The Ideology of the Heritage Foundation

Excavating the Premises and Logics of the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025

In a previous essay, titled “Hegel and the Heritage Foundation,” I sketched the family resemblances between the systematic thought of G.W.F. Hegel and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I tried to demonstrate that they both anchor their political theories in a similar origin, namely the traditional family and the ownership of property. These then serve as the basis for Hegel justifying constitutional monarchy and the Heritage Foundation justifying the dismantling of the administrative state. I then tried to show how we might design an entirely different political project that starts from existing interpersonal relations instead and leads to a society of democratic self-governance, solidarity, cooperation, and equal thriving for all.

In that essay, I telegraphed the theoretical premises of the Heritage Foundation in order to move quickly to the critique and alternatives. In this essay, I would like to return to those theoretical assumptions. I will propose a close reading of the words and logic of the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025. I realize that some of you may find this tedious and prefer instead to move forward to the possible alternatives. But I think it is essential that we understand the system that the Heritage Foundation is trying to build, and lay it bare, if we are going to get beyond it. I also realize that I am drawing here on the words of the Heritage Foundation and not their actions or the acts that have been taken in the name of Project 2025. Economists warn us to only focus on “revealed preferences,” in other words preferences that as revealed by actual choices, rather than by stated desires. Fair enough. The words of the Heritage Foundation may be smoke and mirrors, or pure ideology. Nevertheless, I think it is important to take account of self-avowed ideology. So I will lay the groundwork here that I had assumed in the previous essay.

The Heritage System

The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” is comprehensive, systematic, methodical. It is extremely strategic and all-encompassing. In the short two-page preface written by Paul Dans, the director of Project 2025, the full scope of the project becomes clear. It represents, in his words, “a well-conceived, coordinated, unified plan” and it hopes to put in place “a trained and committed cadre of personnel to implement it.”^[1] There is almost a military spirit to the initiative. The objective of the mission is “to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State.”^[2]

The project understands itself as being part of a conservative movement that harkens back to the winter of 1980 and the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency. The inaugural “mandate for leadership” was actually produced back then, and in the words of Dans, “literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page.”^[3] Dans underscores the “revolutionary” nature of that moment: “the revolution that followed might never have happened, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists.”^[4]

The coordinators of Project 2025 understood fully well that their plan needed to be implemented immediately upon accession to the presidency, because it is at that time that the presidential power is at its greatest. “History teaches that a President’s power to implement an agenda is at its apex during the Administration’s opening days.”^[5] For that reason, they planned to be ready at the very first moment, including with agency teams and personnel “to move out upon the President's utterance of ‘so, help me God.’”^[6]

The project paints its opposition (and the existing federal government) as a cabal of Leftists who have overtaken the institutions of the government: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass.”^[7] Dans writes that “The federal government is a behemoth weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”^[8]

Kevin D. Roberts, the President of the Heritage Foundation, describes the Left in the idiom of totalitarianism and dictatorship—as if he were pulling a leaf out of Hannah Arendt’s discussion of the Soviet Union as a totalitarian state in The Elements and Origins of Totalitarianism. Roberts speaks of the Left’s “totalitarian intent” and of them exercising “dictatorial powers.”^[9]

The central ideology of Project 2025 is “to deconstruct the Administrative State”^[10] in order to return the country to its unique legacy, which Kevin Roberts identifies as “a unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom.”^[11] Notice those two terms. “Human flourishing” is the conception of human self-development that John Stuart Mills developed in On Liberty and that he traced to von Humboldt. Freedom, here, goes back to the American Revolution.

The Notion of Freedom

The notion of liberty at the heart of Project 2025 has three dimensions.

The first and dominant dimension is a religious one. Liberty is conceived as fulfilling nature or God’s intentions for us as humans. This is tied to the term “blessedness” or the “Blessings of Liberty” that Kevin Roberts writes about in relation to the idea of liberty.^[12] It revolves around our supposed divine essence as humans to raise a family and have children. It is grounded on the traditional nuclear family, on marriage, on the binarity of male and female, and so, on heterosexuality and monogamy. Along this first dimension, to be free is to be free to live out our human nature. On this dimension, freedom is not being left alone to do what one wants, but to do what one should do: as Roberts writes, “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.”^[13] And “what we ought” is intended to reflect that human nature described above. This represents a very moralizing conception of liberty that revolves around a normative ideals of the traditional family, heterosexuality, and procreation.

The second dimension is tied to the American Revolution and the American experience of liberating the country from monarchical rule and colonialism. Freedom here is the ability to govern oneself and not be governed by a foreign king or by a colonial project. Along this dimension, the core idea is self-determination and self-governance of a people, more so than of the individual. Here, there is more of a collective element than in the first divine or natural dimension. The pillars of this dimension include the notion of “We the people” and of democratic governance. The people here are always defined as the ordinary American, not the elites, not the East Coast or West Coast elites, but the ordinary Americans in the heartland of America, say in Waco, Texas. So the second dimension is the idea of self-governance through democratic means, where “the people” get to decide how things should be decided.

The third dimension is economic freedom associated with free market or laissez-faire ideology. This dimension reflects the struggle between free market ideals and controlled economies, the contrast with China principally today, but also with the Soviet Union in the past, and all of the conflicts of the Cold War. The idea here is that small government, with less regulation, produces better economic outcomes, and that all of the countries that have embraced socialism or communism ran aground and did not end up serving their people.

The three dimensions allow for a big tent conception of liberty. It allows for a lot of different constituents, including evangelicals and the Moral Majority, populists, as well as Chicago School conservatives and neocons. So it represents a large umbrella that can be helpful in their effort to bring a lot of different factions under one roof.

But at the same time, it includes sharp internal contradictions. The second dimension of self-government does not necessarily include the moral or religious elements of the first. In certain neighborhoods in New York City, for instance, self-government and self-determination would entail a very different conception of family, and in queer or alternative communities, the idea of limiting or regulating sexuality appears as a real infringement on self-determination. There are also conflicts between the second and third dimensions. Some communities may want to regulate themselves in an economic manner that does not conform to conservative Chicago economics. So there are sharp internal conflicts. Historically, I would suggest, there was more natural alignment between these three dimensions. The Physiocrats in the eighteenth century combined the first and third dimensions. Quesnay or Le Mercier de la Rivière believed that it was a divine conception of “natural order” that implied laissez faire. But with the (relative) eclipse of religion in politics and social sciences during the twentieth century, the fundamental contradictions between the three dimensions have grown.

The “Problems that Plague America”

It is worth rehearsing the problems that the Heritage Foundation believes “plagues America” today, because those represent the central axes of their ideology—all of which fall primarily under the rubric of morality. As Roberts notes, “Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.”^[14]

Those moral foundations, centrally the family and children, are threatened by what Roberts calls the “Great Awokening.” The threats include the normalization of transgenderism, drugs, pornography, and inflation at home, Chinese cultural and economic war from abroad, as well as, internally, dependence on government among the low income communities. The latter, Roberts writes, “are drowning in addiction and government dependence.”^[15]

The great threat to our moral fabric is the undermining of the traditional nuclear family, and the prospective mission, as a result, is to “rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad.”^[16] Roberts writes:

Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgender­ism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.^[17]

The Central Goals of Project 2025

On these grounds, Roberts articulates four central goals for Project 2025 and for the conservative movement. They center around upholding the traditional family, dismantling the administrative state, defending our borders, and securing liberty. It’s worth quoting at length the four central goals. These are what he calls the “consensus recommendations” among all the partners and authors of Project 2025, and the “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.”^[18] These four objectives represent the four “promises of the conservative agenda”:

1. Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.

2. Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.

3. Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.

4. Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.”^[19]

Restoring the Traditional Family

The first premise and promise, then, is to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.” At the heart, at the very core of this agenda, is the traditional American family. Along these lines, the idea is to replace government as an intermediary for the family, by the community, by church and schools.

There is a conception of “nature” that undergirds this emphasis on the American family. There are certain “natural loves and loyalties” that are to be distinguished from “unnatural” ones, in Roberts’ words. What is natural is marriage. What is unnatural is children out of wedlock. What is natural is having a father. “Fatherlessness,” he writes, “is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts.”^[20] Although elsewhere the Project generally advocates for small government, here it argues that governmental power should be used to prioritize and elevate the traditional family, including through the tax code and welfare programs.

The family is understood in heterosexual terms exclusively. Any and all reference to sexual orientation, gender, gender equality, is anathema. In a striking passage, Roberts writes that one of the President's first tasks

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.^[21]

Roberts demonizes transgender persons by associating them with pornography and the sexualization of children, as well as predation of children and exploitation of women.

It is in this context that there arises one of the fundamental contradictions: the tension between the emphasis on the family and the preference for small government. On the Heritage Foundation view, the government decides what can and cannot be taught in schools: “The noxious tenets of ‘critical race theory’ and ‘gender ideology’ should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country.”^[22] That is very far from their notion of liberty, of small government, and of not having the government mediate the family. It is the polar opposite: a vision of big government deciding what is and is not taught by teachers in schools.

Dismantling the Administrative State

In terms of the size of government, elsewhere Roberts is adamant that conservatives want to reduce the size of government, or in his words, “to reduce its size and scope back to something resembling the original constitutional intent.”^[23] He goes on: “Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing.”^[24] This leads to the second promise, dismantling the administrative state.

The goal of dismantling the administrative state, according to the Heritage Foundation, is to restore popular sovereignty. The administrative state is seen as not being controlled by the American people, but instead by liberal elites in Washington, DC.

The administrative state is defined by Roberts as “the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government's departments, agencies, and millions of employees.”^[25] His argument is that the administrative state essentially violates Article I of the Constitution, which requires that federal law be enacted by legislators, not by executive administrators.^[26]

On the conservative view here, power is supposed to accrue to Congress, and Congress is the center of popular sovereignty. Dismantling the administrative state is supposedly required by Article I of the Constitution, which gives policy-making and law-making powers to Congress and not to executive agencies. So the overall objective, purportedly, is to return power to the legislative branch. Robert writes, “A conservative President must look to the legislative branch for decisive action.”^[27]

However, and here is another fundamental contradiction, until that can be achieved, it is the President who wields the power that can destroy the administrative state. This would prospectively justify a president, like President Trump, seizing and exercising an imperial form of presidential power to dismantle the administrative state. Not just the “unitary executive theory,” which covers only the power of the president within the executive branch, but an imperial power to relocate power to Congress, supposedly (although we certainly are not witnessing that). Robert writes:

But in the meantime, there are many executive tools a courageous conservative President can use to handcuff the bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, restore power over Washington to the American people, bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.

The Heritage Foundation in effect combines the long-term project of popular sovereignty through Congress with the short-term accumulation of power within the Article II Presidency. This is obviously at odds. It rests on several important elements:

1. First, a notion of “we the people.” The Foundation claims to believe in popular sovereignty and understands “the people” primarily as the rural population of America located principally in the heartland between the two coasts, which are portrayed as the elites. They view the people as the vast majority of the population, made up of working people, those who “take showers after work, not before.” The symbol of the people are the families at little league games in Waco, Texas. This does not really include poor people or minorities, or what the Foundation refers to as “low-income communities,” which, they maintain, “are drowning in addiction and government dependence.”^[28]

2. Second, Article I supremacy. The Foundation argues that democratic decisionmaking must be located in Congress. “Under our Constitution, the legislative branch—Congress—is far and away the most powerful and, correspondingly, the most accountable to the people,” they write.^[29] Accordingly, what they attack most is the administrative state, i.e. executive bureaucracy that is not accountable to the people. They want the people to be sovereign and to express themselves through their legislative representatives.

3. Third, and here again there is internal incoherence, the Foundation advocates for a small government and laissez-faire economic policies. The Foundation seems to believe that the people and their elected legislative representatives would not put in place a large bureaucracy or interventionist economic policies. This is presented as a postulate, as if it is part of the essence of “we the people.” It isn’t of course. And this is where there is such an inconsistency. Congress created the Department of Education and funded it; President Trump is closing it, but not based on congressional power or legislation. Congress put in place all of the agencies that President Trump is attacking. The notion of popular sovereignty does not necessarily go with the preference for a small government. And in fact, conservatives today prefer a huge government when it comes to the military and policing (ICE has been funded more than any law enforcement agency in history). So this is contradictory, but it is a tenet of the Heritage Foundation that the people want a small government and less economic regulation—and that is baked into their ideology.

Defending American Sovereignty

The third promise reflects a militaristic ideal of restoring America’s war fighting power in order to defeat China. China is the main opponent, actually the only stated external opponent for the Heritage Foundation. Roberts argues that the next conservative president must “set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority.”^[30]

This needs to be accomplished by “ripping out the trees—root and branch.”^[31] Radical measures are needed, not just reforms. These include ending all economic engagement with China. Closing and enforcing our borders. And, more broadly, deploy America’s energy supremacy—our vast reserves of oil and gas—as our primary weapon to dominate international relations. And, according to the Heritage Foundation, this is what makes environmentalists so dangerous to American sovereignty.

One of the main strategies proposed—especially as it relates to the second goal, but the third too—is to fire 1000s of bureaucrats in Washington, DC and shutter agencies and departments. Roberts sets everything up as a war between, on the one hand, the managerial elite who want to take power through cultural appropriation of institutions, and on the other hand, the common American people, what he calls “the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call ‘fly-over country.’”^[32] So it’s really East and West Coast elites versus the heartland. There is here a remarkable accumulation of stereotypes with, on the one hand, corporate and political elites, who are highly educated and consider themselves enlightened, who are woke and cosmopolitan. Regarding these people, as Roberts says, “nearly every top-tier U.S. university president or Wall Street hedge fund manager has more in common with a socialist, European head of state than with the parents at a high school football game in Waco, Texas.”^[33] These are the people who shower before work, not after. They are the intellectually sophistication and have advanced degrees and achieve financial success, by contrast to the more humble, ordinary Americans. Those are the ones, on the other hand, who represent the American people. They are the ordinary American, the middle class, the working class. And, remarkably, the Heritage Foundation has now seized the mantle of the working class.

“Securing Our God-Given Individual Right to Enjoy ‘The Blessings of Liberty’”

This is the fourth and final promise, or pilar of their ideology. As noted earlier, their conception of liberty has several different dimensions, and there are internal inconsistencies. The first and strongest strand is a religious conception of liberty tied to the notion of “blessedness.” This reflects the idea, in Roberts’ words, that “an individual must be free to live as his Creator ordained—to flourish,”^[34] or that “Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.”^[35] This is a religious conception, tied to what our Creator ordained. Roberts talks about “religious devotion and spirituality” as “the greatest sources of happiness around the world.”^[36] There is then, first, a strong religious component associated with what God made us to be. Liberty is precisely the freedom to be what God made us to be and what we ought to be.

But there is, second, a strong element of American independence and the ideal of self-direction. Here Roberts speaks of the inalienable right of self-direction and the idea of ordered liberty.^[37] This is much closer to the “Don’t tread on me” style of reasoning. It is, in his words, “America's audacity in insisting that we don’t need them [the rich and powerful] to tell us how to live.”^[38] It is about each person having the opportunity to determine their idea of the good. Essentially, don’t tell me what to do—which, of course, conflicts directly with the first dimension.

And then, third, there’s a strong dimension of free enterprise, Chicago style, or Hayekian freedom, as opposed to elite-directed socialism. And here, the proof apparently is in the pudding: supposedly, socialist and communist countries have failed, whereas, through economic freedom, American enterprise has succeeded.

Finally, there’s also a sprinkle of opposing the “cancel culture” that has violated the First Amendment rights of conservatives at schools and universities, at PTA meetings, etc. Roberts argues that conservatives are and should no longer be harassed and silenced. The fundamental contradiction here is to see how much censorship is now taking place under the Trump administration. We just saw President Trump celebrating that ABC cancelled the Jimmy Kimmel show indefinitely because of his remarks following the assassination of a conservative influencer. There could hardly be a more egregious violation of the First Amendment.

A Friend-Enemy Viewpoint

Taking a step back, the overall political theory has a deep friend-enemy strain to it, very much like the German political theorist Carl Schmitt. There are enemies at home and abroad.^[39] And there is no margin for error.

The four pillars are the traditional family, the sovereign people, the Constitution, and freedom. The greatest enemy is China and socialists, and Leftist academics. And the main targets to fight against are: Openness. Progress. Expertise. Cooperation. Globalization. These are Roberts’ terms, explicitly: “openness, progress, expertise, cooperation, and globalization.”^[40]

With this deeper understanding of the ideology of the Heritage Foundation, I invite you to return to the essay “Hegel and the Heritage Foundation” and reconsider the family resemblances, or stay tuned as we move forward to discuss the crisis, critique, and alternatives.

Notes

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^[1] Paul Dans, “A Note on ‘Project 2025,’” xiii-xiv, in Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (Washington D.C.: The Heritage Foundation, 2023), at xiii (hereinafter referred to as “Project 2025.”

^[2] Dans, Project 2025, at xiv.

^[3] Dans, Project 2025, at xiii.

^[4] Dans, Project 2025, at xiii.

^[5] Dans, Project 2025, at xiii.

^[6] Dans, Project 2025, at xiv.

^[7] Dans, Project 2025, at xiv.

^[8] Dans, Project 2025, at xiv.

^[9] Roberts, Project 2025, at 4 and 11.

^[10] Dans, Project 2025, at xiv.

^[11] Roberts, Project 2025, at 1.

^[12] Roberts, Project 2025, at 3, 13, and 14.

^[13] Roberts, Project 2025, at 13.

^[14] Roberts, Project 2025, at 1.

^[15] Roberts, Project 2025, at 1.

^[16] Roberts, Project 2025, at 2.

^[17] Roberts, Project 2025, at 1.

^[18] Roberts, Project 2025, at 3.

^[19] Roberts, Project 2025, at 3.

^[20] Roberts, Project 2025, at 4.

^[21] Roberts, Project 2025, at 4-5.

^[22] Roberts, Project 2025, at 5.

^[23] Roberts, Project 2025, at 6.

^[24] Roberts, Project 2025, at 6.

^[25] Roberts, Project 2025, at 7.

^[26] Roberts, Project 2025, at 7.

^[27] Roberts, Project 2025, at 9.

^[28] Roberts, Project 2025, at 1.

^[29] Roberts, Project 2025, at 7.

^[30] Roberts, Project 2025, at 9.

^[31] Roberts, Project 2025, at 12.

^[32] Roberts, Project 2025, at 10.

^[33] Roberts, Project 2025, at 10.

^[34] Roberts, Project 2025, at 13.

^[35] Roberts, Project 2025, at 13.

^[36] Roberts, Project 2025, at 13-14.

^[37] Roberts, Project 2025, at 14.

^[38] Roberts, Project 2025, at 14.

^[39] Roberts, Project 2025, at 16.

^[40] Roberts, Project 2025, at 10.