when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.
It is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:
The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and issues,” our real task is a moral one . . .
For Weyrich, who was a devout traditionalist Catholic, conservative policymaking needed to adopt a new moralism that went far beyond the tenets of fiscal responsibility and small-government conservatism. It also had to embrace a conservative Christian worldview and seek to impose a narrow definition of the common good on society.
The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore, the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations. At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one.