Heritage Foundation Chief Takes Long View in Combating America’s ‘Social and Cultural Deterioration’ 

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts says he has two great passions in life: politics and education.  

“And I make a living in education,” Roberts told Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn during a recent interview on “The Larry Arnn Show” podcast reaired on “The Kevin Roberts Show” podcast Wednesday. 

Arnn presented Roberts with two questions: “What’s going on in the country? And how do we stop it?” Roberts identified two “streams” of problems. 

“One is a hyperconcentration of power and what I call the Imperial City, Washington,” Roberts said. 

The second is “social and cultural deterioration,” he added. 

“It seems as if too many Americans don’t really even want to be self-governing,” Roberts told Arnn, seemingly preferring “automatic dependence on government.” 

According to the Heritage president, the institution of the nuclear family has deteriorated such that Americans “can’t transmit the eternal things, the permanent values,” Roberts said, later suggesting it’s a problem that “will take 50 to 75 years to correct.” 

“First, we have to understand it took many decades to get into this mess,” Roberts said. “And, so, we have to have the fortitude as conservatives to know that while a sense of urgency is good, we’re going to have to have that sense of urgency for decades.” 

The American people must be given “the transparency and the insight” to understand the problems in America today so that they can restore their families and communities, he explained. 

On another matter, Roberts says, “there’s a strong corollary” between the problems besetting education and health care and the solutions to both. 

“In both cases, in the cases of both industries, we have artificially inserted a third party,” he said. “In the case of education, the government; and in the case of health care, the government. Not that government doesn’t have a role per se, it just shouldn’t have the role that it does on the scale that it does.”  

Roberts said our real problem today “is what’s going on domestically,” more so than abroad.  

“We are weaker as a republic by every measure that I can think of as I sit here than we were in the 1980s,” Roberts told Arnn. “We need to get that house in order while also recognizing that our military, for example, has to prioritize defending the United States through the lens of what makes sense for Americans, not people of other countries, before it starts implementing what some of these armed forces branches call their first priority, which is implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

You can hear more about how Roberts met his wife, how he got started in the education sector, and when he started taking his faith more seriously here: