"Project 2025" pt. 3

Friends, 

I continue to slog my way through The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” I use the word “slog” because I find the language of the project to be so slanted and disingenuous that it is hard to take at face value. It is slanted with repetitive references to “woke” words – “woke warriors,” “the Great Awokening,” and so on. And it is disingenuous because it uses the provocative power of words and phrases, like “pornography” or “protecting children” to provoke, but stipulates definitions of those terms that are not fitting to the original provocation. When someone abhors “pornography,” are they really thinking about a book about a child with two moms? When we think of “protecting” children, are we willing to omit transgender or nonbinary children from that protection? A more genuine use of language would be to say, instead of “pornography,” “any reference to sexual relationships outside of a heterosexual married couple.” And instead of “protecting children,” a more genuine phrase would be, “shielding our children, whom we assume to be cisgender and straight, from children whose gender or sexual expressions that we don’t agree with.” Then, the kinds of things “Project 2025” refer to as “pornography” and “protecting children” would be revealed for what it really is – bullying, plain and simple. 

But, again, don’t take my word for it. The essay is here I encourage you to read it yourself - especially if you find my characterization of it to be questionable, unfair, or wrong. Page references below refer to this online edition. 

The third promise of Kevin D. Roberts’ opening essay, “A Promise to America,” turns its attention to international relations under the title, “Promise #3: Defend our Nation’s Sovereignty, Borders, and Bounty against Global Threats.” Right off the bat, Roberts wants to establish an “us v. them” mentality, with the “them” being “Washington, D.C. and other centers of Leftist power like the media and the academy.” If that isn’t clear, it gets more pronounced: “Today, 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.” I’m guessing Kamala Harris’ selection of Tim Walz, a former high school football coach, as her vice-presidential running mate deflates this overbearing stereotype a bit. Roberts continues, “Many elites’ entire identity, it seems, is wrapped up in their sense of superiority over those people. But under our Constitution, they are the mere equals of the workers who shower after work instead of before.” (p.10). I would be quite surprised if Roberts, or any of the other writers in “Project 2025” were numbered among the “workers who shower after work.” In fact, when you read their biographies at the beginning of the document, most of them proudly claim their corporate, educational, governmental, or business backgrounds as what give them expertise on their subjects. Nonetheless, this carefully crafted rhetoric depicts Roberts and his partners as among those who are ignored or demeaned by such “Progressives.” 

Roberts’ analysis is grounded partly on his critique of Woodrow Wilson and his invocation of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Wilson is a frequent reference, under titles like “Wilsonian globalism,” to refer to international treaties and agreements, which Roberts depicts consistently as a sacrifice of the US’s own self-interest. Roberts cites specifically immigration policies, environmental concerns, and economic globalization, particularly with regard to China, as those places where progressives sacrifice the interests of people who shower after work in order to “exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.” I suppose that’s the “Wilsonian globalism” part in Roberts’ mind. The part where Roberts invokes Dietrich Bonhoeffer is where he describes progressives as exercising “cheap grace.” Roberts spins Bonhoeffer’s phrase to mean “publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience.” (p.10) It’s hard to imagine that “personal convenience” aptly captures Bonhoeffer’s words, “When Christ bids a man to follow, he bids him to come and die,” but that is just another example of Roberts’ disingenuous use of rhetoric.   

On p.11, Roberts describes how “‘Cheap grace’ aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism,” since it is not environmentalist themselves, but the aged, the poor, and the vulnerable who would suffer should the environmentalists get their way.” What Roberts does not do is define what makes environmentalism itself extreme. He hints at it by claiming that environmentalists want to ban fossil fuels and show no confidence in human resilience or future ingenuity to respond to environmental concerns. But to establish that environmentalists are “extreme” would require looking at the science behind climate change and the relationship between environmental concerns and the use of fossil fuels. It would require a frank appraisal of alternative energy sources, projections of who is already suffering and who stands to suffer the most if the effects of fossil fuels continue unabated, the need for international focus since the environment itself is globally shared, and carefully negotiated steps that can address both caring for the vulnerable and implementing necessary change. All these hard approaches are what environmental activists do regularly, but none of it is evident in Roberts’ attempt to denigrate them as extremists. In fact, Roberts argues on p. 13 that a better alternative would be for the US to lean into its own oil reserves and aggressively pursue dominance in the global energy market. The argument that “Wilsonian globalism” diminishes the noble aspiration toward “we the people” calling our own shots is not based on an ethical principle that the US might honor for other countries. For Roberts, it seems that globalism can have an upside, as long as the US can impose its self-interests on other nations. 

Surely it is necessary to hear differing views on immigration, environmental challenges, energy use, and international markets. It is necessary for the US to weigh the needs for global cooperation with the need for national sovereignty. It is necessary to consider the short-term as well as long-term effects of the use of fossil fuels and alternative energy sources. Those are the “costs” of “costly grace.” That kind of work cannot happen within Roberts’ “us v. them” approach, which makes Promise #3 another opportunity lost.