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Heritage is now just another nest of kooks. And before you say "well, it was always like that" - no, it wasn't. You might not have liked the views it espoused, but it wasn't this. Over 40 years, I've agreed and disagreed with Heritage - but it's no longer a serious place. https://t.co/zJxohje0Ul

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 30, 2023

I'm old enough to remember when Andrew Bacevich was a voice in the wilderness saying this about the GOP (that they weren't "serious"), and using Reinhold Niebuhr to back it up.

That was 15 years ago. I doubt anyone would remember.  But I'm not impressed with the Lincoln Project/Resolute Square/Atlantic crowd now who want to purge their garments so that they be white as snow.  I'm not interested in hanging blame on them for the sins of their fathers, either.  But Jeebus, fellas, show a little humility and awareness of history.  15 years is a lifetime ago only to punk kids who've only been alive for 30 or less. (Yes, Nichols says he's been arguing with the Heritage Foundation for 40 years.  That only makes his argument worse.  Heritage hasn't changed its stripes.)

You can do better.  And yes, Heritage was always a nest of kooks.  Nothing's changed except, like all things and persons that age, their true nature is just more obvious.  This is the future you worked so assiduously to create when you were younger (you're all still younger than me!  Damn punk kids!).  Quit denying responsibility for it.

Bacevich didn't.  That's why he's ignored today, and still a more serious thinker than all of you combined.

In Niebuhr's view, although history may be purposeful, it is also opaque, a drama in which both the story line and the dénouement remain hidden from view. The twists and turns that the plot has already taken suggest the need for a certain modesty in forecasting what is still to come. Yet as Niebuhr writes, "modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management."

Such humility is in particularly short supply in present-day Washington. There, especially among neoconservatives and neoliberals, the conviction persists that Americans are called up on to serve, in Niebuhr's most memorable phrase, "as tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection."

Exactly.  

Now git offa mah lawn!