Project 2025 is the new normal Kevin Roberts could rewire America

A new book marks just how far these ideas have permeated Washington’s conservative institutions — and where some of the battle lines may, perhaps, be drawn over the next few years. Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America (HarperCollins) is written by Kevin Roberts, who has served since 2021 as head of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage originated the now-notorious “Project 2025”, a 900-page policy wishlist subsequently disavowed by Trump and which, nonetheless, featured heavily in Kamala Harris’ campaigning. In the wake of the furore it caused, Project 2025 has lived on as a series of internet jokes about cartoon-villain policies such as prison camps for fat people, or trapping the souls of prominent liberals in crystals. At its heart, though, more than specific policies, lay a project of institutional rewiring, and list-building for a putative second Trump administration: the two elements analysts agreed were critically missing from Trump’s implementation strategy in 2016.

Politics is proverbially the art of the possible; while it’s easy to spill ink on so colourful a figure as Trump, how far he’s able to deliver on his voters’ hopes rests heavily on those around him. And here, early indications are that the core aim of Project 2025 — staffing — will deliver. Notably, one of its key contributors, former ICE director Tom Homan, has already been announced as “border czar”. Nor is the personnel project confined to leaders: institutions such as American Moment, formed in 2021 to train young New Right-aligned Hill staffers, are now enjoying their titular moment. It’s a far cry from the turmoil back in 2016. In America at least, the realignment is here to stay.

What will that realignment look like? Perhaps more than the 900 pages of Project 2025, Roberts’ readable, polemical Dawn’s Early Light captures one of the key sensibilities percolating through this new (re)aligned administration. And this isn’t just a bit of policy tinkering here and there. It’s a whole worldview, that’s comprehensively displaced the 20th-century free-market outlook Roberts dismisses in his book as characteristic of “wax-museum conservatives”. Indeed, Roberts’ own 2021 appointment as director of Heritage, until relatively recently one of Con Inc’s institutional bastions, is a case in point. So, too, is the man who wrote the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light: New Right leading light J.D. Vance, now Vice President-elect of the United States.

Opponents may prefer nutpicking fringe voices in this movement, for clickbait critiques. But Roberts’ book is the fullest articulation I’ve seen to date of the mainstream version. And while nothing he proposes is “extreme”, except within the narrow Overton window set by Trump’s enemies, nor is this mere status-quo conservatism. Roberts quotes Gustav Mahler’s famous description of tradition as representing not “the worship of ashes” but “the preservation of fire”.

And fire recurs as a metaphor throughout the book, whether the light of tradition, or (figuratively) burning down rules, beliefs, and institutions perceived as inimical to national renewal. If this sets him at odds with the “fusionist” conservative settlement that preceded the New Right, it flies still more fiercely in the teeth of the Great Awokening. But this isn’t straightforwardly a partisan Republican/Democrat divide. Roberts frames his side as the “Party of Creation” in contrast to his enemies’ “Party of Destruction”, whose end goal he characterises as a “conspiracy against nature”.

This conspiracy attacks what he calls “the permanent things”: the natural family, the importance of faith, the necessity of strong community ties, the dignity of work, and the common (national) good. In aggregate, it’s a war “against ordered, civilised societies, against common sense and normal people” coordinated by “political, corporate, and cultural elites” whose interests diverge radically from “those of ordinary Americans”. But these are not, or not only, Democrats: Roberts characterises his enemies as “the Uniparty”.

Against this Uniparty, he draws a metaphor from forest management, proposing a “controlled burn” of everything that supports its continued ascendancy. What does Roberts propose to burn, and renew? He is, as he acknowledges in the book, one of the numerous Catholics that throng the New Right’s intelligentsia, and this comes through especially in the chapters on family and education. But while much of the Democrat freakout over Project 2025 centred on the document’s approach to reproductive technologies, Roberts’ framing of the family theme touches only very lightly on these contentious topics. Here, Roberts focuses instead on a distinctly Catholic-inflected call to re-order policy and the economy around the natural family, understood as the linchpin of a flourishing social fabric.

He describes how Heritage has implemented this approach internally, with a slew of flexible and remote working policies designed to support young families.He boasts that this is already paying off in a “Heritage baby boom”, along with improved ability to retain young conservative talent. In a similar way, he argues, all American domestic policy should be re-ordered with flourishing families at its heart.

His views on education are just as passionate. Roberts co-founded one of the many classical schools that have sprung up in the USA in recent decades, a movement that emphasises education as character formation via the Western canonical tradition. Against this, he sees modern mainstream schools as “godless assembly lines” whose aim, far from “shaping character”, is to create “obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion”: mere interchangeable cogs in the globalist, Uniparty machine.

I get the sense that Roberts himself might be happy to see all of America’s kids educated according to the classical model. But he stops short of proposing anything so top-down, merely prescribing “universal school choice”. But if the family and education chapters are more detailed on worldview than policy, the book gets crunchier and more combative in the chapters addressing foreign policy, the economy, and elites.

Roberts, who describes himself as a “recovering neocon” views DC’s “foreign policy Blob” as a crucial foe. This Blob comprises an alliance between “liberal internationalists” focused on globalising human rights and democracy at gunpoint, and “neoconservatives” whose interest is more American hard power. Taken together, it’s a bastion of a “woke imperialism” he views in much the same terms as my cabbie last week: that is, resources wasted on foreign entanglements of minimal relevance to America, and that would be better spent in line with the national interest.

In Roberts’ view, it’s fundamentally un-conservative to propose socially engineering other societies, let alone at gunpoint. Besides, he argues, the world has changed: the neocons’ reality has already disappeared. America is no longer the sole hegemon. It faces multipolar near-peer rivals, risks grave overstretch with military commitments on multiple fronts, and has allowed its domestic arms industry to deteriorate to a degree that throws its capacity for self-defence into question. His proposal aligns with other signals emanating from the Trump camp: burden-shifting in Europe, negotiations with Putin over Ukraine, and — significant in the light of the New Right’s overall Gramscian streak — greater transparency about foreign lobbying in Washington.

But Roberts reserves his fiercest polemic for the deracinated, deculturated, corporatist Davos class, and the “sham economy” that serves their interests. He denounces this group as “un-American”, and as having presided parasitically over a hollowing-out of America’s middle class via managerialism, de-industrialisation, and the globalisation of finance. This fake economy, he argues, should be dismantled in favour of “free enterprise and meaningful work”. He focuses particularly on those who deal with China as though it’s a friend or neutral party, when it’s better understood in Schmittian terms as a political enemy, castigating all those Americans (including Hunter Biden) in the elite class, now busily at work whitewashing, trading with, and selling assets and IP to this enemy.

Perhaps the most hot-button issue in cab-driver terms — immigration — features mainly in the negative. It’s a feature of the “globalist” worldview that seeks to dissolve borders and treat “immigrants and natives as interchangeable replacement parts” while crushing all dissent via managerial tyranny. In sum, this results in a post-national corporatism that is, he argues, “functionally the same” as “socialism”.

I found this last claim less than wholly convincing, though perhaps it plays well with mainstream Republicans. Even so, I’m curious to see how much of his programme of dismantling monopolies, “re-nationalising the elite” and waging all-out war on “consolidation, cartelization, regulatory capture, DEI mandates, and ESG” makes it from theory into practice. For much of what Roberts outlines here wouldn’t sound out of place coming from Bernie Sanders. And yet, while Trump’s shrilly apocalyptic haters are mistaken to expect his administration to be objectively more oligarchic in its funders or outlook than the one that preceded it, it’s hardly oligarch-free. And it’s reasonable to assume that these wealthy individuals are already hard at work arguing for carve-outs from any putative programme of economic populism. If Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos is any indication, most oligarchs are pragmatists; and Bezos is hardly the only member of the ultra-rich to have read the tea-leaves.

Notoriously, and to the fury of Trump’s enemies, many in Silicon Valley have, too. And where this latter group is concerned, Roberts’ perspective is intriguingly ambivalent: he describes the internet as a “false frontier” that distracts Americans with navel-gazing and entrenches digital tyranny, surveillance, and the “Deep State”. But he also extols those aspects of the information revolution that enable remote working, small-scale manufacture and tech innovation — including in military technologies, such as Palmer Luckey’s Anduril drone systems. And he echoes a phrase popularised by “Little Tech” investor and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen: “It’s time to build.” Taken together, the vibe is a counter-intuitively potent mix of Catholic social teaching plus tech-optimism and a distinctively American, pluralistic frontier spirit.

What if any of this sensibility, then, will make it into the new Trumpian Normal? Everything now depends on those backstage Capitol staffing manoeuvres, and the compromises that result, both formally and within the party. Trump has enemies in both Houses as well as the permanent bureaucracy, while there are numerous factions in the broader Trumpian coalition, in addition to Roberts’ vision for the New Right. These include, for example, those Right-wing progressives for whom Elon Musk is perhaps the most notable figurehead: a faction that controls both vast piles of cash and also the world’s public square, to whom Trump arguably owes his victory, and for whom the New Right preoccupation with the natural family and the little guy are (to say the least) relatively low-priority. There are also plenty of neocons happy to play along, but who’ll in due course work to dilute anything that smells too strongly of Bernie or the Monroe Doctrine.

As for what any of this means on this side of the Atlantic, if Roberts gets his “controlled burn” and Trump his mass deportations, we might see European “far-Right” figures such as Jordan Bardella and Giorgia Meloni re-coded as the centrist social democrats they really are. From a British Right-wing perspective, too, perhaps the greatest blessing will be that, in the wake of Trump’s victory, no one will pay the blindest bit of attention to anything our moribund Tory Party does or says for at least the next four years. The realignment has landed, in America, and the New Right’s bellies are full of fire; all Anglo Right-wing eyes will be on what happens across the Atlantic. Perhaps we might even dare imagine that a spark could cross the pond: that, one day, the British Right will leave off worshipping Maggie’s policy ashes, and turn instead to preserving her radical fire.

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Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

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