Conquest's Second Law and Why America First is Winning
Any movement not explicitly pro-American will eventually become anti-American.
Since October, the conservative pillar known as the Heritage Foundation has been in disarray. Heritage President Kevin Roberts refused to condemn Tucker Carlson for interviewing Nick Fuentes, instead posting a video defending Carlson as “a close friend of the Heritage Foundation” and denounced the “venomous coalition” attacking him. By January, more than sixty people were gone, with Mike Pence’s rival think tank acquiring most of them in free agency.
These departures were framed as an implosion, or perhaps even a misstep. The reality is more complicated. Those who left were unable to contend with the forces that took over Heritage. The institution shed those who no longer fit its direction—the direction of the New Right. Kevin Roberts kept his job, Heritage kept its building, its brand, and its proximity to power and prestige.
Whether thats a tragedy or long-overdue and necessary change depends on your perspective, but its worth understanding what force produced the outcome, because it’s the same force reshaping American politics right now.
This is Conquest’s Second Law, just not the way you’re used to hearing it.
Conquest’s Second Law
Robert Conquest observed that any organization which is not explicitly right-wing will eventually move leftward. This happens because social status, institutional funding, media acceptance, respectability and so on all flow to the left. Anyone or anything that resists that flow faces a social cost. Therefore, unless resistance to this is built in to the institution, they will drift over time.
That same process exists with pro-American sentiment, but stronger.
Elite culture’s default posture is critical of America. Criticizing the United States, whether its history or power or culture, is the fastest way to signal elite sophistication. Conversely, being overtly pro-America is seen as provincial, Trumpy, possibly even racist.
The drift towards anti-Americanism therefore happens quickly and completely, much faster than the drift left. Environmentalism started with Roosevelt-coded conservation and ended with zealot-like activists calling America the greatest threat to the planet. Human rights organizations founded to champion universal rights now devote disproportionate energy to criticizing America—and our vassals—while overlooking our adversaries. Even our military has embraced a streak of this, investigating overt patriotism as a possible sign of far-right ideology.
There are almost zero counter-examples of institutions that remained durably pro-America without being explicitly conservative or nationalist. Young ambitious people need status so they signal moral superiority by criticizing America.
The only prevention is enshrining explicit and unapologetic pro-American ethos in an institutions founding documents, hiring, and culture. Anything less is suicide by this process.
Heritage: What Actually Happened
The surface level narrative is that Heritage tore itself apart over antisemitism. That’s partly true, but what actually happened was a realignment.
Roberts arrived with the explicit goal of reforming Heritage into something resembling modern conservative politics. The institution warmed to policies and personalities that the old Heritage would never have supported. Many scholars who built Heritage’s reputation found themselves inside an institution moving in a direction they couldn’t follow.
The Carlson-Fuentes controversy revealed this split. Roberts’ refusal to condemn forced a choice by people who had likely been quietly uncomfortable for months. Thus, the antisemitism question was real and serious but it was also a proxy for deeper disagreements about what conservatism is for, who it serves, and whether the old conservative ideology is still relevant in a political environment that has moved past it.
The people who left were not wrong about the moral seriousness of antisemitism. That they were forced to choose between moral conviction and institutional relevance is itself an indictment of the dynamic I’m describing. However, they were defending an institutional orientation that the broader New Right has no interest in or has even rejected. As such, their departure didn’t weaken Heritage in the eyes of the movement that now defines conservatism.
This is Conquest’s Law from an unexpected direction. Heritage wasn’t captured by the left. It was captured by a right that demanded explicit pro-American commitment as a litmus test and found the old guard’s version of conservatism insufficiently bound to it. The Old Right cares about limited government, rule of law, free markets. The New Right cares about one thing first: whose side are you on? Everything else is downstream of this.
The Counterexample
If Heritage shows how powerful this can be as a catalyst for change, their libertarian cousin the Cato Institute shows what happens when that change is resisted.
The Cato Institute has held essentially the same pro-immigration and pro-labor-mobility position forever. True to form, last week they published a paper arguing immigrants reduced U.S. deficits by $14.5 trillion over thirty years. Twenty years ago, that paper would have been boilerplate center-right woo woo. Today it reads to the increasingly nationalist contingent as open-borders propaganda meaningfully indistinguishable from the progressive position on immigration.
It was immediately met with condemnation. Tech-right titan Joe Lonsdale said “You guys have lost the plot” citing misleading statistics. Journalist Chris Brunet called the study “in favor of destroying western civilization.” Several commentators pointed out the irony of a libertarian outfit referencing higher tax revenue as a positive. The surface of the condemnation may seem to be the person’s position on immigration, but the core of their argument is whether that position is truly pro-America.
Cato didn’t move, but the discourse moved around them. For decades their grounding in a free market didn’t matter, but now it’s the only thing that matters. Their unchanged position is illegible to a movement that has redefined what it means to be pro-America around sovereignty and enforcement. The libertarian anchor wasn’t strong enough to keep them legible as allies once the discourse moved.
Any institution or major figure in the coalition must contend with the same forces at work. The pressure to adapt or be left behind will totally transform our coalition, as it has already transformed Heritage, helped spawn a new establishment think-tank, and accelerated the conservative ridicule of the libertarian project.
America First Is Winning
Faced with this, the question isn’t whether the idea of America First has contradictions, because it does. The question isn’t whether America First is “right,” because there are compelling arguments against it. The question is which direction is the wind blowing.
Several years ago, “America First” was basically just a slogan, or a compelling heuristic at best. Today it’s the operating logic of the Republican Party and the default frame for political debate.
External forces: the media ecosystem, donor class, and political power structure have begun to realign around a simpler question. This is the same mechanism Conquest described, with status, funding, and institutional acceptance flowing in one direction. Now the current runs through the right’s own parallel establishment.
America First is nebulous. It means different things to different people, and that’s a feature, not a flaw. For years, conservatives policed their coalition with “RINO”—a loyalty test applied to individuals. America First is that same instinct extended to institutions, policies, and entire ideological frameworks. It doesn’t function as a coherent platform because it doesn’t need to. It’s a heuristic that has been captured by institutional forces far larger than any single figure, and it now operates as the default filter through which the movement evaluates everything. The question is no longer “is this conservative?” It’s “is this pro-America?” Those sound similar. They are not.
Foreign policy has moved from interventionist consensus toward skepticism of foreign entanglement. Trade policy has moved from free-trade orthodoxy toward protectionism. Immigration policy has moved from comprehensive reform toward enforcement. Cultural politics has moved from institution-driven toward open confrontation with credentialed consensus. Every major policy lane in American conservatism has moved toward the America First position.
This obviously isn’t because America First has better white papers. It functions as a simple, durable test that ordinary people can apply to any policy question. Does this serve Americans? Whose side are you on? These aren’t sophisticated questions and they don’t need to be. They just need to be asked, repeatedly, of every institution and every leader, and the answers need to be visible.
The institutions that survive this realignment will be the ones that can answer clearly. The ones that are explicitly, permanently, and credibly committed to American greatness as their first principle. Pro-liberty is not enough. Pro-markets is not enough.These principles are all subordinate to and downstream of a functioning, sovereign, and confident nation.
The current is flowing in one direction. It has been for a decade. This is why America First is winning: the number of relevant questions facing each institution has dwindled to just one. Are you pro-America in a way the movement will recognize? If the answer is anything other than, “Yes, unequivocally,” then the Party will march past you.
Whether that is the right question to ask will be the argument of the coming years.
Philip Reichert is the founder of Junto and Executive Director of the Sagebrush Institute. He is a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who has worked as a producer at Fox News, senior staff in the Texas House of Representatives, and as a contractor for the U.S. Space Force.