Relations Committee hearing on Iran policy. He was subsequently informed that he was not to write anything on Iran for Heritage.<\/p>\n
Soon after publishing their National Interest essay, Hulsman and Lieven signed a deal with Pantheon to expand their argument into a book, which will be released next month. “I worried about getting fired, but we keep encouraging people to believe in moral courage, so we had to show some,” Hulsman says. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It didn’t take long for Heritage to reward that courage with a pink slip.<\/p>\n
Keep in mind, Hulsman is not some RINO\/moderate\/Chafee voter. As Ackerman noted, Hulsman was a regular on Fox News and the Washington Times’ op-ed page, where he “cheerfully whacked Howard Dean, John Kerry, the French, and other enemies of the cause.” Regardless, as the Cato Institute’s Chris Preble said, “At Heritage, anything that smacks of criticism of Bush will not be tolerated.”<\/p>\n
It’s worth considering what Hulsman’s dismissal says about today’s conservative movement.
\n
\nHeritage has always been a right-wing institution, but demands for strict ideological purity were never necessary. In 1999, when Hulsman was hired to revitalize Heritage’s European studies program, “there was a sense that you had authoritarians, neocons, realists and libertarians, all bubbling along.”<\/p>\n
Bush’s presidency obviously changed all that. At Heritage, criticizing neoconservatism will get your fired. Likewise, Bruce Bartlett was fired from the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis for criticizing Bush’s incoherent economic policies.<\/p>\n
Is the conservative psyche so delicate that think tanks have to demand complete and unyielding allegiance to the Bush White House? Or is it the Bush White House that’s calling the shots?<\/p>\n
My hunch is it’s the latter. Heritage is akin to a farm team for the Bush administration — its staffers frequently move up to the White House or cabinet agencies to help execute the president’s conservative vision. If high-profile Heritage scholars, such as Hulsman, publicly criticize the administration’s ideological approach to foreign policy, Heritage runs the risk of making Karl Rove mad — and in the process, losing its charmed position in the conservative machine.<\/p>\n
If I’m right, the problem isn’t with Heritage’s demands for purity; it’s with Heritage’s fear of falling out of favor with the White House. In either case, conservatism is in a sad state of affairs, intellectually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the world of DC think tanks, the Heritage Foundation has no serious rival. The far-right institution has more power, influence, money, and even real estate than any competitor, regardless of ideology. But as TNR’s Spencer Ackerman explained in an interesting online piece today, at Heritage, it’s not enough to simply be a loyal Republican; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}