POLITICS
“What time it is in America” is all you’ll hear for the next two years
The conservative movement’s new catch phrase you shouldn’t ignore
This week, when the DC think tank, the Heritage Foundation, announced its plans for a conservative White House win in 2024, it all sounded so familiar. Heritage hadn’t even changed the name of the policy report it writes before each election: Mandate for Leadership. The first edition — a 3,000 page New York Times best-seller — was published in 1981. We’re now up to MfL IX, if my counting is correct.
Heritage’s plan for the next election — dubbed Project 2025 — covers much of what you’d imagine. In addition to an implementation plan to turn MfL IX into executive action, they’re organizing a personnel database (you guessed it: “Conservative LinkedIn”) as well as a Presidential Administration Academy (“an interactive, on-demand training” program for future conservative appointees).
These plans are what we’ve come to expect from Heritage. In 2016, it was Heritage that Politico credited as Donald Trump’s “shadow transition team”; think tank officials like Becky Norton Dunlop, James Carafano, and Ed Fuelner all lending a hand to get ready for Day 1.
Somewhat hidden in the familiar statement written by Heritage’s associate director of Project 2025, Spencer Chretien, was a more curious phrase. Chretien, a former Trump White House special assistant and associate director of Presidential Personnel, laments that the Republican Party has been stuck in the 1980s: trapped by commitments to supply-side economics and deference within the foreign policy realm to “generals and the intelligence community.”
Things are changing, Chretien assures:
“The conservative movement increasingly knows what time it is in America.”
In the context of the statement, Chretien suggests that this means an aggressive new conservative stance toward “the three-letter agencies” and “the left’s vast power.”
But that phrase — “what time it is in America” — sounded like something else, it sounded like something Elizabeth Cohen, who has written extensively about the political value of time, would have something to say about. Was it that phrase Dan Rather’s assailants shouted when they attacked him in Manhattan? Close, but no, that was “What’s the frequency Kenneth?”
Chretien isn’t the only one at Heritage using the phrase. The organization’s president, Kevin Roberts, has been saying it a lot lately. In May 2022, during a speech welcoming conservative activists to Nashville, TN, he said it. Later last year, when he announced the hiring of Clint Brown, a new vice president of government relations, Roberts said it again: “Conservative patriots like Clint who know what time it is in America.” And, in a December interview with The European Conservative, Roberts used the phrase three more times.
But Roberts isn’t alone. Former Trump campaign aide, Steve Cortes, used this phrase on Twitter a lot in 2022 as did Republican Congressman from Texas, Chip Roy, including during a speech in Congress. Sam Adler-Bell referred this past summer in New York Times to “what time it is” as “a ubiquitous New Right shibboleth.”
But, where does it come from?
With some poking around, it doesn’t seem that Heritage, Cortes, or Roy coined the phrase.
Two years ago, David Reaboi, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, used the phrase as a red-pill variant to criticize NeverTrumpers like Jonah Goldberg: “These people have no idea where we are in the movie; they’ve got no idea ‘what time it is.’” Not to worry, Reaboi has the “what time it is” merch ready to sell.
In the essay, Reaboi points readers to his Claremont colleague and former White House aide, Michael Anton. In Anton’s 2020 book, The Stakes, he too uses the phrase, this time in reference to Rush Limbaugh: “As a friend likes to put it, he [Limbaugh] knows what time it is.”
It seems this has been Anton’s catch phrase for a while (though he says in the podcast that he learned it from Reaboi): a not-so-secret handshake for who’s in and who’s out. It works for the same reason many good slogans work: its meaning is flexible enough to fit nearly any use, yet it’s sufficiently specific to alert allies to listen up.
And, this is what makes Reaboi’s interview with Anton in 2021 so interesting. At the time, Anton had been critical of Heritage, which he said was “just not speaking to young people anymore.”
Reaboi asked him to expand on the criticism. Kevin Roberts had just been announced as Heritage’s new president and Anton signals he’s heard positive things, that Roberts is “a good guy”, and that he’d be willing to “give him the benefit of the doubt.”
That two years later Roberts has adopted this Reaboi/Anton/Claremont language is then not surprising. They are the thought-leader in these circles as well as well-versed in how to speak in Trump’s world. It seems Roberts is learning to speak this way much more fluently than his predecessors at Heritage.
This also takes us back to Project 2025.
This project — like Roberts’ Heritage presidency — will be judged on how well the organizers have learned this new language, whether Trump supporters, if not Trump himself, see Heritage as timely or stuck in time. To be sure, it’s too early to tell whether 2024 will be more like 1980 or 2020, but the success of Heritage and the conservative movement likely rests on whether it can convince the America that it knows what time it is.
