The website for the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” — a right-wing policy and administrative wish list — manifests its worldview immediately. Its wish, the
site says, is for “you the reader — Mr. Smith, Mrs. Smith, and Ms. Smith — to come to Washington or support those who can.”
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That archaic differentiation between married and other women is obviously intentional, sending the message that Heritage and its allies seek to turn back the clock not just past “wokeness” but even past the movement to treat women as equal participants in American society. It is a microcosm of what the effort intends: restructuring the country so that the right — meaning primarily straight White men, as was the case 100 years ago — can decide how power and status are allocated.
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Kevin Roberts is the president of the Heritage Foundation and has overseen the organization as it has shifted toward an explicit embrace of
Donald Trump and his approach to government. In an interview with former Virginia congressman and college professor David Brat (R) on Tuesday, Roberts
articulated his view of the moment.
“Let me speak about the radical left,” Roberts said. “You and I have both been parts of faculties and faculty senates and understand that the left has taken over our institutions.” He said the left was “apoplectic” because, now, “our side is winning.”
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I “just want to encourage you with some substance,” Roberts added, “that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
It is true that, particularly of late, his side has been winning. That is not a function of his side convincing a majority of Americans that its policies or worldview are preferable. Instead, it reflects the Supreme Court’s decisions reversing access to
abortion, stripping power from federal agencies and, most immediately, granting broad impunity to presidents (which, Roberts told Brat, was something the right “ought to be really encouraged by”). The court that made those changes is one that arose largely
despite popular will, not because of it. The immunity decision, for example, was
opposed by most Americans and even most Republicans — at least until the question was framed as granting immunity to Trump.
Roberts describes the moment as a second “revolution,” one that he hopes will remain bloodless as long as, we can impute, the left doesn’t provide too much resistance. But against what is his side revolting?
There’s a hint in his comments leading up to that declaration of war: that the left has “taken over” institutions, including universities. We know what this means from recent context. He’s talking in part about how college students are more liberal than non-college students, a divide that
predates Trump but expanded in the Trump era. He’s talking, too, about the perception on the right that college admission and
employment are driven by considerations of race and identity that disadvantage Whites. He’s talking about how he and people like him feel others who are not like him are gaining power at their expense.
This is the heart of Trumpism, of course. The gap between college- and non-college-educated Americans began to widen during Barack Obama’s presidency, as populism became an increasingly potent part of Republican politics. The ostensible trigger was taxation, but that was a framing driven heavily by the traditional elements of the GOP, which saw cutting taxes as a central policy goal. Rank-and-file members of the tea party movement often
put it differently: They objected to where their tax dollars were going. To people on public assistance — meaning, in their estimation, non-White people who live in cities. To foreign governments. To immigrants.
Trump was a beneficiary of this worldview mostly because he shared it and was willing to amplify it. Make America great again, because it’s not great now, what with Black people
protesting the police, Pride flags flying and immigrants seeking new lives in America. Revert America to its previous greatness so that you don’t have to hear Spanish at the supermarket or be aware that someone is dressed in drag. Muffle and sideline those New York and Los Angeles elites who, in the
estimation of many Republicans, are actively discriminating against White people and Christians.
This fear of a declining America because of an ascendant left is pervasive on the right. Justice Samuel Alito has spoken of it publicly, as did former attorney general William P. Barr. (Trump does constantly, of course.) The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is centered on securing power for the right primarily as a response to that fear. The Supreme Court’s immunity decision is
rooted in the idea that what broke wasn’t Trump’s response to his 2020 election loss but the Biden administration’s effort to hold him to account through the investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith.
That decision was written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who also wrote
the 2013 decision asserting that the era during which Blacks were systematically excluded from access to voting had ended. It was an early benchmark in the right’s effort to claw back power for traditional American values, meaning for traditional Americans, meaning for White Americans.
So much of this is about demography and power. America’s demography is shifting, albeit
not in the way that most people think. When the baby boom was young, there was a large White majority and a small Black minority. Now, about half of younger Americans are Black, Asian, Hispanic or mixed race, and the density of immigrants in the population is about what it was
a century ago. They are more likely to take advantage of shifts in the
acceptability of LGBTQ+ identity.
This shift means more voices challenging how American systems tacitly or explicitly advantage White people and straight people and men, and that means more of a reaction. Race and gender are easy scapegoats for problems from job losses to denied college applications to (to use a more extreme example)
plane crashes. The people advocating for change are young, meaning more likely to be non-White and meaning more likely to be in college. It overlaps.
Trump promises to stand in their way. So does Heritage’s Roberts; his revolution will reshape government to muffle popular will, sure, but it also recognizes the centrality of social issues, like the use of “Ms.” instead of “Mrs.”
America has for decades been shifting toward a government in which power is distributed broadly and irrespective of identity. On the right, this is a problem; getting more people to vote, for example, is
positioned as “rigging” elections since those more people are presumed to be Democrats. So we have Roberts, Trump and their revolution.
This time, though, the aim isn’t a new nation born of equality and the law. It is instead to largely reverse the trajectory of the first American Revolution, centralizing power in one leader who happens to look a lot like them.
