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Remarks by Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D.
Delivered at the Opening Dinner of The Heritage Foundation’s Annual Board Meeting and Leadership Conference Seminar in Chicago, Illinois, April 11, 2007
Tonight I want to give you all, as the real leaders of The Heritage Foundation—your Heritage Foundation—a report on a significant decision that our Board of Trustees made at our meeting earlier today.
Going back a bit, at our meeting last December, we discussed the idea of a major campaign for The Heritage Foundation. We talked about the fact that we cannot count on politicians or universities to address America’s problems and that we believe it is time for Heritage to leap forward to another level. We noted that Heritage was now a permanent institution on the American national scene and that this was a time for new thinking about our institution.
Frankly, it’s time for a new day at The Heritage Foundation. Today our Board approved a campaign to ensure that America’s best days are ahead. To get our country back on course, we believe it is time to recall our nation and our people to our first principles in a dramatic and forceful way. Heritage must continue to provide leadership for America. We must define what that leadership will look like in 10 years and—more important—what we want America to look like 10 years from now.
Why 10 years? It is five times the average Congressman’s time horizon; longer than any President’s vision; and it is beyond the time that most of us in senior management—and many of us on the Board—will be at Heritage. This is our legacy to Heritage—our legacy to America.
So here is the challenge as we see it: What do we want America to look like in 10 years? Most important, we want an America that is animated by its first principles. We want what Heritage has always wanted:
- An America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish;
- An America where people, not governments, are empowered;
- An America where hard work is rewarded, not ravaged by taxes;
- An America that is strong and safe and protects its people from her enemies;
- An America where the single most important institution is the family and where religious freedom and timeless values are protected;
- An America where its borders are secure and its people are united; and
- An America whose educational system is again the standard of the world.
Here is our vision to make this happen. By returning America to her first principles, we will:
- Restore the family to its primary role in civil society;
- Replace the culture of entitlement with one of mutual responsibility;
- Achieve energy security to strengthen our freedom;
- Give every American freedom of choice in health care;
- Restore religious liberty in the public square;
- Return the judiciary to its constitutional role;
- Protect America—and Americans—from freedom’s enemies;
- Advance American leadership and freedom in the world; and
- Provide successor generations with the world’s finest educational system.
And if we do nothing, here is what America might look like: Within the next decade, America’s economy will be significantly set back due to the highest tax burden in our nation’s history at the same time as Social Security and Medicare become insolvent. If our nation doesn’t address the entitlement bomb, in just 20 years we’ll have to either raise taxes to extreme levels or use the entire U.S. budget toward Medicare, Medicaid, Society Security, and interest on the national debt. Not a penny will be left for defense, homeland security, or anything else.
America’s military is on the verge of being “hollowed out” from overuse and underfunding. In 10 years, we could see America become as weak as it was under Jimmy Carter. The world is becoming a much more dangerous place—for Americans and for freedom. If left unchecked, we could see a strong Islamo-fascist terrorist network take over more states in the Middle East and threaten us again here in our homeland.
And what will happen if we don’t rein in an out-of-control judiciary? Already, judges are replacing the people’s elected representatives in determining public policies, and excessive litigation threatens to stifle America’s entrepreneurial spirit.
I will leave it for you to imagine what America will look like in 10 years if we don’t secure our borders or if the decay of the family continues.
We must renew our will; we must reestablish America’s sense of greatness; and we must convince more Americans than ever before of the rightness of our cause. That’s what this campaign is all about.
The Past
Heritage helped launch the modern conservative movement. For more than 30 years The Heritage Foundation—our Heritage Foundation—has provided leadership for America.
We’ve got a track record to be proud of, and many rank us at the top of our field. We changed the way think tanks operated, and we have changed America for the better in many specific and principled ways.
On welfare reform, we changed the debate from one about welfare cheats to one about how welfare programs were hurting the very people they were supposed to help. The result was one of the biggest changes in social policy since the New Deal.
When it came to missile defense, we again changed the debate and the outcome of the whole issue. We kept running up against the ABM Treaty, which was no longer valid because there was no Soviet Union. Before all was said and done, Henry Kissinger, the author of the ABM Treaty, had come around to Heritage’s viewpoint, and our President informed Moscow of America’s withdrawal from the treaty.
And I could remind you about the stories of how we’ve changed the debate on tax policies as well.
The bottom line is, we are known for our ability to revolutionize the way think tanks operate. We turn policy ideas into action.
The Future
We will continue to create new policy ideas—ideas have always been and will continue to be the heart of The Heritage Foundation. We are proudly an idea factory.
But we are much more. Getting those ideas before Members of Congress and Administration officials will continue to be our top priority. We won’t take our eyes off that ball!
However, the Washington of 2007 is different from the Washington of 1973 when Heritage first came on the scene. In 1973, conservative Members of Congress—a minority of a minority party—had convictions, but they needed facts, information, and data to make the conservative case. Heritage was created to provide the facts, information, and data. Today, conservative Members of Congress have the information, but too often they seem to lack the will to do the right thing.
In years past, much of our job was to remind Americans of our country’s founding principles—to remind them of what they knew to be true. But today’s America does not simply need to be reminded of those principles; it has to be taught them.
We need a campaign that will re-teach the principles of the Founders to the American people and then encourage principled Americans to demand that their government live by those principles. We must broaden our “areas of influence.”
It is no longer enough to provide policymakers with the right ideas—they must be encouraged by the public to implement them. We must continue to get our message into news articles, on television, talk radio, and the Internet—through YouTube, podcasting, viral marketing, and whatever new communication portals come along. And all of this must be backed by sound market research to make sure that we are hitting the right note, at the right time, to the right people.
In other words, it is no longer enough to take our research directly to Congress. We must also expand our audience to the American people so that they will demand leadership for America rather than more interest group politics and congressional reaction to the latest news cycle.
Our ability to successfully advance conservative solutions to challenges across the spectrum of public policy—from spending and entitlement reform to national defense and homeland security—will be enhanced if America’s core principles return to the public square. Only by engaging, educating, and mobilizing a larger majority of America’s citizens can we hope to be successful in this endeavor.
We’re going to break new ground, as we’ve done in the past. We’re going to, once again, change the definition of a think tank by changing the terms of the debate and reaching and mobilizing new constituencies.
Conclusion
This is about two legacies…two Heritages, if you will: What kind of country will we leave to our children and grandchildren? What kind of organization and leadership do we want to leave America?
We cannot be satisfied to leave simply a legacy of legislative victories, as important as they have been. We cannot rely on our current “areas of influence” to be broad enough to shape the public policies of the future. We must give the next generation a legacy of leadership, of purpose and the means to win.
This campaign is about continuing to build and passing on that legacy. What will it take? It will take doing more of what we’re already doing. It may take restructuring or reorganizing—shifting emphasis and adding new departments. It will take new strategies.
We need to:
- Create virtual think tanks to bring together the best minds and ideas from Heritage, as well as from other think tanks and from universities.
- Develop new products for policymakers—and those who can influence policymakers—that are just as revolutionary as the Backgrounder was when we launched it in 1973.
- Implement market research and communications techniques to popularize our message for a broader audience and increase our ability to shape the national debate.
- Design programs and plans to double and then double again the size of our membership so that no elected official can ignore the local “clout” of their Heritage Foundation base back home.
It will take innovation; it will take planning; it will take brainpower—all things our Heritage team is prepared and excited to do. And yes, it will take money: more money. This will mean a major expansion of our membership and gifts larger than we’ve ever seen or talked about before.
I believe, institutionally, we are ready to embark upon this campaign to give our children and grandchildren a better America—one where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish.
So today, on behalf of all of us who have been working and dreaming these really big new dreams, I’m asking for your support, for your partnership, and for your vote of confidence to officially move forward. Today will go down in our history as a “new day” for The Heritage Foundation, and we hope all of you will be with us in this new era.
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