ED MORRISSEY: An Open Letter to Our Friends at the Heritage Foundation.

The value of the Heritage Foundation is that it provides us with rich resources with which to defend and promote ordered liberty in the American sense, in which the true constitutional order constrains government in both law and subsidiarity through federalism in order to promote the flourishing of a free people. Those who sympathize with — or worse, promote — the ideals of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are the opponents of liberty and federalism, no less so than those who sympathize with and promote the systems of China, Iran, and Russia today. Not only should we criticize those on the Left who espouse those positions, we should even more passionately oppose those who do so while claiming to be on the Right. That is the purpose of our intellectual institutions — to stand for principle rather than to shrink from debates.

If the Heritage Foundation does not see that as its mission, it is difficult to understand what its mission actually is. Nothing that Mr. Roberts or the Heritage Foundation board has yet said gives any confidence that the organization can articulate it, other than as measured in vote counts rather than intellectual and moral clarity and rigor.

Nonetheless, I certainly hope that the organization will recover its purpose and mission in the days ahead, and will find leadership that meets this moment.

Heritage is certainly leaning in hard these days to Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.”