I am blog/slogging through the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025.” Starting next week, I will begin addressing it in larger chunks, since it is enormous. It is an ironic case of self-instantiation that a document, criticizing bureaucratic overreach, is so long.
So far, I have focused on the “promises” that are described in the Foreword, “A Promise to America,” by Kevin D. Roberts, Ph.D. More irony: Mr. Roberts, despite speaking often of intellectual elites, adds his academic degree after his name. Apparently, academic elitism is only a problem for “them” and is a virtue for “us.” I say that because part of what makes me recoil when reading this Foreword is how emphatically Roberts insists that “they” are evil, and “we” are not. You can read the document yourself here.
The fourth promise Roberts addresses is to, “Secure Our God-Given Individual Right to Enjoy ‘The Blessings of Liberty.’” The term “liberty” is directly associated with the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that reads, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” I have cited the original document in its non-inclusive language deliberately, as I will note below. As with Roberts’ previous three promises, “the Blessings of Liberty” seems to be a matter on which most people agree. But Roberts will assert that is not the case. Simply put, the American people live into these blessings while “they” – described variously as “Marxist/Socialist/Communist elites,” “the Left,” “the ruling class,” and of course, “woke cultural warriors” – do not.
Roberts argues that when the Founders spoke of “the pursuit of Happiness,” what they meant might be understood today as the “pursuit of Blessedness,” which he says is “found primarily in family—marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like.” (p.13) As I have noted before, it is hard to imagine that anyone is against marriage, children, Thanksgiving dinners, and the like. I have a friend who loves Thanksgiving dinner so much that he and his husband would prepare eight turkeys and invite everyone else to bring side dishes so we could gather at our church and have this meal together. I don’t suppose their homosexual, interracial, Woke Left union is quite the Rockwellian notion that Roberts has in mind, but they do love Thanksgiving dinner. And each other. Once again, Roberts has laid claim to the high road regarding something that plenty of folks he disparages also embrace.
My first response to Roberts’ fourth promise is that, because he has chosen to approach this promise under the stark “us/them” paradigm, it is another opportunity lost. Americans share many common goals yet define them differently and have different ideas about how to attain them. For Roberts, those that differences worth discussing are treated like oppositions worth fighting about.
The second response I have to Roberts’ fourth promise is that its account of history is dishonest. It is not dishonest like someone saying, “My crowd was bigger than theirs,” but dishonest by means of oversimplifying complexities and aggregating things that do not belong together. Here is what I mean, from page 14: “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.”
What a dishonest mishmash of contested ideas. Most people I know see the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the judicial, legislative, and executive branches as rejection of European monarchy. But did the US reject colonialism itself? Or, did we reject being the colony? Did “the American people” reject slavery, or did we not have a war pitting Americans against Americans, because many Americans wanted to preserve slavery? Did “Americans” reject second-class citizenship for women? Don’t forget the explicitly male language of the Declaration of Independence cited above, and the explicitly exclusive laws that only changed because they have been challenged over the years by “woke warriors” who opposed them. Which of the “American people” were the “American people” during Jim Crow, Suffragist movements, Civil Rights movements, and the like? Weren’t these accomplishments gained during these periods the results of agitators, questioners, protesters, and marchers who loved their families and Thanksgiving dinners and stood up for human rights?
Roberts’ depiction of what makes America great reads like one of those dreadful history books that conservative publishing houses have been propagating in home schools and private schools and are trying to force into public schools. Nagging truths, like the fact that the writers of the noble words of the Declaration of Independence owned people, are excised in order to create a pseudo-narrative that the Woke Left will destroy every accomplishment unless we elect a conservative right now. I am not exaggerating. Here are Roberts’ own words on p.16: “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.” And p.17: “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.” All of this from the one who calls others “warriors.”
In the end, Robert’s "Foreword" is a disappointing alarmist diatribe that, instead, ought to be a serious attempt to describe our mutual challenges and look for ways to address them together.
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