When Heritage Politics Turns into Power

 

Summary

As America’s conservative movement redefines what it means to “protect heritage,” its anxiety over cultural loss has begun to target the very institutions that sustain democracy. The Constitution, once seen as the foundation of American heritage, is increasingly treated as a captured tool of hostile elites — something to be reclaimed, even if that means tearing at its limits. This piece examines how a vision of moral renewal evolved into a struggle for power — and the profound irony of saving heritage by endangering it.

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When Heritage Turns into Power

1️⃣ The Heritage Vision and Its Anxiety

The Heritage Foundation’s intellectual project has long sought to restore what it calls America’s founding principles — faith, family, free enterprise, and constitutional liberty. In recent years, however, this “heritage” vision has grown increasingly anxious, shaped by a sense of civilizational loss and betrayal [1][2].

Heritage’s message has evolved from preservation to recovery: that America’s identity, moral order, and national strength have been eroded by cultural liberalism, bureaucratic overreach, and globalist elites [3]. Its publications describe a nation “in decline” and a heritage “at risk” — not only in moral and economic terms, but also institutionally, in the very foundations of governance and democracy [4].

The pain in this narrative is collective: America’s greatness, they argue, has been hollowed out by an elite class that seized the instruments of power — media, universities, and, crucially, the federal bureaucracy [5]. From that diagnosis arises an emotional and political logic: if institutions are captured, they must be taken back.

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2️⃣ The Constitution as a Contested Heritage

Originally, the Constitution stood as the sacred vessel of American heritage — the legal codification of liberty and limited government. But within the new anxiety framework, even the Constitution is treated as something lost or usurped [6].

Heritage-affiliated voices claim that progressive jurisprudence, “activist” courts, and the administrative state have distorted the founders’ intent [7]. The “real Constitution,” they suggest, survives only in the spirit of those who still hold to the nation’s founding truths.

This reframing is crucial: the Constitution ceases to be a neutral framework shared across political lines and becomes a moral identity marker. Fidelity to it is no longer measured by adherence to the rule of law, but by allegiance to a vision of who is truly American.

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3️⃣ The Elite as the “Captors” of the Republic

The rhetorical figure of “the elite” — bureaucrats, technocrats, globalists, liberal judges — functions as the antagonist in the heritage story [5][8]. In this narrative, elites have hijacked the machinery of self-government, turning institutions that once protected freedom into instruments of ideological control.

Heritage’s Project 2025 blueprint crystallizes this belief. It portrays a federal system subverted by unelected bureaucrats and seeks to repoliticize it — replacing career civil servants with loyal appointees to ensure alignment with what it calls “the people’s mandate” [9].

By that reasoning, dismantling existing checks and balances is not seen as violating the Constitution, but as restoring it to its rightful owners. This is how constitutional reverence morphs into institutional aggression.

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4️⃣ From Heritage to Power Politics

The emotional energy of cultural loss, fused with distrust of institutions, shifts the movement’s center of gravity from governance to power.

If the state has been captured, then constitutional limits become obstacles rather than guardrails. “Taking back the country” becomes a moral mission — and those who oppose it, enemies of the republic.

This shift explains why, for some, even the January 6 attack on the Capitol could be rationalized as an act of restoration rather than rebellion. Participants saw themselves not as breaking faith with the Constitution, but as rescuing it from corruption [10][11].

While the Heritage Foundation itself did not endorse violence, its broader narrative — that America’s institutions have been subverted by hostile elites — created the intellectual atmosphere in which constitutional confrontation feels inevitable.

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5️⃣ The Profound Irony

In its attempt to “save the republic,” the heritage movement risks destroying the inheritance it claims to defend.
By making loyalty to a particular moral and cultural vision the test of constitutional legitimacy, it transforms heritage into a weapon of political purification.

The Constitution — once a covenant of pluralism — becomes an instrument of ideological enforcement. Checks and balances, designed to prevent domination by any faction, are rebranded as barriers to restoration.

Thus the great irony:

In trying to reclaim America’s lost heritage, a movement born in reverence for the Constitution has drifted into a politics of power that imperils the very constitutional heritage it set out to save.

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References

1. Heritage Foundation, Mission and Principles (heritage.org/about-heritage/mission).

2. Heritage Foundation, The Family: The Foundation of America’s Next 250 Years (2024).

3. Heritage Foundation, Crossroads: American Family Life at the Intersection of Tradition and Modernity (2025).

4. Heritage Foundation, Saving the American Dream: The Heritage Plan to Fix the Debt, Cut Spending, and Restore Prosperity (2011).

5. Heritage Foundation, The Return of “Blame America First” commentary (2023).

6. Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Project 2025 Full Report, 2023).

7. Heritage Foundation, Restoring the Constitution: The Originalist Imperative (2020).

8. Heritage Foundation, The Administrative State vs. the American People (2021).

9. Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership, Executive Summary (2023).

10. U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, Final Report (2022).

11. Pew Research Center, Public Views on Jan. 6 and Democracy (2023).