Elite “Beltway Republicans” are responsible for the decline of America, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts declared Monday at the National Conservatism Conference in the nation’s capital.
The influential conservative leader directed his remarks at the gathering against the foreign policy and political compromises of some GOP politicians.
“The Washington Republicans … have, for a generation, failed this republic” by not prioritizing American interests and by conceding issues to the Left, Roberts told the crowd of several hundred. “Their messages, their policies, their leadership, have hurt this nation.”
Roberts said the point of Monday’s conference was to pressure such leaders to fall in line with a newer conservative movement amid President Joe Biden’s failures, one based on “the principle of the nation-state” and strong traditional values.
Roberts faulted libertarians for what he called “hyper-individualism, materialism, and globalism” and “their tone-deaf defense of Biden’s open-border policy as somehow being good for Americans.”
Next on the list were so-called neoconservatives, whom Roberts accused of “hubris “ for supporting heavy American involvement in military conflicts after 9/11.
“They tried to turn our republic into an empire and helped squander Americans’ Cold War peace dividend and moral capital on far-flung conflicts,” Roberts said, drawing applause from the crowd.
“The toxic symptoms of America’s post-Cold War decline are all around us,” he said, referencing “the fiscal time bomb,” “cultural rot,” “corruption,” “military and diplomatic humiliations,” “the deep state,” and other ills.
Roberts continued: “There’s plenty of blame to go around for these disasters, but there’s also a painful lesson in them … The fact is that a united conservative movement serving, first and foremost, our nation—not an ideology or a party or a special interest—could have stopped almost all of those problems.”
But instead, he said, “For three decades, progressive extremists captured almost every institutional power center in America, and the GOP went along with it in exchange for lower tax rates and higher defense budgets.”
The scholar and former CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation stressed that the way forward for the Right is to unite and recognize that “there is no third way anymore.”
“In this urgent moment, with our republic at stake, national conservatism is the only kind of conservatism there is,” Roberts said, as attendees applauded in agreement.