“Project 2025” Promises Revenge, Oppression, and Autocratic Rule

The Right’s plans for a return to power are driven by a radicalizing siege mentality and a desperate desire to restore dominance

iStock / credit: bryanregan

This is the first part (of four) of my deep dive into “Project 2025” and the plans to establish a more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime, focused on the ideas, ideologies, and grievances fueling the project – the radicalizing siege mentality on the Right. Part II offers a detailed dissection of the concrete policy agenda and strategies to impose a reactionary vision on the country. Part III contextualizes “Project 2025” by comparing it to what other rightwing factions, including Trump himself, are planning, situates these plans in the broader context of the Right’s history since the 1930s, and explores why a second Trump presidency would be operating under completely different conditions from the first – conditions that make it much more likely for these radical plans to succeed. Finally, in Part IV,  I dove deeper into Trump’s relationship to Project 2025 and why these radical plans represent the self-mobilization of a “conservative” establishment that is fundamentally in agreement with the extremist Right.

Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, would like you to know about his “Promise to America.” And I agree: Everyone should know about it. Every now and then, some influential figure on the Right writes something that I wish everyone would read – every voter, and certainly everyone paid or given a platform to give their opinion on U.S. politics. Kevin Roberts’ foreword to “Mandate for Leadership,” the 920-page report “Project 2025” has produced, is such a text. In just 17 pages, it captures and oozes the siege mentality, self-victimization, and grievance-driven lust for revenge that is fueling the Right and animating the plans for a second Trump administration.

One of the more frustrating aspects of studying and talking about American politics is that if you simply trace the radicalization of the Right and the Republican Party, there is a good chance a mainstream audience will dismiss you as a leftwing conspiracy theorist or an unhinged “activist.” Donald Trump’s outrageousness notwithstanding, it is difficult to convey to people who don’t pay much attention to politics how much the power centers of conservative politics have been taken over by anti-democratic extremism. One way to deal with this problem is to get people to actually read and listen to what emanates from the Right. If you don’t believe and can’t trust my (lefty / liberal) assessment, maybe you can believe them? In that spirit, I think it’s worth spending time diving deep into Kevin Roberts’ “Promise to America” – with lots of extensive quotes, as it is important to get a sense of what these people sound like when they are not being sanitized and normalized by mainstream media coverage. This will serve as Part I of my dissection of “Project 2025,” focusing on the worldview and ideas that are guiding the plans on the Right; there will also be a Part II in which I will look more closely at what those plans entail, and the strategies for how to realize them and turn America into the kind of society the reactionary Right desires.

Heritage is all in on Trumpism

What would a second Trump presidency look like? Over the past few months, detailed plans have emerged on the Right for what they want to do immediately upon getting back to power. Different factions on the Right are preparing separate plans, and there is real rivalry between them. There is, for instance, the America First Institute: It is, in some way, the most Trumpian outfit, as it was founded in 2021 by Trump administration alumni. They are working on what they call “Pathway to 2025.” There is also the Trump campaign itself and its “Agenda 47.” But “Project 2025,” launched in April 2022 under the leadership of the Heritage Foundation, stands out because it unites much of the conservative movement and the machine of think tanks as well as activist and lobbying groups behind the goal of installing a much more effective, more ruthless rightwing regime. It comes with tremendous funding and the backing of much of the political Right. As members of its Advisory Board, “Project 2025” currently lists 101 organizations and institutions. It’s a Who is Who of rightwing actors – Alliance Defending Freedom, America First Legal Foundation, Center for Renewing America, Claremont Institute, Hillsdale College, Liberty University, Young America’s Foundation, Moms for Liberty, and on and on and on.

As the president of Heritage, Kevin Roberts is a key figure behind these planning initiatives. He – and by extension “Project 2025” – have gotten a lot of mainstream attention recently after the New York Times published an interview with Roberts about a month ago, on January 21. “Inside the Heritage Foundation’s Plans to ‘Institutionalize Trumpism’,” it was titled, and it gave the Times’ audience a taste of what mainstream conservatism currently is. Roberts had nothing but praise for Viktor Orbán’s autocratic regime in Hungary that he argued “should be celebrated”; he proudly confirmed he wants to destroy the administrative state and fire 50,000 federal employees; he stood by his assertion that there is a Communist plot in the highest echelons of American power, arguing that among federal employees, “at least a few of them must be Communists. I think there are far more Chinese Communists who’ve infiltrated our government than American Communists, but at the very least, they’re socialists.” Therefore, he defended the McCarthyism of the 1950s, as McCarthy’s “motivation,” as Roberts put it, to purge the federal government from dangerous Communists who had supposedly infiltrated it was correct. Asked about whether or not he believed Joe Biden had won the 2020 election, the flatly answered: “No” – and simply insisted that Heritage had an “election-fraud database” of its own to prove he was right. And finally, he described the “Black Lives Matter riots” as “far worse than January 6” and stated that the assault on the Capitol was no big deal while “the far bigger threat to our republic is the Biden family.”

To a mainstream audience still primed to believe that there is a firewall between MAGA and the reputable conservative establishment, with Heritage firmly falling into the latter camp, what Roberts said in this interview might have come as a surprise.

It shouldn’t have. The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973 as part of an attempt to build a machinery of organizations and think tanks that could help counter what conservatives perceived as the liberal hegemony. Heritage has, for decades, been the most influential, most powerful of these rightwing think tanks – certainly the one closest to the power centers of the Right and the Republican Party. It used to be associated – and associated itself – with Reaganism, and it has rightly been regarded as conservative establishment.

In recent years, however, Heritage has gone into a decidedly more Trumpian direction, defining their own role as “institutionalizing Trumpism” – and not in the sense of containing or taming it, but to make it more efficient. Kevin Roberts, who took over as president at the end of 2021, has been key in this development. Roberts holds a PhD in U.S. history from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to ascending to the leadership at Heritage, he weas the CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a rightwing think tank in Austin focusing on, amongst other things, fighting for the privatization of education and on making the “moral case for fossil fuels” by rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. He also served as the president of Wyoming Catholic College.

Roberts, in other words, is not some moderate imposter who pretends to be hardcore to blend in with the MAGAs because that is the direction the wind is blowing. He is part of the Religious Right and comes out of the world of reactionary Catholicism. He is a true believer in the reactionary political project.

Roberts has not been subtle with his political and ideological preferences since taking over at Heritage. For instance, when the neo-fascists under Giorgia Meloni emerged victorious in Italy in September 2022, Roberts was among the most enthusiastic voices on the American Right. In his immediate reaction, he took to Ex-Twitter to hail Meloni as a role model: “This can be a trend: conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is – US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.” Us vs Them, the “real” people vs “globalist” elites – that is very much the spirit shaping Heritage and “Project 2025.”

The “woke” elite vs real America

In April 2023, Heritage published a 920-page report titled “Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise.” It is the latest in a long line of such “Mandates for Leadership” Heritage has produced in irregular intervals since 1979 – and this one serves as the policy agenda for “Project 2025.” Department by department, agency by agency, it outlines what the Right wants to do with / to the executive and the administrative state immediately upon returning to power. It provides not only a distillation of what “Project 2025” has come up with in terms of plans for concrete action, but also of the ideological forces and influences that shape this agenda.

The report starts with a short note by Paul Dans, the director of “Project 2025” and one of several Trump administration alumni Heritage has brought in since 2020. Dans sets the tone for the whole endeavor: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”

This is what we get here: So. Many. Enemies. They are everywhere, they are in charge of the most powerful institutions, and they are out to destroy the country.

This leads right into Kevin Roberts’ more substantial foreword to the whole report, which he has called “A Promise to America.” It starts with a very dark assessment of where things currently stand in the nation:

“our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. 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. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s ‘radical chic’ to build the totalitarian cult known today as ‘The Great Awokening.’ And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”

Roberts presents a tale of decline – the nation is on the brink as the enemies of America, “real America,” have been gaining power. Those enemies are referred to as “the anti-American Left” or as a sinister “ruling and cultural elite.” Roberts doesn’t define those terms anywhere in the foreword, nor is there a substantiation of what, exactly, makes someone part of the “elite” anywhere else in the report. And yet, Roberts can be certain that everyone on the Right agrees with this assessment. The “globalist,” “woke,” leftwing “elite” has quickly emerged as the new consensus enemy against which Republican politicians, rightwing activists, and reactionary intellectuals will rage incessantly. This sinister “elite” is a chimera that is entirely detached from the political and socio-economic realities of American life. Donald Trump, in this understanding, is *not* part of the “ruling class” (another prominent term in the rightwing discourse), nor is someone like Clarence Thomas – but every lefty student and activist absolutely is. Simply put, anyone who adheres to “woke,” leftist ideology is a member of this “elite” that is  supposedly dominating most major institutions of American life: the media, big tech, education – and nothing less than a counter-revolution will save the nation.

The focus on a “cultural elite” is also indicative of how much conservatives seek not just political rule, but also cultural domination and affirmation. It’s telling that rightwing anxieties aren’t alleviated by, for instance, the fact that a reactionary majority is dominating the Supreme Court. Conservatives realize that their vision for U.S. society has come under pressure – not just politically, but even more so culturally. And in the cultural sphere, the shift in power away from white Christian conservatives has been even more pronounced.

This helps explain why the foreword to what is ostensibly a policy planning document authored by the president of the leading conservative think tank is nearly indistinguishable from standard righting culture war noise: This isn’t just about power in Washington. The goal is to re-establish political, societal, and cultural dominance in all spheres of life and turn the clock back to before what Roberts calls “the Great Awokening.”

Save our children

The mission for conservatives, Roberts declares, is to “rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left – at home and abroad.” He offers four “promises” as the pathway to achieving that goal.

Promise #1: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”

The American family, as it is conceived by the Right, is under acute threat from leftwing elites who want to destroy it. The first and most immediate step to counter this threat must be, according to Roberts, to purge from government everyone and everything that doesn’t conform to reactionary gender and sexual orientation norms. In Roberts’ words:

“The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors. This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

Roberts’ foreword, much like most of the report, oozes a visceral disdain for the lgbtq community, and for trans people specifically. Very much in line with the broader reactionary anti-trans crusade, measures targeting one of the country’s most marginalized, most vulnerable groups are presented as a necessary effort to protect children. Roberts wants to outlaw pornography, which he says is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender

ideology and sexualization of children.” He also demands that the “noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country,” as they “poison our children.” If you’ve been paying attention to any of the manufactured rightwing moral panics of recent years (and in some cases even decades), none of this is surprising. Lgbtq people are associated with pedophilia, anything that deviates from either a conservative Christian understanding of the natural and/or divinely ordained order or the white nationalist interpretation of America’s past and present needs to be purged. For the children, of course. Much of this sounds like Marjorie Taylor Greene might have posted it on Ex-Twitter or said it to rile up the base at a rally. “This is Heritage, you know, not some fringe group on the right,” Kevin Roberts said in his New York Times interview. He is correct: This is not just the fringe, nor is the militant white Christian nationalism of Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is what defines the center of conservative politics today.

Government bureaucrats are behind the “Great Awokening”!

Promise #2: “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.”

Roberts now focuses his ire on all government experts, professionals, and “bureaucrats” who are roundly discarded as being part of the leftwing conspiracy against America. Some examples:

“Bureaucrats at the Department of Homeland Security, following the lead of a feckless Administration, order border and immigration enforcement agencies to help migrants criminally enter our country with impunity; Bureaucrats at the Department of Education inject racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America’s classrooms; Bureaucrats at the Department of Justice force school districts to undermine girls’ sports and parents’ rights to satisfy transgender extremists; Woke bureaucrats at the Pentagon force troops to attend ‘training’ seminars about ‘white privilege’; and Bureaucrats at the State Department infuse U.S. foreign aid programs with woke extremism about ‘intersectionality’ and abortion.”

Roberts also rages against “unaccountable federal spending.” But what superficially may sound like a more traditional form of small-government libertarianism is actually part of the reactionary counter-revolution. Roberts fills us in on how it is all connected: That federal spending he wants to cut is “the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening. Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress.” The goal, therefore, has to be to “bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.”

A vast conspiracy. Enemies everywhere. Un-American forces have overtaken “every last institution.” Radical counter-measures are urgently needed. It is the permission structure that governs rightwing politics.

China, Wilson, “globalist” elites: It’s all just one enemy

Promise #3: “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.”

This part of Roberts’ foreword is ostensibly about national security, foreign policy, and America’s place in the world. But it opens with yet more railing against “woke,” “globalist” elites and their power centers in Washington DC, the media, and the academy – with a particular disdain for Woodrow Wilson and Wilson era progressivism mixed in (more on that in a minute). Roberts really dials up the faux-populism here, contrasting what he describes as “America’s corporate and political elites,” who are fully in cahoots with the nation’s foreign enemies, and “real America” made up of “humble, patriotic working families.”

“Those who run our so-called American corporations,” Roberts warns us, “have bent to the will of the woke agenda … Today, nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas.”

How is the domestic “woke” agenda connected to America’s national security threats? Just like Woodrow Wilson in the early twentieth century, Roberts explains, “the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.” Seen in this light, globalization is nothing but a conspiracy orchestrated by the Communists in China and the globalist “woke” elites at home to undermine U.S. strength. What Roberts calls “environmental extremism” serves the exact same purpose: “It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

In fact, where others might identify a complex array of threats and challenges in the international arena, Roberts only sees two intimately connected issues, two underlying dangers that are constantly colluding and conspiring to bring America down: “(1) that China is a totalitarian enemy of the United States not a strategic partner or fair competitor, and (2) that America’s elites have betrayed the American people.” Based on this diagnosis, Roberts deducts that there is no room for moderation, no justification for restraint. There is only the urgent need to come up with a much more radical response that is commensurate with the threats the nation faces from both the enemy without and the enemy within:

“The solution to all of the above problems is not to tinker with this or that government program, to replace this or that bureaucrat. … We solve them not by trimming and reshaping the leaves but by ripping out the trees – root and branch. International organizations and agreements that erode our Constitution, rule of law, or popular sovereignty should not be reformed: They should be abandoned. Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized. Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.”

Progressivism, Communism, Fascism, Wokeism

Promise #4: “Secure our God-given individual right to enjoy ‘the blessings of liberty.’”

There is, in Kevin Roberts’ view of the world, really only one enemy, one devil, that seeks to destroy America and the exceptional combination of religious virtue and “free enterprise” that supposedly made this nation great, once upon a time: “The promise of socialism – Communism, Marxism, progressivism, Fascism, whatever name it chooses is simple: Government control of the economy can ensure equal outcomes for all people.”

Analytically, this is complete nonsense. Communism, fascism, progressivism, all just the same thing, all just different disguises of socialism…It is not worth engaging a statement like this on substance. It is important, however, to note how such nonsense connects to a major intellectual tradition on the Right – one that has contributed significantly to the thorough Trumpification of the rightwing intellectual sphere. Not coincidentally, what Roberts presents here is reminiscent of what the infamous 1776 Commission produced, the advisory committee established by then-president Donald Trump in the fall of 2020, with the explicit goal of guaranteeing “patriotic education.”

Actual historians had little influence on the 1776 Report – instead, the Commission was stacked with rightwing politicians, activists, and political theorists from a particular political and intellectual eco-system, often associated with Hillsdale College, one of the country’s most unabashedly reactionary private colleges, or the Claremont Institute, a rightwing think tank based in Southern California. In terms of their ideological perspective, many of them can be described as West Coast Straussians or West Coast Straussian-adjacent. These terms point to a specific school of thought on the Right that goes back to political philosopher Leo Strauss, whose disciple Harry Jaffa, a famous Lincoln scholar and one of the most influential conservative intellectuals particularly in the middle decades of the twentieth century, is a key figure in the West Coast Straussian intellectual tradition. It was Jaffa’s students who founded the Claremont Institute in the late 1970s. Today, West Coast Straussians are undoubtedly the most Trumpian strand of the rightwing intellectual sphere, and the Claremont Institute is the closest thing they have to an institutional home.

West Coast Straussians are obsessed with the Founding – and the idea that America is good because the Framers based the country on certain natural rights and timeless laws of nature, enshrining these eternal laws and morals in the country’s founding documents. In this interpretation, progressivism is the key enemy: A relativistic project of adapting laws and morals over time, thereby alienating America from the timeless essence which it once embodied. This, to West Coast Straussians, puts progressivism in the same category as fascism or communism – ideologies that seek to remake man and the world in defiance of the natural order through totalitarian government intervention. The 1776 Report explicitly makes this argument, claiming that progressivism is akin to fascism. Just like Mussolini, the Report claims, the progressive movement “sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts.” The Left’s end goal, we are given to understand, is inevitably a totalitarian society.

I admit I do not know enough about Kevin Roberts’ intellectual allegiances to assess how much of his railing against progressivism as the totalitarian threat is based explicitly in this tradition. But the key point is that such an understanding of the enemy is pervasive on the Right, and it easily accommodates different camps and modes of politics. Most importantly, it provides the basis on which Republican Party, conservative establishment, and reactionary intellectual sphere have all given themselves permission to radicalize and self-Trumpify: If the stakes are so high, if the other side is out to destroy all that is good about America and not only tear the nation’s moral fabric apart, but erase the natural order in the process, moderation, restraint, and patience are not an option.

One last opportunity to save the Republic

“Ultimately,” Kevin Roberts concludes, “the Left does not believe that all men are created equal – they think they are special. … They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.” This is not the language, these are not the categories of someone who thinks of politics as a competition between legitimate opponents: Bend the knee or be destroyed – unless you can destroy the enemy first.

Roberts ends with an urgent warning: “Every hour the Left directs federal policy and elite institutions, our sovereignty, our Constitution, our families, and our freedom are a step closer to disappearing. Conservatives have just two years and one shot to get this right. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.”

“Greatness or failure,” Roberts is certain: Those are the only choices for the next conservative president – the “last opportunity to save our republic.”

So little time left. Since the formation of modern conservatism as a political project in the middle decades of the twentieth century, rightwing leaders have often claimed it was five minutes to midnight. To some extent, this is all very much in line with established conservative rhetoric. But what Roberts presents here also captures a more recent radicalization of those long-standing trends and impulses. Rarely will you get such a clear view of the heightened version of the type of siege mentality and self-victimization that underlie and explain so much of what has been happening on the Right.

Unfortunately, this is not just a campaign speech, not just the abstract manifesto of a feverish mind. It comes with over 900 pages of concrete plans and a detailed strategy of how to take over and transform American government into a machine that serves only two purposes: autocratic revenge against the “woke” enemy – and the imposition of a reactionary vision for society against the will of the majority. From the perspective of multiracial, pluralistic democracy, “Project 2025” is not a promise, it is a threat.

Please find Part II of my three-part series on Project 2025 (titled “What Project 2025 Would Do to America”) here, Part III (titled: “What Makes Project 2025 So Dangerous”) here, and Part IV (titled: “Allies Against Democracy”) here.