Henry Olsen’s essay last week—“Does Heritage Support Discrimination Against Women?”—may be the worst Atlantic disaster since the Titanic. And yet conservatives of every tribe should read it, especially the New Right thinkers Olsen believes he’s shading.
The topic of Olsen’s essay is the Heritage Foundation’s hiring of Boise State professor Scott Yenor to direct its Center for American Studies. Yenor is an old-school conservative who is not afraid to push buttons and challenge all sorts of post–sexual revolution priors. The subtext is the establishment right’s ongoing conniption about Heritage’s MAGA-era openness to populist, nationalist, and traditionalist ideas that are supposedly anathema to the respectable, fusionist conservatism of most Beltway think tanks.
Olsen frames his essay as an indictment of Yenor cum chivalric defense of Republican women. The first problem is, he never actually indicts or defends anyone. Every sentence seems biased, every attack feline and indirect. Olsen calls Yenor’s views “controversial,” and says his recent hiring “poses serious questions.” He obliquely wonders whether “many social conservatives” might disagree with Yenor. But Olsen himself never gets around to refuting Yenor. In fact, the entire piece reads as though he is tattling on Yenor, rather than debating him.
He throws some of this shade from behind conservative women’s skirts, insinuating that they—everyone from Megyn Kelly to Phyllis Schlafly to women on Heritage’s board—would probably-definitely-for-sure be outraged about Yenor’s scholarship. This segment of the piece reads like a cafeteria whisper campaign.
When Olsen engages the substance of Yenor’s policy work, the results are not compelling. Olsen scolds Yenor for believing that businesses should be allowed to pay higher “breadwinner” wages to male heads of households. But shouldn’t they? As economist Lyman Stone noted on X, employment benefits packages like health insurance and child care do give higher compensation to people with dependents.
Olsen then takes Yenor to task for believing that some “legal changes wrought since first-wave feminism” have “weakened” traditional social incentives nudging young people toward marriage. Does Olsen—does anyone—doubt this?
As it happens, I disagree with Yenor that repealing the Civil Rights Act’s inclusion of women as a protected class would have the social benefits he envisions. But contra Olsen, this is absolutely a debate serious conservatives should be able to have. Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement—one of the best-regarded conservative books of this century—is a deep dive into the unintended consequences of the Civil Rights Act’s Big Karen enforcement regime.
Olsen tries to drive a wedge between Yenor and “today’s Republican Party” by laundering his disagreements with the Heritage scholar through powerful Republican women: “The GOP has spotlighted high-ranking women—including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Senator Katie Boyd Britt of Alabama—in its bid to attract more female voters.”
Not only does Olsen use these women as moral ventriloquist dolls, like Uriah Heep’s mother. He’s denigrating some of the most accomplished working moms in America as pretty-in-pink tokens for the real Republicans—men?—behind the scenes “spotlighting” them to win ladies’ votes.
There is much more to say about the piece itself: its piling-on timing; Olsen’s shopping it to a liberal outlet; his haughty (though as always, humbly indirect) demand that Heritage cancel Yenor; his unironic, how-do-you-do-fellow-kids use of the word “girlbosses.” But it’s the essay’s context that really matters.
Olsen is right that the Heritage Foundation should stand in the conservative mainstream. But the conservative mainstream has moved. Fifteen years ago, unapologetic border security, non-interventionism, and worker-and-family-first economic policy were “outside the American and conservative mainstreams.” Then they got Trump elected.
As Olsen the elections analyst knows, the GOP that operated within the Conservatism, Inc. guardrails he’s trying to enforce lost presidential popular votes all but once between 1992 and 2012. And the fleeting congressional majorities Democrat overreach handed Republicans in that era presided over record debt, cratering birth rates, pointless wars, and the financial crisis.
How many existential national crises must the old fusionist establishment fail to address before conservatives have Henry Olsen’s permission to start calling different plays? Of course, the conservative movement needs to be on guard against extremism and intellectual poison. But establishment hubris is one of those poisons now. The only way to find conservatism’s best ideas is to debate them. Summarily excommunicating dissenters without serious debate is not leadership. It’s superstition.
If the GOP tent is big enough for pro-choicers who are fine with killing the unborn, free-traders on board with killing our industrial base, and war-hawks who support killing another generation of young men half a world away, surely we can find room for people who think it’s okay for Scrooge to give Bob Cratchit a raise so Mrs. Cratchit can stay home with the kids.
Olsen’s essay embodies the Washington Republican establishment’s continued, willful, pathological blindness to its own discrediting. No one—and I mean this very sincerely—no one trusts them anymore. Conservative think-tankers should spend less time curating burn books and more time solving the problems the GOP’s fusionist elite has caused, welcomed, or ignored for a generation.
Agree with him or not, that’s what Scott Yenor is doing. It’s what the Heritage Foundation is doing. It’s what President Trump and Vice President Vance and their teams are trying to do. Old fusionist Boomer-Cons could contribute a lot to this work.
But first they need to stop trying to make Paul Ryanism happen. It’s not going to happen.
