Voices of Freedom - Interview with Ed Feulner

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

An Interview with Dr. Ed Fuelner, a Conservative Institution Builder What does it mean to be a conservative? That question has long been debated, but the foundational principles of conservativism have been more sharply challenged in recent years. Focal points of discussion have centered on the role of government and America’s approach to global conflict. Few have as much insight into the development and growth of conservatism and its current state than our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Dr. Ed Feulner, a renowned leader and institution-builder, shares his own path towards the ideals of freedom, describes what it took to build a movement, and offers his thoughts on the principles upon which conservatives can coalesce.  Dr. Ed Feulner co-founded and built Heritage in the late 1970s from a small policy shop into an American powerhouse of conservative ideas. Feulner has authored nine books, played a prominent role in dozens of organizations, and speaks frequently both in the United States and abroad. Topics discussed on this episode: The books that influenced his ideological perspective and shaped his life Feulner’s role in building institutions of the modern conservative movement How he transformed ideas into policy that have impacted America What it means to be a conservative Whether conservatives can coalesce around the restoration of civil society America’s role in the world and the state of our country Are we in a new Cold War? The role of free markets and free enterprise in today’s conservatism How he continues to remain a happy warrior Over the years, he has consistently been listed as one of the 100 most influential conservatives in America and his service has been recognized with numerous accolades and honors, including the 2012 Bradley Prize. 

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. There's been considerable debate the last few years about what it means to be a conservative. And that's by no means the first time that's happened, but it does raise some questions. What will the current differences

mean for the future of the movement? Can timeless principles hold it all together? If you've had more experience in modern American conservatism than our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom, Dr. Ed Fulner, who led the Heritage Foundation for 37 years, is here to share his wisdom and insights into the world of ideas. Ed, of course, co-founded and built Heritage in the late 1970s from a very small policy shop into an American powerhouse of conservative ideas. Over the years, he's consistently been listed as one of the 100 most influential conservatives in the country, and his service has been recognized with numerous accolades and honors, including the 2012 Bradley Prize. Welcome, Ed. It is wonderful to have you.

Thank you, Rick. It's great to talk to you and all of our good friends at Bradley and everybody who's going to be looking at this podcast. Thank you. Fantastic. Ed, you've had a truly amazing career and you still travel more than 150,000 miles a year with no apparent signs of slowing down. What keeps you going at such a pace? Oh, boy. Rick, I'm just so proud to have the opportunity both here in the United States and around the world really to promote the freedom agenda for people around the world. Tomorrow morning, I'm on an airplane to San Francisco connecting to Taipei. After Taipei, it's Seoul. From Seoul, it Seoul at Singapore. I'm back for 10 days and I'm off to Switzerland. That's a lot of miles. That happens to be promoting and launching the new Index of Economic Freedom,

Heritage's annual summary of more than 180 countries around the world in terms of which one has the freest economy and how that has helped not just the big guys, but helped the little people. We like to note that really because of freeing economies, more than one and a half to two billion people around the world in the last 15 years have been lifted out of poverty. That's because of freedom and free enterprise and the opportunity that entrepreneurs have built all around the world. It's very exciting. It sure is. Let's step back for a minute. Let's go back to the beginning of your journey in the conservative movement, Ed. You were deeply influenced, I know, by two books, The Conscience of a Conservative by

Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater and Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. Talk to us a little bit about why those books struck such a chord with you. Well, I had worked with good friends of the Bradley Foundation with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. I'd founded an undergraduate chapter when I was studying with the Jesuits out at Regis in Denver. Incidentally, two of my sisters both graduated from Marquette, so we know Milwaukee pretty well. So ISI was early. They introduced me to Russell Kirk. Then I happened to be, went on to get my master's degree at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And it was 1964. And I picked up a copy of Barry Goldwater's Slim Little Volume, Conscience of a Conservative. And wow, it just struck all the right notes, both on the political front, reinforcing what the principles that Russell Kirk had given me in the conservative mind from Burke to Elliott, going back to Edmund Burke and down through the years. So those two, Kirk theoretical, Barry Goldwater, practical politics, kind of a good combination to get me started. Amazing. You've been described very accurately as an institution builder of the modern conservative movement. And I think most of our audience will have a pretty good idea of what you've

done at Heritage. But what are some other institutions that you've been involved with and why have they mattered? I proudly admit to that. And Rick, it's going back to the kind of the start of the Heritage Foundation. It was actually another Milwaukeean, Paul Weyrich, and I, who Paul was a staffer on the Senate side. I was a staffer on the House side. And we'd get together frequently and we'd look at what the other side was doing. And as a consequence, not only did we get Heritage started, not only did we get started the Republican Study Committee of Conservatives within the House of Representatives, but we were also two of the founders of State Policy Network. We were two of the founders of the American Legislative Exchange Council. Then on down through the years,

I had the, oh, and about the same time that Barry Goldwater was running, one of the highlights really of my youth was being invited as a, when I was at the Wharton School to go up to New York for a day to meet with Bill Buckley and Frank Meyer from National Review, where a visiting professor at Columbia that year from the University of Chicago by the name of Milton Friedman was going to be there. And the five of us sat down and we founded the Philadelphia Society. And I was elected treasurer. And I said, hey, guys, I'm a poor graduate student trying to figure out how I'm going to buy my next hamburger. I can't open a new bank account. At which point, Bill Buckley wrote out a personal check for $100 payable to the Philadelphia

Society to start that. So it's been kind of a steady stream of working with people with real visions and trying to do my own thing in terms of adding and multiplying to the institutions that undergird what we're all about at conservatism. That must have been quite a meeting. It was fantastic. And it was not until we were there that we realized that this was the very first time that Buckley and Friedman met.

Really? Of course, 20 years later, you'd read stories in National Review or somewhere else about Milton Friedman just returned from a week-long skiing trip in Switzerland at Bill Buckley's chalet where they were together. Anyhow. In a recent speech, Ed, you pointed out that conservatives today can choose from many works of political philosophy to engage their intellect. But that wasn't always the case. In the 50s and 60s, it was almost radical to be right-leaning, but thanks to the work of some pretty amazing intellectuals like Kirk, like Buckley, a movement that embraced liberty, civil society, free enterprise, started to become more cohesive and more visible in this country.

Now, it took time for those ideals to become actual policy, but that's where you played such an important role. Talk to us about how you were able to turn what were just ideas, ideas that inspired you, into actual policy that's had a real impact on this country. Going back to my early days after getting my degree, studying overseas for a couple semesters, coming back, having the opportunity to work at the Center for Strategic International Studies with Richard Allen, who was a great principled conservative who was also very, very closely involved with ISI and who arranged for a fellowship actually at CSIS, where for the first year I was at CSIS, I kind of worked the hill for them to report back what's going on at their senior staff meetings. And boy, that was pretty heavy, heady stuff.

We had Admiral Arlie Burke was the director, former chief of naval operations. Eleanor Lansing Dulles, the sister of John Foster Dulles and Alan Dulles was one of the senior fellows. People like that, and I'm briefing them on what's going on on Capitol Hill. Well, anyway, the second phase of the program was spending one year on Capitol Hill and still paid by CSIS. And I looked around and my home state senator was Everett Dirksen from Illinois. And congressman was Don Rumsfeld, who went on to bigger and better things. And the third one that I talked to was a Wisconsinite, Mel Laird from Marshfield, congressman from Marshfield, chairman of the House Republican Conference. And I signed up with Laird because through the Republican Conference,

he was able to work kind of all the issues. I was with him for the first year. When the program was over, he invited me to join his permanent staff in the Republican conference. I did that. And during that time, I got to know people on the Senate side as well. And we both looked around and saw what was happening on the other side of the political fence where the liberals were, frankly, a generation ahead of us. They developed all these things, the Democratic Study Group inside the House of Representatives, and they had close working relationships where they'd bring somebody

in from the Brookings Institution to testify. And by gosh, the next Democrat administration, that person who was up testifying and kind of horn-swiggling the conservatives to listen to him and pay attention to him was suddenly the Secretary of the Treasury or some other major job. And we said, hey, why aren't we doing this kind of thing? And one of the reasons we weren't was because the conservative institutions that were around in 1964, there weren't many of them, but the ones that were all got intimidated by the IRS after Goldwater lost. And they were being looked at very skeptically.

And they didn't want anybody to think what they were publishing was trying to influence legislation. I remember arguing with the head of one of the other, the then existent conservative group saying, well, if you're not trying to influence legislation, why are you producing all these papers? What good is it? You know, you've got some college librarian who's got a busy job now, I suppose, having to index it and put it on their bookshelves. But what else? And so it was kind of those very basic questions that resulted in, hey, why can't we do that too? And my gosh, next thing you know, we had this former governor from California, Ronald Reagan, come in and testify why guaranteed annual income was not a good way to go in terms of one of the big Democrat promises. And all of a sudden, we started to see, hey, we really could make a difference. Now, remember, too, at this stage of the game, the Mel Lairds and the people like that in the

Congress were very, very much in a minority. The Republicans hadn't had a majority in both houses in, I think, about 40 years at that time. And they were all short-staffed, too. And that's when we said, hey, look at what they do on the Democrat side, where if the ranking Democrat on a committee happens to be too conservative to some of the rebels down below, they come together and they do something called shared staff, where they all pool their funds and come together. Why don't we do that? That's what started the Republican Study Committee. And then the Republican Study Committee became kind of the conscience of conservative House members that brought them together and said, hey, John, you're on ways and means. Why don't you become our expert on tax policy to

remind us what the conservative position is, not just the Republican position, but the principled conservative position. Or Phil Crane, you're on banking and currency. What can we be doing differently in that area? And on and on. So the institutions would develop. I was the first executive director of the Republican Study Committee, then went on to Heritage later on. And that was what we later called the inside-outside strategy. On the inside, pull the members together so they're working together. On the outside, give them the intellectual arguments as to why they should go this way on a prospective tax bill rather than that way. And so it was an educating experience for everybody up and down the political scene in the conservative movement at that time.

And one thing that I did very early on when I took over Heritage in 1977, we had a series with six or seven debates between the different factions of what we would broadly call the conservative movement, a libertarian versus an anti-communist, a social conservative versus a free market advocate, and tried to figure out what the common grounds were. How can we bring them all together? So when you talk about where we are now, it kind of reminds me of the old days, too. I mean, that's a great segue. I mean, the conservative movement has always welcomed debate and exchange of ideas, and that's a beauty. That's a strength, I think. But as you point out, there to the Constitution, strong civil society. But there's also no question we're going through a debate right now among conservatives.

After all that you've seen and witnessed and been part of, how would you describe what it means to be a conservative. In the elevators, on the walls in the elevators at Heritage, you'll still see the second half of our statement of purpose. The first half is kind of a given. The Heritage Foundation is committed to, and what the elevator says, building an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish. And you need all four of those. Yes, you need freedom so individuals can express

themselves. You need civil society because one of the real problems we have right now is that liberals and even some conservatives are too willing to accept the notion that, gee, we got this problem over here, let's have the government solve it. No, we need the intermediate institutions that Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville and so many others during the course of generations have called the defining substructure, really, of America, so that you don't need a government program to solve these things. You do them through those institutions of civil society. And that's why what you do every day is so, so very, very important, Rick. And we thank you for that. And anyway, so all that came together.

And those today are, I think, the same principles. It's a combination on the one side. Frank Meyer said it very well, deputy editor of National Review, really the leading fusionist conservative back from the 1970s on, really, when he said, let's bring everybody together. In effect, let's add and multiply, not subtract and divide. And how do you do that best? You find the common elements that everybody agrees on. Everybody agrees on freedom. Everybody agrees on the rule of law applicable to everybody. Everybody agrees that, hey, smaller government's better. Everybody should agree that free enterprise is really good. And free enterprise means not only the opportunity to start a business, to build a business. It also means the opportunity to trade internationally. how fundamental it is to look for basic laws of economics that say, what is the most rational use of scarce resources? How do you bring them together?

And you don't do that through government planning. You do that through the market, because the billions of choices being made every day in the market are far above the capability of any computer or any AI to ever interpret and get any better than what free-thinking individuals can do. So that's, I think, what we've got to get back to. Again, stressing those common beliefs that bring us all together. And don't haggle about the things at the margin that are, if not irrelevant, they're at least secondary in terms of their importance. Totally agree. Let's drill down a little bit on civil society.

And what do we mean by civil society? Well, I mean, it's families, it's schools, it's churches, it's neighborhood associations. It's what has made this country unique and exceptional in so many ways, which I'm sure you know very well throughout your travels. It's just different. There has been historically different in this country. Do you think that restoring civil society is something that the right can coalesce around? It seems to me it's an opportunity.

I agree completely. It's an opportunity. And as I travel around the country, particularly, not so much overseas, but as I travel around the country and I find out that in a suburb of St. Louis, there is a church-related group that works closely with the state employment and the state welfare community to help individual kids in schools. Maybe one kid, by gosh, he can't sleep at night because there's something wrong with the bed. And yeah, got bed bugs. Well, by gosh,

there's somebody in that church where the volunteer comes from who's got an extra mattress. You know, give the kid a mattress so that he can get a night's sleep. Don't say we got to have a government program to go in and examine everybody's mattresses to see if they got bedbugs or not. You know, those kinds of things are just so intrinsic to what the American experiment's all about. And yet, I think some of my friends who've either been around Washington too long or who don't appreciate the ingenuity and the care of the American private citizen, they lose sight of it. And so civil society tends to be kind of diminished in terms of its importance. But boy, late Richard Cornell used to call it the independent sector. This is where we come together as volunteers to really make a difference.

And that is so much a part of the American experiment that we really ought to reinvigorate it wherever we can. And again, kudos to you for everything you do on the Milwaukee-centered side of it. You know, I'm on the board of the Scaife Foundation in Pittsburgh, and we try to do the same thing within Pittsburgh and build up those private institutions, not just count on the government to solve everything.

It's true in every community. I mean, these are the heroes of our communities, the people that you never read about in the newspaper or on TV. They're only there to try to make lives better. And they're doing it one person at a time. And that's civil society at work. And amazing things can happen when you get good people rowing in the same direction. How true it is.

You mentioned at the top that you're off to Asia. Last year, you met with Taiwan's president. You've got a multi-country tour coming up. And it's a difficult part of the world. The whole world is difficult right now. And there's been a debate about whether we're in a new Cold War with China and Russia. Given your experience in the Reagan years, when there really was a Cold War and it was at its height,

would you say that we're in or about to be in a new Cold War? I'm afraid we're very close to one. Not only with the situation in the Middle East, on Israel confronting so many challenges on different fronts. February 22nd, two years ago, I was meeting with the president of Romania, who was, he said, this is going to be a short meeting, Dr. Follner, because there's things happening in our next door neighbor, Ukraine,

that I have to take care of. And we were just getting the very first reports of what the Russians were up to. Oh man, it was scary to me, but I'm an American. I don't live in Bucharest. I don't live in Warsaw on the other side of Ukraine. Certainly, I don't live in Kiev. But that's not just a challenge to the Romanians and to the Polish and to the Ukrainians. It's a challenge to all freedom loving people around the world. And it's a challenge, frankly, to NATO, because we are

committed. And Putin's made no bones about it. If he's successful in Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics are going to be next. And Poland and Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia are all members of NATO. That means America is going to be in a hot war. And in the meantime, Russia and China are coming closer and closer together. North Korea is now supplying ballistic missiles to Russia so they can rearm when we and our NATO allies have put embargoes on the sale of the raw materials that could go into those kinds of things. Iran's acting in a very, very antagonistic way. So you've got the real axis of evil, all four of them together right now, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea. And it's as formidable a challenge in terms of foreign policy as I've seen, and I've been through a lot of them, going back to the Korean War and watching at why America is still different, why America, the shining city on the hill, still doesn't have to be the global leader or whatever.

But America has to lead in the globe countries that believe in freedom, that believe in the rule of law, that believe in people being treated equally around the world. And that's all we ask. We're not saying that everybody has to copy the U.S. Constitution and all the rest, but we are saying that respect individuals, rule of law, opportunity for individuals to make their own decisions, to decide what church, if any, they want to go to. And all these basic things. Yes, it's the international scene really bothers me right now. And I'm afraid it kind of bothers me under whoever is going to be our leader, because we've had some good people in office. And I hope they will continue to press the position that the United States still has a real significant role to play in leading the free world, leading free nations around the world. And sometimes it has to do more than one

thing at the same time. And that seems to be lost as well. You know, I mean, the Cold War really did present a contrast between freedom and authoritarianism. Free countries foster innovation and entrepreneurship, and that leads to more prosperity. Authoritarian countries don't. It's just different. One of the main points of the current debate on the right is the role of free markets. You've always been committed to free enterprise. To you, how important are free markets and free enterprise to our continued understanding of what it means to

be a conservative? Conservative beliefs are fundamentally a confidence in the individual making choices that are in her or his best personal interest. I don't mean just me. I mean my wife. I mean our son, our daughter, our grandchildren, and everybody close to me, everybody who I go to church with, everybody who lives in our community in suburban Virginia here. And to be able to make those free choices means that you have to be able to do it not only in things like, hey, better to have school choice than to be forced to go to a one-size-fits-all government-provided school. If you don't want to work for a big company, go out, find some entrepreneurial idea, whether it's opening a standalone hamburger shack or whether it's starting at the bottom of a major corporation and building your way up the corporate structure, whatever it is. But to have that freedom to be able to decide on your own.

I look around and until the last couple of years, I was a fairly frequent visitor to China. And I go to China and I'd see 40, 50-story apartment buildings where there used to be rice paddies. And I'd think to myself, how are they financing this? And you'd find out, well, people were putting down payments down because they had been forced, they didn't have anything to buy, so all their money went into a state bank, and the state bank wasn't paying any interest.

So better we put it down for an apartment and maybe someday we'll be rich too. Well, then all of a sudden the government puts the brakes on whatever government loans were involved in building the apartments and the people end up losing their money and the apartment building never gets finished. And you look right now at what's going on in China with the mistakes that government investment has made in so many different areas in infrastructure, in individual decisions like that being forced by government. That's not the way the market works. The market works because individuals come together and there's not a winner

and loser. There are two winners, the guy who's buying and the guy who's selling. And that's what the free society is all about. And again, those are the literally billions of decisions that are made on a micro level every day that no computer, no algorithms in the sky can ever duplicate or certainly not replace that. And that's what's so great about the system we have. And my concern is 240 years ago, Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations made kind of an offhand comment when he said, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. And sometimes I think to myself, my gosh, right now with this Congress or with this president or with both of the above, we're testing how much ruin there is in the nation and how much we're going to have to suffer through it before we can get back to where we want to be. But fundamentally, I don't want to be the advisor on the extent of national ruination. I

want to be the advisor in terms of how we can do so much better and how we can all prosper together, how we can all live freely and jointly and make things much better for our kids and our grandkids. And that's what the whole American experiment, I think, is all about. jointly, and make things much better for our kids and our grandkids. And that's what the whole American experiment, I think, is all about. Totally agree. When thinking about free enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit and so forth, I often think about the Bradley brothers who grew up with nothing on the east side of Milwaukee and built just an amazing business. But it wasn't easy.

They were also free to fail, and they did, but picked themselves up and created an incredible company whose legacy survives today through the Bradley Foundation. Amazing stuff. And that happens everywhere. That opportunity exists and continues to exist in this country, and we've got to make sure that it stays that way. We do, and we've got to make sure that everybody can rise to be the best they ever can be. And that's what the whole American experiment's all about, I think, Rick. Right. Last question, Ed. There are a lot of differences in the conservative movement.

There are a lot of challenges facing our country, but I have never been with you when you've been downbeat or pessimistic. You're always an optimist. What continues to make you such a happy warrior, Ed? Being with real American people and just seeing them talked about or talked to on television or meeting them in person and seeing what they really want. And, you know, they don't all imagine that somehow they're going to live the life of Riley, as we used to say, and have everything handed to them. But they're there, they're working diligently to build a better life for themselves and for their children and their grandchildren. And that's what we all should be doing.

You know, just focusing on that civil society again, how we can all do our own little bit to make things better. It doesn't mean you have to go to Washington and lobby for some new program. It means you look around and say, hey, there's a shelter. Let's figure out how we can be helpful there. Or let's bring extra groceries over to the local food bank. Or, you know, see what we can do through our church or synagogue and make things better. And I'm always just heartened to be with real American people. And that was one of the reasons why at Heritage we always took and still take great pride in the fact that, hey, we are so grateful and honored to be supported by some really good always reminded of, with the Bradley Prize and what it means to people involved in the conservative movement. had 500,000 individual American citizens, many of whom had no idea what a think tank was or necessarily that they were conservative, but they'd hear one of our people on TV or read a

newspaper article or a Twitter feed or something and say, oh, hey, that's what I think. I want to get involved with them. And, you know, next thing we know, we got a check for 20 bucks or 50 bucks and we got a new member. And it's being able to reach out and talk to those people and say, yes, we have a lot in common. Yes, this is what America is all about. Not necessarily supporting just heritage, but looking at those institutions that can bring us together, that can build a better America tomorrow. That's what it's all about, I think. Absolutely. Dr. Ed Fulner, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. And thanks for all that you have done and continue to do for our country.

You truly have made a difference. Thank you. Thank you, Rick. Enjoyed being with you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.