MOLLY BALL ON THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION

Her article in The Atlantic "The Fall of the Heritage Foundation and the Death of Republican Ideas " was interesting but I'm not sure about some of her claims.  For example, she writes that in the early 1980s, Heritage wasn't just another collection of hacks collecting wingnut welfare:

During the 1980 election, an up-and-coming Washington think tank called the Heritage Foundation undertook a massive task: to examine the federal government from top to bottom and produce a detailed, practical conservative policy vision.
The result, called Mandate for Leadership, epitomized the intellectual ambition of the then-rising conservative movement.
..By the end of Reagan’s first year in office, 60 percent of the Mandate’s 2,000 ideas were being implemented, and the Republican Party’s status as a hotbed of intellectual energy was ratified. It was a Democrat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who would declare in 1981, “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

A few paragraphs later, Ball describes Heritage as an "august policy shop" and that's where I suspect she's wrong. I wasn't as involved with politics in the early 80s as I am now but I can't recall the Reagan Administration, the Republican Party and its supporters ever having an intellectual tone. Ball continues: "Without Heritage, the GOP’s intellectual backbone is severely weakened,.." Since 2001, I've read or re-read some writings of the major conservative thinkers such as Kirk, Buckley, Friedman, Hayek, Strauss, Weaver and Burke and none of them are as compelling as Joseph de Maistre but he's never mentioned by American conservatives.

My claim is that the GOP never had an "intellectual" backbone.