Project 2025 is boogyman of the wonkish. The Heritage Foundation’s executive action plan to change the rules and deconstruct the federal bureaucracy—by shrinking the regulatory apparatus, uprooting ensconced federal bureaucrats, and training a new class of policymakers working from framework of democratic-republican principles and classical liberal values—would have broad support in a Republican Congress, and this terrifies the permanent political class in Washington. Moreover, the Supreme Court is already making moves to reverse enabling precedents, which explains the attack on the Supreme Court.
The overturning of the 1984 Chevron USA., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. decision, which set forth a legal doctrine known as “Chevron,” a precedent that mandates that courts must defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of a statute it administers unless Congress has directly spoken to the precise issue, would be a significant step forward in dismantling the administrative state by taking away its arbitrary power. The doctrine has given federal agencies wide latitude to bureaucrats and experts to interpret and implement laws according to their ideological predispositions.
That this is shop talk is a problem because of the lack of sophistication among those who play an outsized role in shaping our political discourse about administrative behavior and legal doctrines and their relation to political economic regimes. It would help for the “deplorables” (the proles and serfs of America) to understand the system a little better. What is presented as a threat to democracy is the antidote to the totalitarianizing nature of administrative rule. Administrative rule in an advanced society is technocracy not democracy (administrative rule is not democracy in any type of society). Indeed, the objectives of Project 2025 represent a program to return the nation to the robust constitutional republic the Founders envisioned.
Key to the propaganda war against the program is the way the term “fascism” is twisted to turn hopeful projects into evil ones. The cultural managers of the transatlantic sphere portray fascism as populist, nationalists, and dictatorial. Trump is a fascist, the public is told, and if he is reelected that will be the end of democracy. But your betters know that populism means democracy. So what are they really hoping to save? Nationalism in the modern period is the view that the following things are important: cultural and territorial integrity, a common language, an enduring and virtuous creed, the privileges and immunities of citizenship, the rule of law, and the role of one’s country in the interstate world order.
The dictatorial piece is prevented by a constitutional system of checks and balances, separation of powers (into executive, judicial, and legislative), robust federalism, and respect for classical liberal freedoms. At least one would hope so. But the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the slavocracy, inheriting many of the traits of its immolated predecessor, is a fourth branch of government, the administrative state, the inherent design of which is to bypass lawmakers, putting policymaking power in the hands of the technocrats who control the apparatus. This situation puts the apparatus at the whims of ideological predilection, and therefore not governed by the general will as conveyed by its representatives in government.
In theory and in practice, the administrative state and technocratic control is anathema to a representative democracy manifest in the form of a constitutional republic. Unelected, it is unaccountable to a representative democracy. It is moreover unconstitutional; it is not in the Founders’ design. Progressives, the social engineers, have captured the apparatus and direct its powerful bureaucracies. The administrative state is how public health officials were able to trample on our civil rights during the pandemic, to take an obvious example. Another is the imposition of curricular content and uniformity of instruction in public education. The United States is founded as a federated system. The administrative state centralizes power into the hands of a ruling class.
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