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“For every American who is discouraged about the American present and the American future, whatever the reason for that is, it’s time to saddle up, because we’re going to take our country back,” Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts promises. 

Roberts made that vow in a discussion with Joshua Treviño, chief transformation officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, on this week’s episode of “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast. Roberts, who previously served as chief executive officer of the TPPF, discussed his new book, “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America.” 

For starters, Roberts contended we don’t have a genuine free market in this country.

“You only have a free market, for example, if you have good families, a stable society, and a government that reflects those virtues,” he said. “And we don’t have a free market in America today.”

Instead, it’s “an utter collusion” between Big Government and Big Business, replete with corporate welfare. 

That segued into a discussion of a differentiation between conservatism and libertarianism. “The philosophical shortcoming of American libertarianism is that it’s about the material and it’s about the freedom to do whatever the heck you want,” Roberts said.

“The good news is you hit a triple,” he added, drawing an analogy to baseball. “And we’re going to get you home. And home is conservatism, properly understood, with gratitude at the top, which then can be gratitude for both material and nonmaterial things.” 

One of the foundational tenets of conservatism is a certain communitarian nature, Roberts said. 

“Communitarian in the sense that, before we care about who we’re voting for, we care about one another, we care about our neighbors, we care about community,” he asserted. 

The way to undermine the power of Washington is by emphasizing the power of our local communities, the Heritage Foundation chief said.  

Roberts later said that if Americans continue to let education in this country deteriorate, all of the policy work will be useless. 

“Once we secure that delivery vehicle of universal school choice, we need to make sure that we are regenerating the intellectual tradition that founded this country, because if you don’t do that, you will never understand liberty the way our Founders did,” he said, adding: “You will never understand order the way our Founders did. And it doesn’t require you to subscribe to one religious faith or another. But it at least requires you to respect them, because that’s what required of an American citizen.” 

You can hear more of what Roberts has to say about social welfare and about living in Louisiana and Cajun culture here: