Why did Mom Donnie win the mayorship of New York City? Well, he had the diagnosis right, which is that there's an affordability issue, but he's not gonna have the policy right. Each of us in the United States, just as our founders felt, should feel an obligation to get this generation of politics and policy and civil society right so that millions of people down the road can enjoy the same. That's part of the American tradition. Welcome back to The Kevin Roberts Show. I'm Larry O'Connor, and we sure hope you had the greatest of Christmases with your family and you enjoyed your holiday season. But we're not done celebrating quite yet, right? It's New Year's time, and it's our country's 250th birthday. And at Heritage, we're going all in with a bold new initiative, the four cornerstones of America. And we're going to get into it with Kevin Roberts right here on The Kevin Roberts Show. It's always good to have you on your show. It's nice to be on my show. Thanks for being back. Yeah. So the four cornerstones, this is huge. And let's break down, sort of define our terms here. I've got family, work, national security, and citizenship. How did you hone in on those four? Well, we asked ourselves the question regarding America's 250th birthday. In addition to celebrating the great aspects of our history, what should Heritage be saying about America 250 years from now? America 500, in other words. And we said, well, we work on every policy issue. We've talked about this on this show. We've talked about that over the years. How do we convey that? How do we communicate that to a broader audience in a way that makes sense? We're going to do the high-minded, well-researched policy. We're going to argue for some of the particular bills and argue against others. But how can we convey this to the American people for America's birthday, but for a long time, like for a decade or more? Think about it. The family, the dignity of work and free enterprise, national security, and what it means to be an American citizenship, what America is, these are the questions we need to be asking in 2026. Yeah, and this is not a branding thing. I've been hearing talk in the hallways here and stuff. This is really more about the fundamental essentials for a free society. That's sort of the approach you seem to be taking. I would like to think that, yes, I would like to think that if our founders were sitting here having a conversation and they overheard us talk about those four cornerstones, they would say, yes, that's what America is about. And the reason they would say that, I think, is because those are the attributes of a healthy society. Those are the attributes of a society where ultimately you want those things to be right. You want the policy to be correct so that people can be self-governing, so they can flourish. Obviously, we're going to continue to do the research and the policy work that we do under each of those cornerstones. cornerstones. It's sort of the sub-foundation, if you will. Hopefully, we're resoundingly successful, which means that it really will be the golden age for America. You just used the word policy like three times in two sentences. You picked up on that. There's a clue here, I think. Well, you know, there are critics on the left who often say about conservatives, and frankly, over the last several decades, sometimes they're right, is that we talk about culture, and it's all bromides, and it's a paragraph in a speech, but it never actually hones down to actual tangible policy. So what's the answer to that criticism? Well, the answer to that criticism is, at least here at Heritage, I would like to think for most of the political right in this country, but at least here at Heritage, we start with our ideas and policy. So in fact, just a quick 30 seconds on how we came at this, we asked all of our colleagues, including our policy colleagues, what are the big questions? What are the big things we want to solve so that as we're celebrating America's 250th, we're thinking about the next 25 years. And this is what we came up with. In other words, it grew out of the policy work that we do every day. And yes, there is a packaging messaging component. But what I would also say to the left is that's the kind of thing that they've cleaned our clocks on for a generation until Donald Trump arrived. That is packaging and messaging and communication. On the right, we're trying to match them along with our policy. Yeah. And by the way, for our next several episodes, we're going to be going into each and every one of these cornerstones and breaking down the policies for family and national security and citizenship and the dignity of hard work. But for people on the right, conservatives right now are hearing that and say, OK, yeah, policy. But how does that translate to my home and my family? It actually starts with what the everyday American is feeling. And so what the everyday American would say is it's very difficult to form a family. Sometimes it's difficult to keep a family intact. There are many headwinds to even if a couple wants to have children to having children. We want to make sure that the government, which is not the answer to all of those problems, at least has the right policy that doesn't have disincentives to those things. Also, think about the dignity of work and free enterprise. Why did someone, why did Mom Donnie win the mayorship of New York City? Well he had the diagnosis right which is that there an affordability issue but he not going to have the policy right And so what we saying is we want people to be working hard We lament the tragedy of eight and a half million able-bodied working age young men in the United States, not even looking for work. That's a crisis of the dignity of work, but also a problem and not having good free market policies. We want national security, not just safe borders, but we want our own streets and sidewalks to be safe. And ultimately, although the last cornerstone is perhaps a little more philosophical, it seems, I would say it's one of the most real attributes of living daily life in the United States. And it is with 15, 20 million illegal aliens who came in under the Biden years, nothing against them as human persons, as we've talked about on this show, Larry. But that challenges what it is to be America and to be Americans, meaning that we haven't assimilated these foreign-born people. We also haven't assimilated our own native-born population because our schools have been terrible. And so there are many different aspects in which this question of what it means to be an American affects people in their daily lives. That's what motivates us. The policy flows from those needs. Hard to assimilate newcomers to our country and emphasize that they embrace citizenship. when we're not even doing it for our own. Yes, when you think about a small minority of American-born high school students could pass the citizenship test, we've got some work to do. Yeah, that's fair to say. All right, your favorite part of our episode is the history lesson. Yeah, I know. If we go back to our founders, they're not going to use terms like the cornerstones of our society or our nation, but almost all of the founding documents and the letters they all wrote to each other, It's just interwoven the idea of freedom and faith and citizenship, patriotism, family. It's all there, right? This is not a new concept. Not at all a new concept. If you think about it, our founders would say these are the philosophical foundations to have a free society. The second point is each of the founders, to the person, knew that what he was doing, whether it was signing the Declaration or helping to frame the Constitution a decade later, was for posterity's sake. In other words, it wasn't just for that particular generation of Americans, nor was it even just for generations of Americans 200 years later, although that was the key purpose. It was that what they were doing was decidedly human, that what they were putting into civil society and the structure of our government actually reflected human desires, human loggings, the desire to be in community and family, to live securely, to be prosperous. In other words, these four cornerstones are simple. But the reason that we're turning back to them in the 2020s is because our politics and policy have become so complicated. It is amazing when you read about the founders how openly they discussed not only how the eyes of the world were on them at that moment, but they often talked about their posterity, about future generations and what they would say about what they did. It's very rare, isn't it, to be sort of in the middle of it? I don't do that. I don't think, you know, what are they going to say about what I did 100 years from now? Yeah, especially here in Washington where policymaking seems to be like in three-day increments. Yeah, until they take the next poll. Yeah. Well, that's right. And then it might be 30 days, but rarely even a year. Yeah, it's overwhelming when you go back and reread, for example, the text of the constitutional debates. Every one of those men, regardless of where they were on some of the big philosophical or political questions, knew that what they were doing was going to affect history. And there's a certain hubris in that, you might think. And that wasn't lost on some people. But actually, it was a humility that they saw themselves thinking about the importance of faith as instruments of God in order to put into as close to perfection as you can in this life a governmental structure that obviously would rely on the virtue, but also the education and formation of the citizenry. And so one of the things that we have lost in American education that we hope to get back that is vital to this project is understanding we're not just teaching math and science and reading as important as those are, not even just history, but we're transmitting values about what it means to be free, what it means to be an American. And what it is, in other words, to say that, yes, our lives are important, our children's and grandchildren's lives are important. But we, each of us in the United States, just as our founders felt, should feel an obligation to get this generation of politics and policy and civil society right so that millions of people down the road can enjoy the same. That's part of the American tradition. I love that. All right, so the founders are looking at all this stuff, what they're doing, how they're building this new country. Family, hard work, pursuit of happiness, if you will, common defense. All those words are in there, the same cornerstones you're looking at right now in patriotism. When you talk about them as four cornerstones, you know, I love the imagery. Look at a building and the four cornerstones. When you looking at a building you don see all four but they are interconnected aren they One goes down the whole building comes down Did they recognize that Did they see that these are all sort of ideas and concepts that had to work together Completely. And if you think about it, going back to the text of the constitutional debates or perhaps even more appropriately, the debates over the Declaration of Independence, which, of course, was a huge matter, declaring independence from the United Kingdom. the comment was that you have to form a society in which obviously human freedom allows people to make whatever decision they're going to make. There's great faith that Americans generally would make virtuous decisions because it was a society filled with people of faith. But if you think about succeeding as a family, being open to having children, you have to feel like you're economically secure. In other words, in the American context, you've got the opportunity to go be prosperous. You may make some decisions and aren't. But that you're also physically secure, that literally when you walk outside of your front door, you're not worried about crime. But then more broadly that, and this goes straight to the constitutional debates, that the federal government's got to be strong enough to protect the borders, whether from immigration that's illegal or from foreign invasion. But then lastly, you lose the whole project if you don't forget that cornerstone that's sort of in the back that you don't often see, but that is part of your daily life. And that is, yes, citizenship, the rule of law, to be sure. But really, what does it mean to be an American? And how can I, in addition to all the benefits I get from the United States, pay that back so that people in my generation can benefit? But again, going back to the sort of obsession the founders had with posterity, generations down the road can do the same. Yeah. So when you look at America today, circa 2026, let's say, 250th anniversary. Why is this framework now reemerging for you from your perspective, from Heritage's perspective? What is it that you see in the landscape today that tells you, oh, we need to reinforce these cornerstones? There are a number of strands that come together. The first and ostensible one is the 250th anniversary, and that's self-evident. The second is that the country is weaker than it was 40 or 50 years ago by almost every measure. And I say that lamenting it, but also rather optimistic that we can reverse that trend. We're weaker economically, we're weaker militarily, probably weaker civilly and socially and so on. And so you have to ask the question, what do we as conservatives need to do beyond talking about lower taxes and limited government and free enterprise, these are all very important. How can we be innovative? How can we look to the past and maybe bring some combination of innovation with these principles? And then the third thing is, and I think this is this is providence, the American people know that, yes, there's something wrong, there's something broken. Our institutions are things that especially younger Americans don't trust. But they also sense, maybe because of the election of Donald Trump, maybe because of the promise of some leaders out there that there's an opportunity to fix it. And so for us at Heritage, as we sat back thinking, what can we do distinctively, perhaps uniquely, to actually amplify all of this? And it's the four cornerstones. Yeah. Why? Because these are the things we've worked on for over 50 years. We also have the opportunity, and we know this because we're so close to everyday Americans, maybe to present all of this in a way that allows this center-right governing coalition to be sustained for more than just a couple of election cycles. Because if the left comes back into power, we're going to keep fighting, but we'll be fighting against something. It'll be nice to fight for something, which would be the cornerstones. Is it right for me to jump to a conclusion that there's a reason why family is first in the list? It's probably reasonable for you to jump to a conclusion about that. So tell me about how you reached the understanding that family needs to be emphasized, that this needs to be a major focus going forward. Well, I could go all academic on you and talk about the Aristotelian reason for that. Oh, no, not you. But I'm not going to do that to you, Larry. No, that's not your style. Instead, I'm going to say that Americans are telling us the majority of Americans want to be married. They would like to have children or more children. It's ultimately both of those are their choices. But that there are some headwinds to those things. In addition to whatever choices we make as individuals, it might be government policy. It might be social and cultural trends. And while Heritage would be the first to say government certainly isn't the answer to all of those things, it certainly has been a problem. It has aggravated some of those trends. and we need to get the family right to say something that I think is self-evident in order to have a civilization. I mean, maybe some of the tech bros believe that somehow we don't have to worry about that. We've touched on that in previous episodes, but in heritage, we're traditionalists. We think the old-fashioned way of building families is the way to go, not just for your own personal fulfillment but also for the sake of a healthy society which is built up of a lot of healthy communities Yeah We going to dive deep into the family aspect of the Four Cornerstones in our next episode. But I do wonder, because you travel so much in this country, and it's a big part of your job is to talk to people and learn from people around the nation. Not every family looks the same. You've got your big city families and your urban families. You've got rural families. We've got military communities who all act like one cohesive family. Are there some common threats that you see throughout the country that bring sort of a commonality to the American family? Yeah. One of them is, and obviously the different structures of households, and it's the 2020s we recognize, but one of them is there is a striving for the ideal. And the ideal in American history, the history of the West, has been husband, wife, and however many children. And obviously there are now variations to that in the 21st century. to say the least, which we acknowledge. But there is a striving toward in those families a certain stability and not just the economic stability that's important to a family, not just to the physical security outside the home, but a stability that is at sort of its most basic level human. It's emotional. And that is understanding that this family unit, whatever it looks like, is one that can grow. It can be prosperous. Each individual member can flourish. And what we want to make sure of at Heritage on the policy side of this family question is that all of the disincentives, as we'll talk about in a subsequent episode, that exist in policy are gone. But the big question that we're trying to get Americans to ask is, what can be better about American family life? Because we live at a time when marriage rates and birth rates are at historic lows. And to use a word that is overused, and therefore I try to avoid it, but I'm going to violate my own rule. It is an existential crisis. Certainly by the end of the century, some demographers would say maybe even by 2060, 2070, we have to figure out an answer to that. And at Heritage, the answer to deteriorating marriage rates and birth rates would not be technology. It would not be immigration. It would be the good old-fashioned human way of building communities and civil society and families because of the reward that comes for people. It's not unlike why we're so enamored with the idea of revitalizing the dignity of work. The money is important, but it's really what happens in the heart that's the most. It seems like from looking at a lot of the materials surrounding the Cornerstone Initiative here, the four cornerstones, is it's almost like there's a spirit of a refounding of the nation here on our 250th birthday. Is it fair to say that? It's a really good way of putting it. And And I would also think that even the most politically conservative of our founders would say that's the right way to think about it, that, you know, hopefully there don't have to be, as they would say, additional rebellions. We had one, obviously, in the shape of the Civil War, but that our institutions, including family, those would have to be revitalized. Maybe not every generation, maybe every half century or century. And how appropriate that 250 years into this experiment, and that was about the life, the longest lifespan the founders thought a republic could last, that there is a bit of a refounding. I think it's helpful for us to think about that. And not only is that something that should be entirely peaceful, it should be very joyful if we're willing to embrace these ideas. I mean, honestly, is it even possible to imagine another 250 years of America without reemphasizing those four pillars? I can't. I mean, there's just no way. And there's no historic equivalent, is there? Any other society around the world over the last couple of millennia, they all seem to peter out and crumble. And it's because of one of those, if not all four of those pillars falling apart. No, that's right. And if you think about the reality that we are a republic, not a democracy, but even if we were a democracy, neither a republic nor a democracy has lasted this long. And if you think about the most famous examples, think about the history, a little over a century of the Roman Republic, it deteriorated in large part, I would argue, because a couple of these cornerstones deteriorating themselves. The four cornerstones. These are not abstract policies and not some sort of esoteric sort of thought process. These are real, substantial policy forward ideas that will help re-found this country right where it needs to be where it started back in 1776. We're going to charge forward with our next several episodes looking at each one starting next week with the family. So keep it right here. Think of the Four Cornerstones almost as a brand new operating system that we're reloading into our nation there. I think the tech bros probably understand that reference. And we'll see you next week talking about the family right here on The Kevin Roberts Show. Don't forget to subscribe and give us some thumbs up. It helps us out a lot. We'll be right back.
