What is Project 2025? (Part 7)
A Presidential Transition Project from The Heritage Foundation
What is Project 2025?
This is Part 7 in The Savvy Citizen’s new series: What is Project 2025?
If you’re new to the series, you may want to read the previous parts first, since this is a building series:
I also explain My Approach to the series in Part 1, so I won’t repeat it here.
The Project’s Mandate for Leadership begins with a note from Paul Dans, Director of Project 2025 (which I included in Part 3) followed by the Foreward, A Promise to America, penned by Dr. Kevin D. Roberts, President of The Heritage Foundation.
The Foreward is lengthy, so I’ll break it up over several posts. The first portion of the Foreward is in Part 4, the second in Part 5, the third in Part 6, and we’ll continue with the third part here in Part 7. The emphases are mine to help readability.
Project 2025: Foreward
A PROMISE TO AMERICA
Kevin D. Roberts, PhD
In the Foreward, Dr. Roberts outlines four specific areas Project 2025 seeks to confront. He articulates them in the context of The Conservative Promise:
The Four Fronts / Promises
Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.
Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.
Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.
Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”
Dr. Roberts’ comments on the first three promises are outlined in Part 4, Part 5, and Part 6 respectively; his comments on the fourth promise are reprinted below.
PROMISE #4: SECURE OUR GOD-GIVEN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO ENJOY “THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY.”
The Declaration of Independence famously asserted the belief of America’s Founders that “all men are created equal” and endowed with God-given rights to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s the last—“the pursuit of Happiness”—that is central to America’s heroic experiment in self-government.
When the Founders spoke of “pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as in essence “pursuit of Blessedness.” That is, an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish. Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought. This pursuit of the good life is found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like. Many find happiness through their work. Think of dedicated teachers or health care professionals you know, entrepreneurs or plumbers throwing themselves into their businesses—anyone who sees a job well done as a personal reward. Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness around the world. Still others find themselves happiest in their local voluntary communities of friends, their neighbors, their civic or charitable work.
The American Republic was founded on principles prioritizing and maximizing individuals’ rights to live their best life or to enjoy what the Framers called “the Blessings of Liberty.” It’s this radical equality—liberty for all—not just of rights but of authority—that the rich and powerful have hated about democracy in America since 1776. They resent Americans’ audacity in insisting that we don’t need them to tell us how to live. It’s this inalienable right of self-direction—of each person’s opportunity to direct himself or herself, and his or her community, to the good— that the ruling class disdains.
With the Declaration and Constitution, our nation’s Founders handed to us the means with which to preserve this right. Abraham Lincoln wrote of the Declaration as an “apple of gold” in a silver frame, the Constitution. So must the next conservative President look to these documents when the elites mount their next assault on liberty.
Left to our own devices, the American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women, mercantilism, socialism, Wilsonian globalism, Fascism, Communism, and (today) wokeism. To the Left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority—proof that, in fact, we need a ruling elite making decisions for us.
But the next conservative President should be proud, not ashamed of Americans’ unique culture of social equality and ordered liberty. After all, the countries where Marxist elites have won political and economic power are all weaker, poorer, and less free for it.
The United States remains the most innovative and upwardly mobile society in the world. Government should stop trying to substitute its own preferences for those of the people. And the next conservative President should champion the dynamic genius of free enterprise against the grim miseries of elite-directed socialism.
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. The problem is that it has never done so. There is no such thing as “the government.” There are just people who work for the government and wield its power and who—at almost every opportunity—wield it to serve themselves first and everyone else a distant second. This is not a failing of one nation or socialist party, but inherent in human nature.
Nighttime satellite images of the Korean peninsula famously show the free-market South lit up, with homes, businesses, and cities electrified from coast to coast. By contrast, Communist North Korea is almost completely dark, except for the small dot of the capital city, Pyongyang, where a psychotic dictator and his cronies live. The same phenomenon is on display in the infuriating fact that four of the six richest counties in the United States are suburbs of Washington, D.C.—a city infamous for its lack of native productive industries.
We see the same corruption expressed on an individual level whenever billionaire climate activists, who want to outlaw carbon-fueled transportation, fly to A-list conferences on their private jets. Or when COVID-19 shutdown politicians like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Governor Gavin Newsom were caught at the hair salon or dining at fancy restaurants after moralizing about how everyone else must stay home and forgo such luxuries during the pandemic. For socialists, who are almost always well-to-do, socialism is not a means of equalizing outcomes, but a means of accumulating power. They never get around to helping anyone else.
The Soviet empire was a social and economic failure. North Korea, despite the opulence of its tyrants, is one of the poorest nations in the world. Cuba is so corrupt that its people regularly risk their lives to escape to Florida on rafts. Venezuela was once the richest nation in South America; today, a decade after a Marxist dictator took over, 94 percent of Venezuelans live in poverty.1 Even socialist Senator Bernie Sanders’ home state of Vermont was forced to repeal the state’s single-payer health care system just three years after creating it.
In every case, socialist elites promised that if only they could direct the economy, everything would be better. Very quickly, everything got worse. In socialist nation after socialist nation, the only way the government could keep its disgruntled people in line was to surveil and terrorize them.
By contrast, in countries with a high degree of economic freedom, elites are not in charge because everyone is in charge. People work, build, invest, save, and create according to their own interests and in service to the common good of their fellow citizens.
There is a reason why the private economy hews to the maxim “the customer is always right” while government bureaucracies are notoriously user-unfriendly, just as there is a reason why private charities are cheerful and government welfare systems are not. It’s not because grocery store clerks and PTA moms are “good” and federal bureaucrats are “bad.” It’s because private enterprises—for-profit or nonprofit—must cooperate, to give, to succeed.
So as the American people take back their sovereignty, constitutional authority, respect for their families and communities, they should also take back their right to pursue the good life.
The next President should promote pro-growth economic policies that spur new jobs and investment, higher wages, and productivity. Yes, that agenda should include overdue tax and regulatory reform, but it should go further and include antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies. It should promote educational opportunities outside the woke-dominated system of public schools and universities, including trade schools, apprenticeship programs, and student-loan alternatives that fund students’ dreams instead of Marxist academics. Just as important as expanding opportunities for workers and small businesses, the next President should crack down on the crony capitalist corruption that enables America’s largest corporations to profit through political influence rather than competitive enterprise and customer satisfaction.
Analogous pro-growth reforms for America’s voluntary civil society are also in order. America is not an economy; it is a country. Economic freedom is not the only important freedom. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and the freedom to assemble also represent key components of the American promise. Today, in addition to the problem of Big Tech censorship, we see speakers at universities shouted down, parents investigated and arrested for attempting to speak at school board meetings, and donors to conservative causes harassed and intimidated. The next conservative President must defend our First Amendment rights.
BEST EFFORT
Ultimately, the Left does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life. They think only they themselves have such a right along with a moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, business, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee.
This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.
Our movement has not been united in recent years, and our country has paid the price. In the past decade, though, the breakdown of the family, the rise of China, the Great Awokening, Big Tech’s abuses, and the erosion of constitutional accountability in Washington have rendered these divisions not just inconvenient but politically suicidal. 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. But we should take this small window of opportunity we have left to act with courage and confidence, not despair. The last time our nation and movement were so near defeat, we rallied together behind a great leader and great ideas, transcended our differences, rescued our nation, and changed the world. It’s time to do it again.
Now, as then, we know who we are fighting and what we are fighting for: for our Republic, our freedom, and for each other. The next conservative President will enter office on January 20, 2025, with a simple choice: greatness or failure. It will be a daunting test, but no more so than every generation of Americans has faced and passed.
The Conservative Promise represents the best effort of the conservative movement in 2023—and the next conservative President’s last opportunity to save our republic.
—End of the Foreward—
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Back next time with Section 1 of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership: Taking the Reigns of Government.
Michelle Nichols, “Venezuelans Facing ‘Unprecedented Challenges,’ Many Need Aid—Internal U.N. Report,” https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-un/venezuelans-facing-unprecedented-challengesmany-need-aid-internal-u-n-report-idUSKCN1R92AG (accessed March 14, 2023)