Heritage Foundation President Proposes ‘Taking Back Washington to Save America’

According to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, one question that conservatives often fail to ask is: How do we fix the broken government system in Washington, D.C.? 

Roberts addressed that and much more in his new book “Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America” and on conservative talk radio’s “The Mark Levin Show” on Tuesday night. 

Roberts spoke not only of what needs to happen in the federal government, but also the changes that must take place in state and local governments. 

“We have to regenerate our institutions, our schools, our colleges, universities, [and] dare I say, media industry,” Roberts said. “And I use this metaphor of a controlled burn, which the Forest Service uses to regenerate forests. Obviously, [I] mean that figuratively, where we go, institution by institution, revitalizing them, regenerating them.  
 
“And those that don’t get with the program are just going to wither on the vine and die, because Americans will realize they no longer are places where we can transmit our values from one generation to the next.” 

Ordered liberty is the best thing that the United States has to offer philosophically, Roberts said. 

“We have these two competing goods, of being free and also living in an orderly society, and in the United States, we try to balance this,” he said. “In fact, we’re at our best. If you think about the golden eras in American history, when Americans not only felt free, but they also understood that American society was stable. It was orderly.” 

Even more important than politics and policy, the Heritage chief said, is for Americans to cultivate in themselves a “true definition of freedom, which is the right to do what we ought.” 

“In fact, I would even say [that freedom is] the moral obligation to do what we ought for one another, for our community, and ultimately for our nation-state,” Roberts said. 

Levin suggested that Roberts had released his new book at the perfect time.  

“The election’s over,” Levin said. “Now, we’ve got to be thinking about what we want to do with the culture, what we want to do with other institutions, and so forth and so on. And this is an extraordinarily helpful book.” 

You can hear more of what Roberts has to say about restoring piety in public schools, why China is the greatest adversary in the history of the U.S., and what Americans can do about it here: