Attempt at an Albatross: The Manufactured Hysteria Over Agenda 2025

I have studied the many of the numerous volumes in the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership series, including the latest volume Agenda 2025. The series started under Ronald Reagan (the first volume was rolled out in 1981). Just as they are now, progressives made a huge deal about it then. Yet it’s pretty much the same agenda every time. We know the conservatives at Heritage have no love for labor, are pro-life, want to restructure entitlements, etc. There’s nothing novel on those fronts in this cycle’s installment of the series. 

What is different this time around is the plan to deconstruct the administrative state—the unaccountable, unelected, unconstitutional fourth branch of government that progressives established over the century of corporatization of society and wield to micromanage daily life in America and press into mass consciousness corporate state and globalist ideology. Want to know how public school education normalized the sexualization of children and why our dominant institutions are governed by DEI instead of meritorious accomplishment? That’d be the administrative state. (See Project 2025: The Boogeyman of the Wonkish.)

What Heritage realized was that Trump’s first term in office (2017-2021) did not come with a plan to deconstruct the administrative state, most crucially a roster of activists and experts who would fill those executive branch offices in a newly configured and much smaller federal bureaucracy. The permanent political apparatus in Washington thwarted many of Trump’s efforts, just as overbearing corporatism stifles elected officials in European capitals, which makes it possible for the transnationalists to control the transatlantic space by directly engaging centralized state power. 

It took a bit for Heritage to awaken to the fact that the establishment wing of Republican Party—the neoliberalism/neoconservative uniparty philosophy Democrats integrated into their hegemony, marked by global corporate and military projection—was seriously rivaled by the emergence of populism in the party, a long time in development going all the way back to Ross Perot (see Republicans and Fascists). Trump and MAGA represent the crossover. With any luck, the establishment Republican Party is on its deathbed. But it will take more than luck; a Trump victory would likely seal its fate.

Therefore, Heritage has finally realized, along with a lot of conservatives and liberals, that MAGA in its durability and passion and in its tens of millions represents a grassroots populist movement that affords America a real opportunity to reclaim the democratic-republic principles of federalism and limited government and separations of powers our Founders envisioned. Republicans had partially realized this in the wake of the Civil War—until the rise of the corporate state, represented by the party of the slavocracy and Jim Cow. Populists are taking the Party of Lincoln back to its roots in the American Creed, as well as the classical liberal ethics of the Enlightenment, which is what animated the Founders in their recognition of civil and human rights (see Republicanism and the Meaning of Small Government). Who is the party of the Bill of Rights today? Let’s just say that if you think it’s the Democrats you’re living in fantasy land.

Agenda 2025, like all volumes in the series, represent an inventory of legislative and policy items that presidents may take or leave. No Heritage Foundation mandate has ever been adopted in total, or even in significant part. It’s not the Trump campaign’s agenda. What Trump, Bannon, and the other populists want out of the document is finally an actual plan to dismantle the technocratic apparatus that progressives use to administer the populace through extra democratic means. With the Court overturning the Chevron deference, which supercharged the administrative state, the people have a real opportunity to reclaim their republic (see Celebrating the End of Chevron: How to See the New Fascism). 

This is why Project 2025 is receiving so much attention: progressives realize that their means of controlling people are under threat by the forces of liberty. They decry the movement to reclaim the Creed by accusing MAGA of what it is: fascism. Democrats are masters of projection. Deconstructing the administrative state is in fact anti-fascist/anti-totalitarian. It will shrink the regulatory agencies corporations use to drive small capitalists out of business. It will reduce the power of the ATF, CDC, CIA, DHS, FBI, and the myriad of other alphabet organization that lord corporate state power over the people. 

The decontextualized and superficial way Project 2025 is being portrayed by Democrats and the corporate state media needs to be countered. But there is in the end a simple way of looking at the matter. Attitudes about this document boil down to whether you support party and ideology and the transnationalist project or whether, on the other hand, you believe in America and the constitutional republic the Founders fought and died for.