Institutions decay in a familiar pattern: when values are treated as optional, the serious people move on.
In late 2025, the Heritage Foundation demonstrated this pattern. The flashpoint was not policy substance but a series of leadership decisions that suggested principle would yield to convenience.
When Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, publicly aligned the institution with polarising media figures — including a defence of Tucker Carlson — the reaction inside was immediate. This was not about factional alignment within American conservatism. It was about whether Heritage remained an institution governed by articulated principles, or whether those principles could be overridden by personal loyalties and short-term relationships.
The exodus that followed was visible and telling. Those who left were not activists, but policy professionals, scholars, and institutionalists. Coverage by National Review was blunt. Institutions can survive controversy; they struggle when belief becomes optional.
This was not a peculiarity of American conservatism. It was an institutional pattern. People who join organisations for reasons of principle will tolerate disagreement, internal debate, and temporary defeat. What they will not tolerate is the sense that stated values are ornamental — useful for branding, but not binding on decision-making.
There is a lesson here for Australian institutions, particularly the Liberal Party of Australia, whose stated beliefs remain intact on paper even as decision-making drifts toward convenience, risk-management, or simply a desire to “win”.
The Liberal Party does not lack a moral framework. Its “We Believe” statement is explicit: freedom under the rule of law; individual initiative and responsibility; reward for effort; limited government; equality before the law; and respect for the family. These principles are not extreme. They are broadly shared by the party’s lay membership and volunteer base. They are also intelligible to the wider public.
The problem is not that these beliefs are unknown or unpopular. It is that they increasingly fail to constrain behaviour among elected representatives.
Lay members, donors, and volunteers often find themselves defending positions their own representatives will not articulate, or will actively dilute in the name of pragmatism. Candidates who speak plainly in the party’s moral language are treated as liabilities rather than assets. Ambiguity is rewarded; conviction is managed.
The pattern is visible at state level. In Western Australia, the Liberal Party supported expanded firearms regulations that treated lawful owners as a problem to be managed rather than citizens to be trusted. The policy sat in clear tension with the party’s stated beliefs, but that tension was never addressed. It was framed as pragmatic necessity, while objections from the party’s own membership were sidelined rather than answered.
Over time, this produces a familiar institutional pathology. The party continues to say what it believes, but behaves as though those beliefs are negotiable whenever they threaten reputational comfort or short-term positioning. The result is not moderation, but drift.
This is why comparisons with policy minutiae miss the point. The deeper issue is not whether a party adopts this or that position on firearms, climate, or welfare. It is whether those positions can be recognisably derived from the principles the party claims to hold — or whether they are simply the least controversial options available at the time.
The contrast with smaller parties is instructive. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation does not possess the institutional depth, policy infrastructure, or historical pedigree of the Liberal Party. Yet in recent years it has achieved reputational stabilisation. This has occurred not because One Nation has become more sophisticated, but because its words reliably predict its actions. Observers may disagree with its positions, but rarely struggle to identify what it stands for.
The point here is institutional coherence. Even unpopular positions can command a degree of respect when belief and behaviour align. Conversely, even widely shared values lose authority when they are treated as optional.
For the Liberal Party, the risk is not electoral irrelevance. It is something more corrosive and neutering: the quiet departure of serious people. Those who joined because they believed the We Believe statement was a guide to action rather than a ceremonial inheritance. Those willing to do the unglamorous work of policy development, campaigning, and community engagement — but only if the institution means what it says.
Institutions do not collapse when they offend their critics. They collapse when they stop giving their own people a reason to stay.
This is the lesson of Heritage, and it is not confined to American politics. Values that exist only as language eventually lose their power to attract, to discipline, or to persuade.
Institutions rest on an implicit covenant: the institution upholds certain principles; its members defend them. When an institution retains principles as language but abandons them in practice, it breaks the covenant first. Those who joined under the stated terms are not obligated to remain once those terms are set aside. When institutional principles become negotiable, principled people will negotiate their way out.