Heritage Foundation Chief Reflects on the One Thing the Founders Couldn’t Have Foreseen

The president of The Heritage Foundation says America’s Founders couldn’t possibly have foreseen what he called the regrettably “weak, fractured, and hollow” state of the family today and offered some prescriptions on what should be done about it.

“[O]ur Founders, for all their erudition, prescience, and political imagination, could never have envisioned the state of the American family today,” Kevin Roberts told attendees Tuesday at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington.

“[T]he American family—the spiritual heart and soul that animates that Constitution—has grown weak, fractured, and hollow,” Roberts said. 

Roberts, a historian who has served as the president of The Heritage Foundation since December 2021, explained how the median age for marriage for men and women has risen by many years since 1776. He also cited the dramatic decline of marriage and birth rates in the country.

“Since the 1970s, Americans have consistently said their ideal family size is about two-and-a-half children. But reality has fallen short. Financial pressures, cultural hostility to marriage, and the erosion of hope have opened a tragic gap between the families that Americans desire and the families they believe they can achieve,” he said.

Roberts’ address came as the national conservatism movement celebrates years of success and has seen the placement of its friends and supporters in the Trump administration. Early speakers at the conference hailed what they characterized as the stunning successes of the first seven months of the second Donald Trump presidency, including securing the southern border and a reduction in crime in Washington, D.C.

The Heritage leader noted that Pat Buchanan, a longtime conservative stalwart and former presidential candidate, had predicted the state of American affairs many years before.

Buchanan observed as far back as 2001 that many Americans had seen their God dethroned, their culture defiled, their values polluted, their country assaulted, and themselves demonized as extremists and bigots for holding on to beliefs Americans had held for generations, Roberts said.

The Heritage president said that emphasis on restoring the American family was key to determining what policies to support.

“We must do intentionally what the Founders did instinctively, stake our future on virtuous and ordinary mothers and fathers as conservatives,” Roberts declared. 

“Will [the policy] advance the common good of the American people? Will it cultivate the virtues without which liberty cannot endure? If the answer is ‘no,’ even if the proposal aligns with some past ideological commitment, prudence requires that we reject it,” he continued.

Roberts concluded by describing the importance of long-term thinking—not just in decades but in centuries. 

“Can we have the courage to plant oak trees whose shade we will never sit in? Can we labor to build cathedrals whose spires we will never see completed? And will we embrace the sacrifices necessary to make America’s next 250 years greater than her first?” he asked.

Correction: This article misstated the date of Roberts’ speech and when he became Heritage president. He spoke Tuesday and joined Heritage in December 2021.

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