Recruiting the future

Nick Solheim cracks open a can of Red Bull and ­settles back into his brown leather armchair. His office smells like fresh paint. American Moment, the organization he co-founded in 2021, moved into this space a week before my visit in June. He’s mostly unpacked, but the walls are bare. Solheim tells me his wife is searching for just the right artwork.

After he finishes his Red Bull, he pops a Zyn into his mouth. These tobacco-free pouches of nicotine are popular with young people who say it boosts their energy. Solheim, 27, has one can of Zyn in his pocket and two more on his desk, next to a small bust of Theodore Roosevelt. He needs all the energy he can get. “It’s intern season in D.C., and it is really crazy,” he says.

Each summer, tens of thousands of young people swarm into the nation’s capital to work in Congress and other government agencies, not to mention the city’s long list of think tanks and lobby groups. Reaching these interns is a major focus of American Moment’s work.

The mission, according to Solheim, is to “identify, educate, and credential the next generation of people that are going to serve as staff in the conservative movement—on Capitol Hill, at nonprofits, and, yes, in presidential administrations.” But American Moment is hardly the only conservative organization in Washington, D.C., trying to win young hearts and minds. All the factions warring for the soul of the Republican Party are recruiting young soldiers.

After Donald Trump survived the July 13 assassination attempt, conservatives rallied around him. Even former opponent Nikki Haley spoke at the national convention, where Republicans declared the former president their standard-bearer. But that unity masks deeper divisions not only over what kind of policies Trump should pursue if elected but, on a more elemental level: What it means, exactly, to be a conservative.

American Moment’s new office is in a diminutive red-brick building with an American flag hanging by the door. It’s located a few blocks from the Capitol. As we walk up wooden stairs past rows of cardboard moving boxes, Solheim notes it’s larger than the organization’s previous office. Its youthful staff of seven needs more space to accomplish its audacious plans, which involve nothing short of remaking the government by filling it with like-minded people. A Reagan official famously remarked, “Personnel is policy,” and American Moment takes that to heart. Staff members identify other young conservatives who share their vision and then focus relentlessly on preparing them to staff the unglamorous, bureaucratic jobs that make a presidential administration tick.

Solheim doesn’t mince words when describing American Moment’s vision for conservatism: “The issues that President Trump ran on first in 2016.” He breaks those down into three major areas: foreign policy, trade, and immigration. “No more unjust wars, particularly in the Middle East; no totally unfettered free trade; and reduced legal and illegal immigration.”

Many groups training young people in Washington call themselves “conservative,” but that can mean very different things. I asked Solheim if he identified with a specific strand of conservatism. “I don’t like labels on principle,” he said as he took another sip of Red Bull.

Solheim might not like labels, but that hasn’t stopped others from applying them to him and those who share his principles. “Nationalist conservative,” “MAGA Republican,” “populist right” are a few. But the label arguably used most often is “New Right,” a name that pits Solheim’s group against the “Old Right,” which dominated the Republican Party in the decades prior to 2016.

Those terms suggest Solheim and his allies are radically redefining what it means to be a conservative. But that takes a short-sighted view of history, says Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a conservative think tank founded in 2021 by Russell Vought, who directed the Office of Management and Budget under President Trump. Maitra argues the names Old Right and New Right could be reversed.

The group now called the New Right is actually a throwback to what conservatism looked like until the presidency of Richard Nixon, Maitra says. Conservatism then meant opposing foreign intervention and supporting protectionist economic policies as well as restrictive immigration. He said the group that is today called the “Old Right” is a product of the Republican Party after Nixon. Its adherents tend to believe in humanitarian foreign intervention, free trade, and relatively higher levels of legal immigration. The New Right, according to Maitra, “is not your father’s conservatism. It’s your grandfather’s conservatism.”

IF AMERICAN MOMENT’S OFFICES testify to its scrappy startup status, the stately headquarters of The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) speaks to its eminent pedigree. Purchased by TFAS in 1999, the building was originally built as a private home in 1916. The lobby and main rooms feature jewel-toned carpets, gold-framed paintings, and crystal chandeliers.

Conservative luminaries including William F. Buckley Jr. helped found the educational nonprofit in the 1960s to counter the radical youth movements then sweeping college campuses. Roger Ream began serving as TFAS president in 1998. Despite his long tenure and experience, he’s no less harried this year than Solheim. At the time of our interview in June, he was rushing back to his office on foot and had to join the Zoom call on his phone. He had one meeting before and then another straight after. When he made it back to the office, he took a moment to catch his breath at his desk while joining the call on his computer.

The TFAS summer internship program is a primary part of the organization’s work. This year, it’s hosting 277 students who work as interns in offices across Washington and take classes in free market economics at George Mason University. All summer, they troop in and out of the TFAS headquarters for various smaller gatherings.

If American Moment believes that “personnel is policy,” then the TFAS approach could be summarized with the phrase “ideas have consequences.” That title of a 1948 book by Richard Weaver has become one of the most enduring slogans of the conservative movement. “We feel like very few college students get exposed to the ideas of limited government and economic freedom, and we feel there’s benefit in giving them exposure to these ideas,” Ream said.

In addition to classwork, TFAS interns take seminars on practical topics like writing a résumé and job interview skills. Each intern is paired with a mentor from his or her field. Unlike American Moment, TFAS isn’t geared toward finding people with ideological alignment. In fact, TFAS does not screen applicants on the basis of their political beliefs, meaning nonconservatives can participate. While Ream says they look for the best and brightest, “We try to avoid any kind of bias toward elite universities.”

The TFAS program is only for college students, and it comes with a hefty price tag. A three-credit summer costs $8,450, which covers tuition and eight weeks of housing. Ream said over 80 percent of students receive a full or partial scholarship.

I asked Ream if TFAS hopes to “convert” left-wing students into believing in the free market. He said he wouldn’t use that word. “We recognize for some students it’s a transformative experience for them. And for others, it may not have much influence.”

While TFAS primarily focuses on education, American Moment is building a database. Its staff tries to meet as many people as possible and vet them “for capability, for ideological alignment, for moral clarity.” American Moment also runs several educational programs. The one closest to Solheim’s heart is the Fellowship for American Statecraft, an internship program that tries to bring people to the capital who might not otherwise get there. At the end of the internships, it helps each fellow find a job.

Internships are the gateway to careers in Washington, but they pay next to nothing in an expensive city. Many interns get financial help from parents. That means large swathes of the population—“normal people” as Solheim calls them—are excluded. This summer, the group’s 12 fellows include the manager of an Arby’s and a police officer.

American Moment pays its fellows $3,000 a month as W-2 employees. They work at their internships four days a week and spend Fridays at American Moment’s office learning not only about policy but also things like how to dress professionally and manage personal finances.

Sumantra Maitra calls American Moment a welcome departure from traditional conservative activism that rightly emphasized ideas but neglected important practical training. “You need to be able to implement and not just to think. There are thinkers already, but there are very few people who are just going to be crossing T’s and dotting I’s.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a high-profile example of ideas plus implementation. It includes a policy blueprint for a hypothetical second Trump administration and a database of people to implement those policies. Maitra is in the database for a foreign-policy-focused role.

But its work hasn’t been well received. Trump has publicly repudiated Project 2025 several times, calling it “seriously extreme” at a rally in July. Could American Moment fare better? Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, has close ties to the organization as a board member emeritus. And his influence with the group reaches even further back. An article Vance wrote titled “End the Globalization Gravy Train” inspired Solheim and his co-founders to start American Moment.

Maitra says left-wing activists have been successful at implementing their ideas because they worked hard to place their people in positions of influence. Now finally, “we are replicating their process.”

But this strategy may not be as novel on the right as Maitra asserts. For the last 15 years, Mark Tooley has served as president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a Washington-based think tank founded in 1981 to make Christian arguments for democracy, human rights, and religious freedom. “It’s a well-known strategy for almost everyone in Washington across the political spectrum to draw people to their platform and to train and encourage them to seek roles in government to advance their agenda,” Tooley said. “That’s a part of democracy, and everyone is allowed to do that.”

DISAGREEMENTS OVER PRINCIPLE and policy aside, the fight for the future of American conservatism could come down to who has the best free lunch.

During a midweek, midday rush in the middle of June, the catering staff at the Dirksen Senate Office Building is running late. When they finally roll in their carts, they quickly get to work setting out brown boxes with sandwiches, plastic containers with salad, and sodas. Around 90 interns and young congressional staff, nearly all wearing navy blue blazers, line up expectantly. One young man tentatively ventures forward to snag a box. A caterer, probably fearful of a stampede, warns him off. “Hey guys! We’re still setting up.”

Besides scoring a free lunch, these young people have gathered to attend the first of a six-part lecture series titled “Compass Crash Course 2024.” It’s organized by American Compass, a small think tank founded in 2020 by Oren Cass, a former adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.

Cass takes the podium wearing the D.C. uniform: navy blue blazer and light blue shirt. The session that day is titled “Conservative Economics 101.” The choice of the word “conservative” is intended to contrast with the “libertarian” economics that have dominated the Republican Party in recent decades.

Cass argues Republicans are stuck with a 1980s playbook that only allowed three economic policies: “tax cuts, deregulation, and free trade.”

Those three policies are fine at times, but policymakers should take a much broader view, he argues. “Protecting the family from the market is more important than getting every member of the family into the market,” Cass tells the young people.

The remaining Compass Crash Course 2024 sessions will dive deeper into topics like “family policy” and “pro-worker conservatism.” A senior congressional staffer will teach the last session, titled “How To Make It on the Hill.”

Not to be outdone, American Moment also has a Capitol Hill summer lunch program, held on Fridays, featuring Chick-fil-A and a speaker aligned with its philosophy. All interns are welcome. Sometimes as many as 150 turn up.

TFAS also organizes a summer lecture series together with the office of Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky. They don’t cater lunch but hand out vouchers to the Dirksen Senate cafeteria to all interns who attend.

The Institute on Religion and Democracy tries to stand out by offering fancier fare at a monthly event called the New Whiggery Dinner. The night before I spoke with Mark Tooley, the menu included salmon, steak, chicken, broccoli, mashed potatoes, and cheesecake. They ran out of food, Tooley told me. “We usually have 20 to 30, but we had about 40 last night.”

Tooley explains that “Whiggery” denotes a belief in “classical liberalism, meaning limited government, freedom of speech, open society.” Solheim defines his conservatism in terms of foreign intervention, free trade, and immigration. But Tooley says he’s concerned the New Right is also defined by less confidence in the free market and capitalism. “The conservatism that I knew in my youth was Reaganite and stressed limited government and private initiative,” Tooley said.

But what policies today are truly “Reaganite”? This question lies at the heart of the division between the New Right and Old Right. Reagan’s eight years in the White House left a rich, complex legacy that is open to interpretation.

Solheim accuses conservatives on the Old Right of adhering to something he calls “zombie Reaganism.” For him, that means contorting the Gipper’s legacy to defend a “globalist, free-trade, and social liberal agenda—which any student of history would know that Reagan was not a believer in.”

TFAS’s Ream has been talking with fellow conservatives in D.C. who fear their movement has “been worshipping at the altar of the free market in ways that have hurt the family and family values.” But he thinks government policies, not the market, pose the biggest threat to the family. It’s hard to make the case for free trade in part because its benefits aren’t immediately visible, Ream said. “It’s very visible when someone at a factory in Ohio loses their job, but you don’t see the benefits of consumers saving a lot of money on the things they buy, or a steel mill getting cheaper raw materials because of free trade.”

Tooley says he’s noticed New Right organizations like American Moment are doing a good job reaching younger people right now. “Whether they’re successful long-term depends on who is elected and when they’re elected,” he adds.

But Solheim isn’t only interested in staffing a presidential administration. He points out that Republican members of Congress need staff and so do the many conservative institutions in Washington. Moreover, across America, a huge number of businesses founded by conservatives want to hire like-minded employees. “I think the ceiling is very high for finding that amount of aligned people,” Solheim says. “We could get to 50,000 names on our list, and I’d say, ‘Great, let’s keep going.’”