Project 2025 and Our Common Life

Heritage Foundation, Washington DC,
on a cloudy day in 2012

The first thing you notice about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's massive policy book for the next Republican administration, is not its content but its tone. Considering it's ostensibly about public policy, it has a lot about who it targets rather than how it proposes to solve public problems. The foreword, by Foundation president Kevin D. Roberts, is barely underway before it throws blame for today's problems on "wholesale dishonesty and corruption" of "the ruling and cultural elite today" (p. 1). Nothing happens unless it's someone's fault?

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s "radical chic" to build the totalitarian cult known today as "The Great Awokening."... Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril. (1)

Fevered, ad hominem attacks and name-calling continue throughout the foreword. 

In many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones (2).... The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children (5)... Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists (8)....

...and on and on. References to the "global abortion industry" (261) in a chapter on foreign aid, and "the grotesque culture of violence against the child in the womb" (642) in a chapter on veterans, aren't going to gain you allies for the policies you advocate, either. 

Given the Heritage Foundation's own massive endowment and presence, one could be forgiven for thinking that they themselves are part of the ruling elite. Perhaps "ruling elite" is defined here as "smart people who disagree with us." 

Beyond the fantastic quality to this screed that seems remote from anyone's actual life, I think the tone detracts from the substance they are trying to promote here. Joe Biden comes in for a lot of criticism, as does Barack Obama, while Donald Trump gets none until page 722 relating to the Export-Import Bank. (Anyone who does appear to criticize Trump, like U.S. international broadcasts discussed in chapter 8, get roundly flayed.) I realize I'm not the target audience for Project 2025, but if I were to pick up a paper on, say, climate change, and it began with a lot of attacks on Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell or capitalism, it would lead me to question the credibility of the policy thinking that accompanied them. Are we even trying to solve public problems here, or are we just trying to elect Republicans and shout down people we don't like?

This is a problem because, whenever Project 2025 stops screaming about elites, it discusses some rather serious problems our society faces, like challenges to the family, from China, and for government budgeting, as well as the loss of separation of powers in the government. I feel I'd like to talk with these (mostly) guys, about these problems individually, or better yet as common symptoms of some deeper dysfunctionality, but the authors in Project 2025 prefer to reverse engineer their approach based on crushing their enemies. In reality, our American/human destiny is a common one, and we need to hear from all perspectives. Conservatives certainly have important perspectives, but there needs to be more engagement and less of what Daniel Pink (2024) called "authoritarian revenge porn."

The 30 chapters that follow contain some valuable practical advice. Chapters 1 and 2, by Rick Dearborn and Russ Vought, respectively, provide a basic introduction to the Executive Branch of which any citizen should be aware, and certainly anyone undertaking to work therein, whether or not their principal motivation is "combating the Left’s aggressive attacks on life and religious liberty, and confronting 'wokeism' throughout the federal government" (38). Chapter 7, by Dustin J. Carmack, gets 17 paragraphs into a careful analysis of the challenges facing intelligence in the post-9/11 world (201-204) before he suddenly seems to realize he hasn't attacked "woke culture" yet. There are interesting exchanges on trade in chapters 23 and 26.

I certainly don't have the policy expertise to evaluate the many recommendations in Project 2025. Nor do I have the resources to evaluate the truth or falsity of its numerous claims. (For responses to chapters 11 on education, and 8 and 28 on communications technology, see Perera, Valant and Meyer (2024) and Muenster (2024), respectively.) Project 2025 contains a lot of inside baseball, or #iykyk, nearly all of which goes over my head. A seemingly obvious proclamation like "To fulfill its mission, USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy— not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points" (235) is certainly a red flag that the writer is grinding some axe or other. I will say it is sobering to read how much investment there needs to be in the military (ch. 4) so quickly after condemnation of the national debt (chs 1-3) while we are also expecting to cut taxes (ch. 22). 

From the perspective of our common life, which is what we're all about here on Holy Mountain, there are reasons to worry if Project 2025 becomes the blueprint for the next administration its contributors clearly hope it will be.

1. Public problems that are inconvenient to the ideology of Project 2025--like climate change, access to health care, the legacy of racism, agricultural chemical runoff causing a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, gun violence, pedestrian deaths, threats against local officials, exploitation of workers, and inequality of wealth and opportunity--are either ignored or dismissed as unbelievable. Climate change doesn't appear until chapter 9 on foreign aid, when the very idea is described as "radical" and "extreme" (257). One page later the text attacks gay rights as "bullying" and "partisan" (258) while alleging "Past Democratic administrations have nearly erased what females are and what femininity is" (258-259). Chapter 5, on homeland security, doesn't even bother with an analysis of immigration problems; it wants control centralized so the border with Mexico can be "secured." (For some ways this approach to border security might implicate current residents, see Krauze 2024.) The Department of Homeland Security "has also suffered from the Left’s wokeness and weaponization against Americans whom the Left perceives as its political opponents" (135). We're outraged by phantoms and other points of view while we ignore the most serious public problems.

2. freedom. This is a value popular among the contributors to Project 2025, as well it should be, though perhaps it is not as popular with them as "interests" or "values." Freedom is actually objective #1 under education policy (322). Freedom has a lot of meanings in political theory. Here it seems to mean exemption from liberal policies one doesn't agree with, and the right not to be exposed to ideas not your own. Either we get our way, or we take our ball and go home. Section III features attacks on "the irrational, destructive, un-American mask and vaccine mandates that were imposed upon an ostensibly free people during the COVID-19 pandemic" (283). That includes having churches closed on Easter 2020: "What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?" (456). Chapter 8 on quotes Thomas Jefferson (on government funding for churches) to justify its scorched earth approach to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (246). Conservatives--apparently including ex-President Trump and the January 6 rioters (285 and pretty much all of chapter 17)--should have autonomy from anything from which they disagree, but not so liberals who go in for "woke transgender activism" or "abortion as a form of 'health care'" (284, scare-quotes in original). We get the right-to-infect and freedom to discriminate against transgendered people, but not to be safe during a pandemic or to be transgendered people.

3. separation of powers. Vought cites James Madison on separation of powers, urging the President to be bold in clawing back discretionary authority from the bureaucracy (filled with elitists who are often woke!), while restrained in relations with Congress with which they share power. This would be a tricky balancing act under any circumstances, given the long-standing incentives for Congress to delegate power to the executive as well as the inability of the elected and appointed leaders to oversee the vast bureaucracy. Vought is heavy on coordination and direction, and light on restraint. Chapter 5 wants centralized control over immigration; chapter 6 wants centralized control over foreign policy. It is easy to read this, as many have, as empowering the President to do conservative things by overriding checks and balances within the federal government, with self-restraint reserved for inconvenient things like racism and climate change (p. 60).

4. love. This may be a weird criterion to judge a policy book, but the mountain on this blog is a holy mountain, after all. So much of this text is full of animosity. Even chapter 3 on the bureaucracy, analytically written by Donald H. Devine and co-authors, portrays federal employees not as human beings but as overpaid statistics. (How dare they have union representation and a pension plan! We like our workers hungry and scared?) Opponents are enemies, their motives portrayed with cynicism. (Chapter 4 on the military makes several mysterious references to "Marxist indoctrination" and the authors are obsessed with pandemic-era requirements for masks and vaccinations. Chapter 5 refers to the COVID-19 "vaccine" (scare-quotes in original, p. 156).) None of the contributors cites the biblical book of Revelation to advocate political opponents be thrown into a lake of fire, but the same logic prevails that other points of view must not be tolerated. Really? If you love this country, that means loving the people who live in it, including those with other perspectives than your own. Don't hate them, learn from them.

5. sinfulness. Maybe this is an even weirder criterion? If we take seriously that "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23), we should proceed cautiously with policy change, especially if we're as angry as the Project 2025 contributors seem to be. One of the reasons I like Strong Towns so much is that founder Charles Marohn refers constantly to "humility" in their approach. Admittedly, the very comprehensiveness of Project 2025 may exaggerate the degree of instantaneous wholesale change being contemplated. Nevertheless, the ready-to-go-on-day-one war of good against evil that it is itching to declare assumes all of the sin is by Them, and that We stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. This degree of presumption is frightening when you think about it, considering there are real human lives at stake.

Project 2025 has had a bumpy ride in 2024. Public opinion polls show that people who have heard of it by and large disapprove of it (Yang 2024). Former President Trump, the putative beneficiary of its thinking, has noted its unpopularity and thus renounced it (Hawkinson 2024). Vice President Harris, now the Democratic candidate, has been trying to frighten people with it, invoking it even when it doesn't actually contain the content she attributes to it (Dale 2024).

The megalith that is Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership is worth taking seriously; in the absence of alternative ideas in the Republican Party, this is the closest thing we have to a Trump campaign platform. It is full of serious ideas, though with a rich mix of partisanship, grievance, and score-settling. If the next Republican administration, possibly as soon as five months from now, pushes angrily "onward!" while denying the existence of key problems, it is likely to be alarming for advocates of common life.

SOURCE: Paul Dans and Steven Groves (eds), 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Heritage Foundation, 2023)

SEE ALSO: "Religious Freedom for Whom?" 15 December 2020

Amber Phillips, "What is Project 2025," Washington Post, 30 June 2024

Will Sommer, "He Found a Project 2025 Duffel Bag. Then the Police Showed Up at His House," Washington Post, 16 August 2024