If you want to understand Project 2025, the Republican plan to rewrite the DNA of America, you should start with Kevin Roberts.
Roberts is president of the conservative Heritage Foundation and one of the creators of Project 2025. He’s written a book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America (with a foreword by J.D. Vance) in which he describes the world that would result from Project 2025’s policies.
Alas, you can’t read it yet. Roberts’ book was originally set for publication in September, but for some inexplicable reason, its release was delayed until just after the 2024 election.
However, some reviewers got their hands on it early, like Colin Dickey at the New Republic. His review is worth reading in full to get a sense of how radical and regressive the modern right has become.
According to the review, Roberts and Project 2025 want to destroy, basically, all of modern society. They want to scrap all institutions of higher education, the entire federal government, the public school system, unions, corporations, and most nonprofit foundations.
In place of these things, they want to turn back the clock to a semi-imaginary era – half colonial frontier, half medieval theocracy – where Christianity reigned supreme, where women were broodmares with no rights, where families worked the land or labored in sweatshops while pumping out huge numbers of kids, where all law is vigilante justice enforced by whoever can gather the biggest armed mob, and where the role of government is a bully pulpit telling people to go to church.
This isn’t an exaggeration for emphasis. He says all this in the book. For example, here’s Roberts saying we need to get rid of religious freedom, which is “offensive to Christian morals”, and establish a society where Christian belief overrides other rights:
A man’s religious tradition is a matter of his conscience, but that we have a faithful people is a matter of public concern. Accordingly, the state must not discriminate against religious organizations in government programs, and freedom of religion should take precedence over the enforcement of other rights. Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Here’s him saying that we should ban divorce and contraception, coerce people to marry early, and then coerce them into having as many children as possible, regardless of their willingness to do so or their ability to care for them:
“Men and women,” he explains, “should marry (and do so younger than most do today). They should marry for life and should bring children into the world (more than most do today).”
“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.
…But Roberts admits these solutions won’t be enough to fight the anti-natalist cabal; the biggest headwind against fertility, he notes, “is not this or that government policy but prosperity itself: the wealthier a society is, the greater the opportunity cost involved in raising kids.” Having children is thus “not an economical calculation but an act of faith and love.” Which is to say, not only should you be having more kids, but you should be prepared to go into poverty to do so…
The biggest problem, from Roberts’ point of view, is that nobody wants any of this. Americans are increasingly secular and nonreligious. Americans overwhelmingly support contraception, IVF, abortion and other reproductive technologies that are anathema to the religious right. Americans marry later, have fewer children, and desire comfort and prosperity over shotgun weddings, overcrowded hovels, and lives of manual labor and poverty.
All the ideas Roberts proposes are massively unpopular among everyone outside of a tiny minority of religious fundamentalists. And he knows this, which is, of course, why the publication of this book was delayed until after the election. He doesn’t want to tip his hand too early, lest these unpopular ideas become known to voters and swing the election against Republicans who want to implement them.
The problem he can’t get around is that we live in a democracy. Roberts isn’t ready (yet) to call for burning the Constitution and installing a king who rules by absolute decree. He still has to explain how these ideas will triumph despite their being electoral poison.
To square this circle, his preferred solution is a massive, shadowy, world-girdling conspiracy (he calls it the “Uniparty”) whose only purpose is to trick people into voting for these things. This is intolerable to him, because in Kevin Roberts’ mind, only Kevin Roberts is entitled to decide on other people’s behalf what they really want. And once Republicans take over the country, demolish every legal and cultural institution established in the last hundred years, and force people to live the way Project 2025 wants them to live, everyone will be grateful.
If this sounds familiar, it should. It’s the same argument as Ayn Rand saying that only Randian protagonists have dreams, feelings or beliefs, and everyone else is a vacant flesh-suit mindlessly echoing words they’ve heard elsewhere. It’s Christian evangelists declaring that no non-Christian is sincere in their beliefs because everyone feels the Holy Spirit in their hearts. It’s the fallback of every religious fundamentalist who, having failed to persuade anyone, simply declares that everyone already agrees with me, and it’s only the wickedness of sin that keeps them from admitting it.
As the review says:
Roberts is convinced that the broad unpopularity of many of his proposals is due to conspiracy. The decadent tone and posturing of Dawn’s Early Light, with its refusal to understand what Americans want and what gives them value in life, leads him straight to paranoia. Having watched culture slip away from his draconian values, Roberts fishes for an endless series of shadowy cabals to explain this state of affairs. He opens his book hinting at “a trillion-dollar conspiracy against nature”; he decries birth control as a eugenicist plot and claims “our current educational environment is … the result of a hundred years of plotting by progressives who want to create generations of obedient drones.”
When it’s just a ranting street-corner preacher, this paranoia is comical. It’s an implicit admission of defeat. It says that they can’t convince anyone and they’ve given up trying, so spite is all they have left.
When this paranoid conspiracy mindset is espoused by those in power, it’s less amusing. It leads straight to the conclusion that democracy doesn’t work, because people don’t know what they want, so they need to be coerced and brainwashed for their own good. And if your opponents aren’t ordinary, decent people with their own sincerely held views, but the fingers of a sinister worldwide conspiracy, then no measure is too extreme to stop them.
There’s a straight line connecting this mindset to Republican election denial and election theft, to the January 6 insurrection, and all their unveiled threats of civil war and bloodshed. (Roberts has also said that “a second American revolution is coming” which “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”)
Democracy, to the religious right, isn’t valuable in itself but only a means to an end: the end of them being in charge and getting to do what they want. If it doesn’t give them that outcome, they’re willing to throw it overboard and impose their views at gunpoint. They’ve said so many times, and this is only the latest example. They’re eager to be dictators if they get the chance.
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