Project 2025 Status
In an enthusiastic afterword, Heritage Foundation founder and conservative elder statesman Feulner focuses the reader on a key lesson that the conservative movement learned over the years, and during the Trump Administration: focus on personnel. “People are policy,” states Feulner, noting, “personnel choices will ultimately determine the success or failure of the policy agenda, and hence, of the whole Administration.”
That view informs Project 2025’s intensive, organized focus on early recruitment, vetting resumes, training, establishing an administrative curriculum, and preparing teams of experienced department advisors to shepherd conservative and loyalist nominees into key positions of government – the conservative Christian rule-writing army – while clearing out career professionals.
Feulner is clearly proud of his – The Heritage Foundation’s – role in the Trump Administration, taking credit for the administration’s adoption of 64 percent of its organization’s policy recommendations. As a result, he states, “the Trump Administration cut taxes and eliminated unnecessary regulations, creating a growing economy and the lowest unemployment rate in five decades – including among minorities and women – solutions based on the core principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.”
In his closing, look-ahead remarks, Feulner seeks to remind readers – and America, and possibly Trump himself – of his, and The Heritage Foundation’s, longtime role in visioning the nation’s future, and helping to implement deeply conservative public policies. He clearly hopes a future Trump or other GOP president will enact many of the far more radical steps proposed in the new blueprint.
What’s left unsaid by Feulner – rather remarkably – is any mention of the extremist shift The Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups have made since the Reagan years, to now back the call for autocracy – a “supreme” leader. It’s a far cry from the Republican Party vision documents of the 1980s or even 1990s. Feulner is silent about the harms of unbridled authoritarianism, the evisceration of checks and balances, and the incredible negative backlash Project 2025 would direct against groups of Americans, as well as immigrants – the very population that forms the backbone of the United States. America remains a nation of immigrants.
Project 2025 could rightly be deemed an unpatriotic, un-American vision, because it advances a system of governance more like the dictatorships that conservatives claim to oppose.
Here, Christian conservatives repeatedly cite Viktor Orban’s autocratic regime in Hungary as a useful model for their newly muscular cultural war on gender and diversity, and their attacks on Big Tech and companies that they fear are influencing America’s youth to embrace progressive values and principles such as equality, human rights, and democracy.
There is also no acknowledgement of the deeply racist and white supremacist views that permeate Project 2025. As noted earlier, the entire vision document takes the extraordinary position that to recognize race as a category is in itself racist. It applies similar ahistorical arguments to other categories of inequity – gender, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, physical ableness, etc. This viewpoint is a form of sociopolitical gaslighting – turning the naming of the harm (the accusation) back on those who suffer from it. What Project 2025 proposes, shining through 887 pages of conservative viewpoints, is a profoundly racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, white supremacist, evangelical Christian vision of America – all the isms. Its reforms seek to deny or render invisible the diverse melting pot of our nation.
There are ironies, too. Project 2025’s goal of imposing conservative Christianity as the basis of law and policy for America has more in common with governments led by orthodox religious leaders – for example, hardline Islamic regimes – that conservatives deem historic enemies of Christianity and criticize as repressive. Yet, they would impose Christian theocracy on America.
Looking ahead, then, Project 2025 represents what many US mainstream analysts and media have warned: a blueprint for dictatorship, one that would move America sharply away from its deepest principles and origin story as a nation of immigrants that welcomes all, a nation guided by democratic principles enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, including a collective embrace of equality for all, the right to a life free of tyranny and violence, with freedom of speech and a free press, and with freedom of religion – any religion. That includes, of course, not practicing any religion, either.
In a word, Project 2025 is at war with choice, and America is built on that very principle: the freedom to choose.