Following the 2024 election in the US, many progressives like myself are wracking our brains trying to come up with ways to restore a sense of hope in the functional future of our country. One of the ways I’m dealing with it is to read and comment on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The incoming president said, when questioned during the campaign, that he’d never heard of Project 2025 and knew nothing about it. As with many of his statements, this was a blatant lie. One of the major contributors to this document has been named as a member of the incoming administration. I doubt DJT helped write the thing, but it’s not news to him.
Proceed with the following understanding: I am not intending to research every single contributor or every single assertion contained in Project 2025. I will quote or summarize main points.
Basically, I’m reading it so you don’t have to. If, like me, you typically read a thousand pages a week anyway, I recommend you read it yourself, even though we will likely find it an intensely frustrating and infuriating experience. I’ll try to keep each post under 1000 words.
Title page: Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise.
A before-we-even-get-started comment: “conservative” has a number of definitions. It could mean, as in medicine, “taking the least possible amount of most well documented action to achieve a goal.” In the context of politics, it generally means “averse to change.” In the US, it actually means “reactionary,” meaning a push-back against societal change. Since the Reagan administration (at least), the conservative far right has been promoting its notion that things were so much better in the past.
What “past” actually means: before the Civil Rights Act. They’d like you to think the American Dream underlying MAGA resembles the post-WWII 1950s, which would be bad enough. What their dream actually resembles is the pre-Civil War 1850s. Things were better, all right – if you were straight, white, property-owning, male, and at least nominally a Christian.
Okay, back to the document. Page xiii: A Note. “In the winter of 1980, the fledging [sic] Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership.”
See? This is not new. This is the same old shit, simmering for 40 years. An entire generation of dissatisfied white people has matured in the steam of this toxic brew.
Page xiv: “The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”
This is their rallying cry. What it means: the civil rights granted to nonwhite people in the US constitute a threat to white people. In the conservative mind, if your neighbor has the same rights as you, your rights are somehow damaged. And if they don’t look like you, they shouldn’t have the same rights as you anyway.
Page xiv: “The task at hand to reverse this tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead.”
When they say “original moorings” they mean the Originalist interpretation of the Constitution, which was written by and largely benefited the straight, white, property-owning (some of them slave-owning) male Christians who most wanted to throw off the yoke of English taxation.
Sub-comment: the American Revolution had many causes, but it launched under the banner of “no taxation without representation.”
Sub-sub-comment: Many of the early colonists were indeed religious dissenters, but the American Revolution was never about religion. By 1770, the colonies were home to dozens of different religious groups, many nominally Christian (from Catholics to Quakers) but many not. The colonies were also home to thousands of nonwhite immigrants, many of them brought to North America by force, many not. Free people of color fought in the Revolution alongside white people - as in every other war since then.
Back to the document. Page 1: Foreword: A Promise to America. “Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries.”
Comment: oh, give me a break. There is no pornography invading school libraries. They mean books featuring nonwhite or nonstraight characters - books such as ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ often banned. People who try to equate actual literature with pornography are thought police. They almost always have a religious agenda.
Next comment: Republicans held the presidency from 1981-1993 (Reagan + G.H.W. Bush), again from 2001-2009 (G.W. Bush), and 2017-2021 (DJT. That’s all of his name I’m willing to give). So, for 24 of the past 43 years, it’s been Republicans issuing the declarations of emergency and the executive orders. Republicans tipped us into the Persian Gulf War, the invasion of Afghanistan (a 20-year-long epic failure), and the invasion of Iraq. But transgender Americans and drag queens are the problem? Your bias is showing.
Sub-comment: the conservative agenda is not truly concerned with inflation. The US Federal budget has ballooned under “conservative” governments. Conservatives are not truly concerned about drug overdoses, either, or they would support more robust mental health services nationwide. What they are really concerned with is the second part: the normalization of cultural diversity, whether embodied by nonbinary gender identities or not.
Sub-sub-comment: Because this is their deepest concern, conservatives have been working for decades to force Christianity into public schools and to roll back LGBTQ+ rights. Their actions on these issues nationwide – most obvious in Florida and Texas – are open infringements of liberty.