Edwin Feulner, the founder and longtime president of the Heritage Foundation, died last month. He will be remembered as one of the most consequential visionary leaders in modern conservatism. He will also be remembered as the person, more than anyone else, responsible for the Republican Party’s turn away from truth, expertise and good governance.

Feulner founded the Heritage Foundation with two other Republican congressional staffers in 1973. At the time, they saw the Republican Party of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and the party’s congressional leadership as conservatives in name only who paid lip service to conservative ideas but, in their view, acted like Democrats in office.

He decided that the core problem turning Republicans away from conservatism in office was the policy advice they were receiving. When the policy agenda darted toward a new problem, Republican leaders would consult the same experts in think tanks such as the Brookings Institution, the federal bureaucracy and universities that Democratic leaders consulted. Their advice was often to address the problem with a new government program.

For example, Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in response to rampant pollution in industrial America and staffed it with environmental experts. It was remarkably successful at reducing air and water pollution in the 1970s, but at the cost of new intrusions into the economic lives of everyday Americans. Feulner and his peers saw not a success, but a betrayal caused by what he saw as liberal experts whispering into the ears of would-be conservatives.

Heritage would solve this problem by providing Republicans with their own experts. The think tank created a roster of policy analysts who would promote conservative ideas. They would whisper into the ears of Republican policymakers instead.

Feulner was a true innovator. Before Heritage, most think tanks were structured either as contractors such as the RAND Corp., providing policy analysis at the request of the federal government, or universities without students, where individual scholars pursued their own intellectual priorities.

Feulner organized the Heritage Foundation like an interest group. They closely aligned their reports with the congressional policy agenda, marketed their findings aggressively in the media and placed dozens (if you ask Heritage, hundreds) of conservative experts in the executive and legislative branches. Almost all think tanks founded since were modeled on how Feulner chose to run Heritage.

He made an early alliance with Ronald Reagan. When Reagan became president in 1981, Heritage handed him a 20-volume, 3,000-page policy planning document called the “Mandate for Leadership.” The document laid out hundreds of specific conservative policy recommendations that the administration could quickly implement. Many “Mandate” chapter authors were hired into senior positions in the agencies they wrote about. If that sounds familiar, it is because they have published a similar document every presidential election since, including “Project 2025” last year.

Heritage quickly grew into one of the largest think tanks in Washington, D.C. By the time Feulner stepped down in 2013, the think tank had become an $80 million organization. It could claim credit for numerous major conservative policy changes across many areas of federal policymaking, ranging from Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America and welfare reform to the health care reform architecture that Mitt Romney and Barack Obama used to save America’s private health care insurance system.

However, his legacy is more complicated outside conservative circles. No person is more responsible for the Republican Party’s turn against expertise. Heritage provided a platform for analysts to make claims that were not supported by scientific evidence.

Under Feulner’s leadership, Heritage convinced Republicans in Washington, D.C., to deny climate change and turn against clean energy, that tax cuts would pay for themselves and that America’s racial gaps had less to do with systemic racism and more to do with the genetic inferiority of Black and Latino people. He taught Republicans to distrust scientists and bureaucrats if they didn’t tell them what they wanted to hear.

Feulner would often say that he was just helping policymakers solve problems with conservative ideas. Indeed, some problems are best addressed by reducing the role of government in American life or through promoting a hawkish foreign policy.

But, unlike real experts, Heritage and Feulner’s promise was that every problem could be solved with a conservative solution, or that every nonconservative solution would be a disaster. In my research, I show that Heritage’s reports would often produce wildly different predictions about legislation when compared with respected nonpartisan experts such as the Congressional Budget Office and academic research.

The result is that Feulner bears much of the responsibility for the polarization of American politics. There is a strong connection between the growth and influence of Heritage and polarization. When political parties cannot agree on the basic facts underlying policy debates, they cannot work together to solve the problems. When government cannot solve problems, people lose faith in the political system itself.

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E.J. Fagan is an associate professor of political science at the University of Illinois Chicago. He is the author of “The Thinkers: The Rise of Partisan Think Tanks and the Polarization of American Politics.”

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