From a Google Image Search - The Heritage Foundation - Kevin D. Roberts, President
In Project 2025, Mandate for Leadership 2025 conservatives are laying it all out. The plan is to completely transform the United States into a conservative nation-state. Conservatives believe that they must save America from the excesses of the left, and that America is being turned into a socialist state with only the most tenuous connections to the founders, the Constitution, and Christian morality.
Conservatives contend that the founders clearly delineated the powers of the states and the powers of the federal government, but the modern federal government has turned into a "behemoth" that usurped the rights of the states. They argue that this swollen federal government is robbing Americans of their individual rights to the pursuit of happiness (like the right to be poor, the right to work until you die, the right to be homeless, the right to be fired and unable to find a new job right away, the right to die young, the right to opt out of health care because you can't afford it). Yet conservatives do not acknowledge that there were only 13 states when our documents were written and they don't acknowledge that the population in 1776 according to the US Census Bureau was 2.5 million, or that as of February 21, 2024, the population is 341+ million.
Conservatives ignore the chasm between early Americans who owned slaves and those who did not. They ignore the fact that the states were given more rights than the federal government because slave states were protecting the institution of slavery. Many decisions/compromises were made between opposing groups that affected how the Constitution was written. George Washington, as our first president, provided important precedents in how our laws would be applied, although he was a slave owner. He did favor a strong central government and a peaceful transition of power. He walked away from being president for life although it was on offer.
The Heritage Foundation has undertaken the task of defining a conservative view of how the American government should function and now, along with allied groups, they are intent on what they believe to be the final push to bring their conservative government to fruition. The 2025 version of this plan is not an abstract wish - it is a plan to replace anyone in the government who is too woke or is part of the "administrative state" (Civil Service employees) with Trump loyalists or conservative loyalists. Every employee could be a clone of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Jim Jordan. By riding Trump's coattails, the Heritage Foundation feels assured of victory. After all, look at what they accomplished in the Supreme Court. They even invented a new, fake branch of law called Originalism which would allow them to insist that America has wandered away from the ideals of our founders, although it may seem to many of us that we have tried to live up to these ideals. Perhaps the founders were naive in stating the ideals in our documents which offer the people intangibles but do not spell out what tangibles will bring these ends about. If we ditch all that has been added to our Constitution since 1789, we will be left with a document that was written for 1789, not 2025.
Conservatives do not want a strong central government because the government as it has evolved over time is too liberal, (they label it socialist, but this is not socialism) and because laws/regulations are written or fleshed out at government agencies and departments rather than by Congress (although Congress gives agencies the broad strokes of policy). Conservatives want school vouchers so states or parents can use any kind of schooling they wish. They want fossil fuels to stay at the center of American energy sources, so they want to disband the EPA. They want no immigration at the southern border so they impeach Mayorkas and can be expected to make big changes at the Department of Homeland Security.
Perhaps when the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010 without bipartisan support from Republicans, conservatives saw their weaknesses, saw conservative power slipping away, and saw what a single party could do without having to work around a strong opposition party if they found strategic methodologies, even if they crossed constitutional lines on occasion. The Republican/Conservative coup may have begun with the Tea Party, but Obama and the ACA unintentionally gave the movement wings.
The Tea Party was a bottom-up movement that expressed a desire by Americans to pay less in taxes and to make sure tax dollars did not support "deadbeats" or pay for abortions. That move towards lower taxes got preempted by wealthy Americans and all subsequent tax cuts went to the top 10%, not the bottom 90%. These wealthy Americans agreed that they should be able to decide how all the taxes they would not be paying should be spent. While conservatives may blame "elites" (as they do in this Manual for Leadership) for an explosion in the size of government, the true elites have been relieved of paying taxes that once supported a livable society that worked for most Americans, forcing the government to run at huge deficits.
The true elites owe conservatives for all the tax cuts they have received, and they do not lean to the left. Many elites no longer even live exclusively in America. they are global citizens who are Americans in name only, but they influence life in America by using the massive fortunes the right wing lets them hoard to get our government to pass the laws they want. Since Citizens United v FEC the wealthy have a carte blanche pass to buy legislation and even influence the decisions of the Supreme Court by showering justices with expensive favors. Election spending is part of the reason that a party that represents a minority of Americans often has an outsize presence in Congress.
The Heritage Foundation most likely understands that Trump cannot accomplish the plans they have put forth in terms of replacing the administrative state, reforming the DOJ, or closing agencies or departments that conservatives have beefs with like the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. That is why they plan to put this project to reform the US government in a conservative way on autopilot by hiring the right people to put in place to make it so. If Civil Service employees can keep the government on the "woke" train, right-wing employees could certainly be expected to keep the government on the Trump train (or the Heritage Foundation train, but don't tell Trump).
What is so stunning is the arrogant stance that conservatives hold all the answers to the meaning of life and God and everything. All we have to do is stop the clock and stop doing every liberal thing we are doing (according to conservatives who say we are messing up the world on purpose by trusting government to run a healthy and stable society) and follow all of the steps outlined by conservatives and the Heritage Foundation to remake America as it was before the 1970s, or as Ronald Reagan imagined it in the '80s. We will need to rewrite the Constitution and strip the federal government of any powers that were not mentioned in the Constitution as it was written and approved in 1787, even though the breakdown of government powers was very much influenced by Southern slave owners.
Conservatives contend that they must take over because the libs (cultural elites) are ruining America. In addition, the Constitution in its current form is toxic and therefore must be returned to its original form (as determined by the Heritage Foundation). For these reasons, Conservatives say that they are justified in using any strategies to "fix" America. (Perhaps you also hear that childish voice in the back of your head that says, "Who died and made you the boss?") Conservatives are vacating democracy because they say that our democracy doesn't work. It doesn't produce the country that they think America should be. We are already living in a totalitarian liberal state they suggest, so they need to change this to a totalitarian conservative state and that will fix all our social ills. Somewhere along the way, conservatives were obviously anointed to perfectly understand the true American way and we should all just sit back and watch the magic happen. Yikes!
Let's look at some of the language contained in the Manual for Leadership 2025:
The Foreword is written by Kevin D. Roberts, PhD, President of the Heritage Foundation who offers a list of what "the ruling and cultural elite of today" (by which he means the libs) are responsible for.
· Inflation ravaging family budgets.
· Drug overdose deaths continue to escalate.
· Children suffer toxic normalization of transgenders with drag queens and pornography invading school libraries.
· A totalitarian dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic cold war against American's interests, values, and people.
· Low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence.
· The worst ingredients of 1970's "radical chic" to build the totalitarian cult known today as the "Great Awokening." (known by conservatives)
· The very moral foundations of our society are in peril.
Obviously, the writers of this manual believe that conservatives bear no responsibility for any dysfunction in American society, and they now wish to form an authoritarian conservative state that will put things right. The way they list their priorities is also interesting don't you think?
The first Mandate for Leadership was written in 1979 and published in the same month and year of Ronald Reagan's inauguration, in 1981. It had 20 volumes and 3000 pages and was a handbook containing more than 2000 conservative policies.
Conservative objectives can be summed up in this manner according to Roberts: "We can...
· rescue our kids.
· reclaim our culture.
· revive our economy.
· defeat the anti-American left at home and abroad."
Roberts delineates the First Conservative Promise. We will Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. He continues, "[in] many ways, the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family. Its purpose is to replace people's natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones. You see this popular left-wing aphorism, 'Government is simply the name we give to things we choose to do together.' (Have you ever once seen this aphorism?) But in real life, most of the things people 'do together' have nothing to do with government. These are the mediating institutions that serve as building blocks of any healthy society. Marriage. Family. Work. Church. School. Volunteering. (Isn't it nice that all your life has been mapped out in just six words?) The name real people give to the things we do together is community, not government. Our lives are full of interwoven, overlapping communities, and our individual and collective happiness depends upon them. But the most important community in each of our lives -- and the life of the nation -- is the family." (This is why conservatives, should they gain control, plan to only acknowledge nuclear heterosexual families and why they will force women to have babies even if it kills them. This is why our books will reflect these values and only these values. "We've come a long way baby" and conservatives don't like it and will not tolerate it if they gain power once again.) (Note: A syllogism is only as correct as the premises that begin it.)
"Furthermore, the next conservative President must understand that using government alone to respond to symptoms of the family crisis is a dead end. Federal power must instead be wielded to reverse the crisis and rescue American kids from familial breakdown. The Conservative Promise includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this task." (It sounds like such a worthy task until you realize that laws will mandate acceptable gender roles and there may be punishments for not complying even if biology says otherwise. Can you engineer perfect little nuclear families by regressing?) (Again-false premises lead to false conclusions.)
"Some obvious and long-standing goals like eliminating marriage penalties in federal welfare programs and the tax code and installing work requirements for food stamps. But we must go further. It's time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including the tax code to restore the American family." (Make it economically impossible to survive unless you are in a two-parent family?)
"Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities" (which was dependent on not taking a stand in politics) "that reject woke progressivism." (I guess woke progressivism is worse than simply being woke.) "They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent." (Separation of church and state will end with us.)
"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." (Who is totalitarian?)
"Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection.... Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. (Who will decide?)
"In our schools, the question of parental authority over their children's education is a simple one. Schools serve parents, not the other way around. That is, of course, the best argument (if you buy it) for universal school choice -- a goal all conservatives and conservative Presidents must pursue."
"The noxious tenets of 'critical race theory' and 'gender ideology' (history and science) should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country...or cut off from school funds."
"Allowing parents or physicians to 'reassign' the sex of a minor is child abuse and must end."
This information is taken from pages 1-5 of the Foreword of the Manual for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. The language is incendiary. Anything in parentheses is commentary. This material is dense and too long for one post. To be continued...