By Rick Perlstein, The American Prospect
I had expected to write more columns in the run-up to the election on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I wanted to explore its complexities and contradictions. But guilt got in the way. Democratic campaigners were having so much success scaring voters with the thing by depicting it as simple—a book of spells the next Republican administration could cast to make democracy disappear—that I went another way.
The election results, alas, have mooted my reticence.
Project 2025, as I’ve been saying, remains a contradictory thing. The incoming administration does hope to cast parts of it like magic spells—for instance, Trump’s announcement that he’ll bring universities to heel by threatening their accreditations (read all about that on pp. 320, 332, 351, and 486). On the other hand, the Heritage Foundation’s dreams of their plan serving as Trump 2.0’s playbook seem to have proven hubristic, with another, more politically supple outfit (the appropriately named America First Policy Institute) slipping into the role Heritage imagined for itself, even if the project and the Svengalis who compiled it are too valuable to do entirely without.
Which all leaves my original judgment pretty much intact: Project 2025, in all its complexity, is a useful catalog of what conservative tactics and policy plans look like now. Something we ought to take advantage of—as a tool for informing our resistance, and as a textbook about how conservatism in 2025 works. And so, class, gather around. I’m about to tease out one of its more subtle lessons.
George Orwell once wrote an essay about Charles Dickens that contains an important insight into one of the strangest paradoxes of politics: Why does conservatism so often clothe itself in the language of liberalism?
Orwell’s insight starts with the question of why do the people atop England’s class structure like Charles Dickens so much. Why is he buried in the church where the British monarchy performs its sacred rites? The argument Dickens struggled to convey in all his work, after all, was the fundamentally dehumanizing nature of Victorian England’s rigid system of social hierarchies. So why would those who were most passionate about preserving them want to have anything to do with his books?
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