The Incoherent Economics of Project 2025 | Suzanne Schneider

On July 8 Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C. He was there to deliver a special message to the old Republican coalition—the libertarians, neocons, and establishment types who remain skeptical of Donald Trump’s GOP. Conservatives, he told them, face a left that is “totalitarian in its mission…expansionist, imperialistic, and practically jihadist in its theocratic fanaticism.” Against that threat, Roberts argued, they have no choice but to ally with national conservativism, an emergent right-wing movement that combines militant cultural reaction, unilateralism on the world stage, and populist economics. He acknowledged that it might be a hard sell. “Libertarians may not like populism,” he said,

but the left’s New America will erase individual freedom altogether. Neocons may not like the New Right’s prudent foreign policy, but the only alternative are [sic] those “death to America” chants at pro-Hamas rallies. Establishment Republicans must understand too eventually that the radical left will allow them no committee chairmanships or corporate lobbying gigs. Ex-conservative Never Trump performance artists must also understand that if the left succeeds, even their precious magazines, columns, and speaking fees will be taken from them.

“In this urgent moment with our republic at stake,” Roberts beckoned the prodigal sons to come home, because “national conservatism is the only kind of conservatism there is.” 

It was uncanny to watch Roberts rail against a Republican establishment that Heritage, perhaps more than any other institution, helped create. Founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors, Heritage surged to national prominence in 1980, when it published Mandate for Leadership—a policy handbook for what would become known as the Reagan revolution. According to the historian and former Heritage fellow Lee Edwards, Reagan implemented or initiated approximately 60 percent of its two thousand proposals, including dramatic tax cuts, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and creating “enterprise zones” meant to spur redevelopment in blighted urban neighborhoods. Seven more installments followed between 1984 and 2020, often timed to incoming Republican presidential administrations. Heritage takes pride in its historical achievements: the most recent iteration of Mandate for Leadership, more colloquially known as Project 2025, opens by noting that its predecessor put “the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page.”

But under Roberts the foundation has moved—albeit ambivalently—to embrace quite a different cohort. In recent years a group of “New Right” intellectuals and political movements has emerged, borrowing (as I have detailed elsewhere) from left-wing critiques of capitalism in the service of a reactionary cultural project. They include Catholic post-liberals like Patrick Deneen and Sohrab Ahmari; Oren Cass, the founder of a think tank called American Compass; Josh Hawley, the senior Missouri senator; and the Ohio senator and vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance. The New Right has propelled economic populism into the conservative mainstream, arguing that government, far from threatening traditional family values, needs to actively intervene in the marketplace and the home to reshape the nation’s moral habits. 

The national conservatism movement is a cornerstone of this new coalition. A product of the Edmund Burke Foundation, a policy institute founded by Yoram Hazony in 2019, NatCon conferences bring together New Right intellectuals with the elected officials and wonks they hope will implement their agenda. The July edition was the fourth of its kind in the United States; past events have occurred in Rome, Brussels, and London. The movement’s influence within the US is growing, as evidenced by the latest speaker list, which included seven sitting Republican senators; President Donald Trump’s former senior advisor, Stephen Miller; and Vance, who has spoken at several NatCon events.

While the New Right represents an ascendant tendency within conservatism, it has by no means displaced the older Republican establishment. Legacy conservative institutions like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the magazine National Review are not at all enthused about its economic policies or the people behind them. In July 2023, over 120 leading voices of the old fusionist coalition—from former Texas congressman Richard Armey to Jeb Bush, George Will, and eight affiliates of National Review—launched an open letter titled “Freedom Conservatism.” The document reiterates familiar GOP fiscal priorities and insists on individual liberty as the moral foundation of political life. AEI’s director of domestic policy studies, Matthew Continetti, applauded their effort but also reflected on its disadvantages relative to the New Right. “I would feel a lot more confident about the project if there were more millennials and zoomers involved,” he told Politico.

Roberts is doing his best to bridge the divide. As his outreach to the old guard at NatCon suggests, he is moving to position Heritage as a kind of big tent, capitalizing on New Right energy without alienating the moneyed establishment. It is the culture war that binds these competing economic factions together. There might be newfound space on the right to debate the free market, but nearly everyone agrees about using state power to enforce a radical agenda on a fallen citizenry, including by banning trans medicine for youth and imposing draconian abortion restrictions. They differ over whether cultivating a moral society must entail improving working people’s material conditions—whether, in other words, to combine economic carrots and legal sticks or rely on sticks alone.

Heritage’s attempts to shape the future of the Republican Party recently encountered two major setbacks. In July the Trump campaign moved frantically to distance itself from Project 2025, whose policy recommendations have proven remarkably unpopular. (Trump incredulously claimed to have “no idea who is behind” it.) Then Roberts himself came under the spotlight. His forthcoming book, originally titled Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America, was scheduled to be published in September, with a foreword by Vance. But only a few weeks after Trump’s comments, The New Republic reported that the book’s publisher, the HarperCollins imprint Broadside Books, had “tried to suppress it amid the scrutiny of Project 2025 and Vance’s ties to Roberts.” Images circulated online indicating that its subtitle has been softened to “Taking Back Washington to Save America.” Its publication date was postponed to after the election. Whether and in what form Vance’s foreword will appear in the revised edition is anyone’s guess.

Democrats may not ascribe much importance to these intra-conservative squabbles. Yet understanding them is crucial because many of the New Right’s economic positions may well attract voters. Multiple polls indicate strong public support for capping prescription costs and adopting policies, including paid leave and care subsidies, to offset the financial burden of having children. A Public Opinion Strategies study undertaken last year in Alabama, Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia found that “nearly 80 percent of voters support increasing federal funding for states to expand their child care programs…including 68 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of Independents, and 88 percent of Democrats.” The public reaction to Project 2025 has shown that most voters find a sticks-only Republican platform repulsive—but $4,000 baby bonuses, sectoral bargaining agreements, and caps on credit card interest payments and prescription drug costs could sweeten a regressive social agenda. The saving grace for liberals, at least for now, is that the conservative old guard is fighting tooth-and-nail against the most appealing aspects of the New Right’s program.

Almost everyone on the New Right pines for a rupture from mainstream conservative politics. If anything unites this motley crew, it is their palpable sense that Ronald Reagan’s three-legged stool—a coalition of neocons, libertarians, and the Christian right—has collapsed under the weight of twenty-first century conditions. At the heart of their complaint is that neoliberal capitalism supposedly promotes the wrong kind of social order: individualist, libertine, and self-maximizing rather than family-oriented, virtuous, and self-regulating. To revitalize conservatism, they propose nothing less than rejecting four decades of economic orthodoxy.

In her influential study Family Values, the sociologist Melinda Cooper showed how factions of the Reaganite coalition found common ground in their regard for the patriarchal family as the “virtuous” alternative to public financial support.¹ To this end they devoted state resources to reshape the moral habits of welfare recipients, funneling money into abstinence education and responsible fatherhood initiatives while bolstering punitive mechanisms like work requirements. The goal of such interventions, in Cooper’s words, was to reestablish the family as “the primary source of economic welfare for those born into a world of ever-diminishing public goods.” Originally a Republican specialty, this project soon found bipartisan support, effectively culminating in Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms.

The intellectuals, policy wonks, and elected officials who comprise the New Right agree that stable family formation should remain the goal of public policy. But they break from their predecessors’ view that, as Cooper puts it, “excessive government spending on welfare upsets the equilibrium state of the family and undermines its natural incentives toward altruism and mutual dependence.” Instead they have come to feel that capitalist incentives undermine family formation. This in turn represents a threat to national unity: without boosting the birth rate, the argument goes, the nation relies on immigrants who weaken social cohesion. As Senator Hawley put it during his recent NatCon address:

Time was, a working man could support his family—a wife and children—on the work of his own hands. Those days are long gone. These days Americans toil away in dead-end jobs and cubicles servicing the global corporations while paying outrageous sums for housing and healthcare. They don’t have families because they can’t afford to have the families they want…. You want to put family first? Make it easy to have children, and put mom and dad back in the home.

American Compass’s Rebuilding American Capitalism: A Handbook for Conservative Policymakers puts it even more starkly: “If top business talent finds it can earn more money trading piles of assets in circles than making productive investments in the real economy, capitalism will not work. The market will deliver the profits, as America has learned, but also national decay.”

The state, it follows, must intervene to right the ship. With that intention, the New Right adopts economic policies that for decades have been the purview of liberals and progressives. Hawley has called for revitalizing usury laws to cap credit card interest rates. American Compass advocates supporting domestic manufacturing (including through a 50 percent local content requirement for “goods that are critical to national security or the industrial base”), champions sectoral bargaining as in European social democracies, and endorses a $2,000-per-parent, tax-free “baby bonus” to be mailed as a check from Uncle Sam alongside the child’s Social Security card. You know things have gotten weird when Senator Vance applauds Lina Khan, the antitrust warrior who chairs the Federal Trade Commission, and Fox Business hosts confess to “feeling the Bern” about Senator Sanders’s attempt to rein in prescription drug prices. Both Vance and Hawley have visited picket lines to bid striking autoworkers good luck. The president of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien, even addressed the Republican National Convention. 

Sohrab Ahmari—a founding editor of Compact, who was previously a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post—is one of this realignment’s most visible faces. The next conservative revolution, he believes, requires overturning conventional wisdom about public and private power. His book Tyranny Inc. (2023) contests the libertarian idea that freedom flourishes in the absence of the state; he calls on readers to “pay attention to private power and admit the possibility of private coercion” from corporations such as Amazon, Uber, and Ernst & Young. “Instead of waving competition and the price mechanism as a mystical talisman against coercion, the state must actually counter coercion, by encouraging (rather than hindering) labor organizations,” he concludes. 

Oren Cass, a former advisor to Mitt Romney and current chief economist at American Compass, takes a similar line. He protests that there is nothing genuinely conservative about neoliberal policies that have offshored industries, undermined workers’ rights, and cut taxes for the wealthy: “Not only the ethos, but also the self-interest of hedge-fund managers steered the Republican Party’s message toward a hyper-individualism and market fundamentalism that was neither conservative, nor popular, nor wise.” He argues, on the contrary, that “market forces are not the family’s friend, and public policy plays an indispensable role in protecting the family’s foundations from relentless erosion by the market’s push for profit.” Reagan may have quipped that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” Cass notes—but he did so just as he was announcing “record amounts of assistance” to farmers. “Governing is about solving problems and creating conditions for people to live dignified lives, raise families, and contribute to their communities. Certainly, this was Reagan’s view.”

Cass believes it is only a matter of time before establishment Republican positions go the way of the dodo. “Every expired political movement,” he has written, “has its Japanese soldiers holding out on remote islands, unaware that the war has ended or sworn to fight on regardless. We have the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board.” But excitement alone will not overcome the GOP’s traditional moneyed interests. As Trump’s former trade advisor, Peter Navarro, acknowledges in his contribution to Project 2025, “the obvious political problem in adopting many of the policies proposed here is that they will be opposed by the special-interest groups that benefit from open borders and offshoring and that contribute lavishly to both political parties.” 

True to form, National Review has rebuked American Compass for peddling “Old-Left Wing Ideas Rebranded as New Right-Wing” ones. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board continues to agitate against proposed expansions of the Child Tax Credit, including the one Vance champions. Nor have these institutions wholly receded in influence; their fiscal priorities and approach to governance still dominate beltway politics. Elected Republicans like Senators Marsha Blackburn and Tom Cotton may ape Hawley’s populist rhetoric, but they’re not lining up to cosponsor his antitrust legislation or his bill to prohibit publicly traded corporations from donating to political campaigns.

For the Heritage Foundation, these debates about the country’s economic future—and indeed the broader question of how economic conditions relate to social ones—present a distinct challenge. It has, over the years, vociferously advanced policies favored by the GOP’s wealthy donors, opposing even paltry attempts to make health care, education, and housing more affordable and endorsing tax cuts, deregulation, “right to work” laws, and corporate offshoring. When Cass announced the creation of American Compass in a 2020 letter that chastised “the neoliberal political consensus and policy agenda that has characterized recent decades,” he almost certainly had Heritage, among others, in mind. 

Like much of the Republican establishment, Heritage took a rightward turn during the presidency of Barack Obama. The foundation lobbied vigorously against the Affordable Care Act (though the law was modeled on a 1989 Heritage study) and launched a 501(c)(4) to engage in direct political action. In 2013 its presidency fell to the former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint, a businessman active in the Tea Party movement. Under his leadership, which lasted until the spring of 2017, the foundation worked quickly to fill the Trump administration with staffers, including energy secretary Rick Perry, attorney general Jeff Sessions, and education secretary Betsy DeVos. But the board of trustees soured on DeMint’s “bombastic” political style and his alignment with the Trump administration. They voted unanimously to fire him. “When DeMint went in,” the former Oklahoma congressman Mickey Edwards told Politico, “Heritage became very political. It changed from a highly respected think tank to just a partisan tool and more ideological—more of a tea party organization than a think tank.” DeMint then founded the Conservative Partnership Institute, which is part of the Project 2025 advisory board. 

Heritage’s board replaced DeMint with Kay Coles James, a longtime policymaker and Christian activist who served in the Reagan, George H. W., and George W. Bush administrations. The foundation’s first female African American president, she redirected it toward the conservative center. During her tenure Heritage fellows rebuked the Trump administration’s tariffs and bemoaned the US’s withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But by responding measuredly to Covid-19 and condemning American racism in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, she raised the ire of figures on the right, including the former Heritage fellow Andrew Kloster, who held several positions in the Trump White House, and Tucker Carlson. Writing for The American Conservative, Kloster accused James of “seeking to redirect social conservatives from the fight against liberalism and towards an alliance with the woke left,” citing her opinion pieces suggesting that “conservatives need to apologize for a history of racism.” In March 2021 she resigned along with her executive vice president, a Never Trumper named Kim Holmes. That October the board of trustees appointed Kevin Roberts as her successor. By all accounts his ascent shook up Heritage dramatically. Between January and September of 2022, according to The Dispatch, fifty-one staffers departed and another seventy-three joined.

Roberts had an inauspicious start for a culture warrior. He trained as a historian at UT Austin, writing a dissertation on “the ways in which enslaved peoples of African descent were not only affected by, but influenced, the major societal and economic changes in Louisiana’s evolution into a slave society.”² According to his official biography, Roberts left the university in 2006 to found John Paul the Great Academy, a K-12 Catholic school in Lafayette, Louisiana. He later served as President of Wyoming Catholic College, where he refused federal funding lest the school “be forced to violate Catholic tenets.”

He was little known in political circles until 2016, when he took the helm at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank in Austin. From this perch, he captured national attention by agitating against Covid-19 lockdowns, allying himself with Texas governor Greg Abbott, denouncing the Black Lives Matter protests, opposing critical race theory, and decrying the creep of “gender ideology” in schools. (He has advocated on behalf of the “school choice” movement as an antidote to woke cultural indoctrination.) A lifetime conservative Catholic with reported ties to Opus Dei, he also opposes abortion, gay marriage, and contraception—advocating “radical incrementalism” to rid the country of all three. “I’m a big boy,” he clarified by way of analogy. “I don’t want half an enchilada.” But to realize their most ambitious policy aims, he continued, conservatives need to eat however much they can, whether it’s half or even a morsel. 

Since becoming president of Heritage, Roberts has tried, at least rhetorically, to reconcile the foundation’s traditional fiscal priorities with the New Right’s economic populism. In a 2022 speech to the Dallas Forum on Law, Politics, and Culture, he called for a “common good” conservatism erected around “just order, and the central institution of society, the family” which “subsume every other good that has sprouted from them, including the free market.” Old-guard conservatives need not have worried: the address lacked any suggestions that would empower workers or jeopardize wealthy donors. In fact Roberts hardly discussed economic policy at all, preferring to revile the forces of woke cultural indoctrination. This was not incidental—it reflects how he thinks about power. As he noted in the same speech: 

In my view, borrowing from generations of conservative thought, culture is the very essence of what it means to be conservative, because it forms our political behavior. It originates in our homes, our neighborhoods, our communities, our cities, our schools, and it should guide our national debates. To use today’s parlance, politics is downstream from culture.

As recently as two years ago, in other words, Roberts was signaling a firm commitment to conservatism’s traditional cultural laments about social decay rather than the materialist approach popular among national conservatives. 

Vance, perhaps Roberts’s most prominent admirer, has labored to smooth over this tension. His foreword to Dawn’s Early Light (which The New Republic published in full) depicts cultural habits and material conditions as mutually reinforcing. Vance claims—perhaps too optimistically—that a new synthesis of both approaches is emerging:

Roberts sees a conservatism that is focused on the family. In this, he borrows from the old American Right that recognized—correctly, in my view—that cultural norms and attitudes matter. We should encourage our kids to get married and have kids…But we should also do something else: create the material circumstances such that having a family isn’t only for the privileged. That means better jobs at all levels of the income ladder. That means protecting American industries…That means listening to our young people who are telling us they can’t afford to buy a home or start a family, not just criticizing them for a lack of virtue. Roberts is articulating a fundamentally Christian view of culture and economics: recognizing that virtue and material progress go hand in hand.

In times of moral crisis, Vance argues, “doing the same old thing could lead to the ruin of our nation.” He quotes Roberts: “It’s fine to take a laissez-faire approach when you are in the safety of the sunshine. But when the twilight descends and you hear the wolves, you’ve got to circle the wagons and load the muskets.”

Nowhere are the tensions within Heritage’s effort to span the old and new rights more visible than in Project 2025. A cooperative project of dozens of organizations that was overseen by Heritage, the nine-hundred-plus-page document is rife with extreme policy goals, which have attracted much attention. These include eliminating the Department of Education, outlawing pornography, charging parents and physicians who provide gender-affirming care to minors with child abuse, severely restricting abortion, and—in Roberts’s words—“deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’)…reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights” from every federal rule, regulation, or piece of legislation. 

Less often noted is that the document is also deeply incoherent on the relation between economic conditions and social life. Here we see a conservative movement at odds with itself, unable to harmonize its newfound concern for working-class families with the legacy demands of capital.

In his foreword, Roberts argues that “it’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code,” to that end. The directive to “save the family” offers an expansive mandate for a variety of culture war agenda items, but the sort of economic policies championed by Cass and Ahmari are mostly absent. A document that fetishizes family stability also praises low-paying, poorly protected, and unpredictable gig work—the worst job for any working parent—for affording “flexibility” and “worker independence.” Roberts wants “higher wages for workers who didn’t go to college,” but Project 2025 undermines organized labor and support regressive taxation. It calls for abolishing Head Start, eliminating price caps on prescription drugs, and further deregulating and privatizing health care. 

When the tensions can no longer be contained, the reader is offered a salad bar of economic proposals rather than a coherent set of recommendations. There are dueling cases for preserving or abolishing the Export-Import Bank (a federal credit agency that was created during the New Deal) and “Alternative Views” on everything from ESG investing to worker safety regulations to the H-2A visa program. Kent Lassman, CEO of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, lobbies for a free trade agenda while Navarro champions a “fair trade” regime that would include tariffs, move critical manufacturing onshore, and battle China for world economic domination. 

That Project 2025 entertains debate about economic policy makes its united front on the culture war all the more striking. There are no “Alternative Views” on forcing the FDA to withdraw approval for chemical abortion drugs or replacing the civil service with loyalists tasked with using the administrative state as a cudgel against enemies. In this sense, the next conservative administration is to act very much like the globalist elites that Roberts has castigated for “chastising rather than representing their nations’ views and re-programing rather than reflecting their people’s values.”

The New Right faces formidable barriers to achieving its vision. For one thing, the current infighting over economics leaves the GOP platform dominated by unpopular culture war action items, rather than policies (like $4,000 checks to new parents) that might have mass appeal. In a 2023 essay announcing his disillusionment with the party, Ahmari wrote that he fears that Republicans will keep repeating the same mistakes:

The Left’s cultural orthodoxies repel millions who would otherwise be drawn to its economic message, me included. Yet I also believe that the material order—how we organize our political economy and class structure—bears heavily on the shape of our culture. Efforts to change the culture without reforming the economy are futile.

It remains an open question whether a second Trump administration would embrace the ideas of New Right intellectuals. More certain is that Republican donors will stand firm against the proposals Cass and Ahmari have floated, and that institutions like Cato, the American Enterprise Institute, and National Review will keep clinging to the three-legged stool.

But a conservative generational shift is underway, driven by millennials with stronger memories of the 2008 financial crisis than of the Cold War. For Democrats, these intraconservative developments are a wake-up call to enact the legislation that progressives like Senators Sanders and Warren have put forward—the sort that is too radical for the billionaires agitating to fire Lina Khan, but apparently not for many Republican voters. If they fail to reinforce social progressivism with policies for economic justice—from health care and housing to education, child, and elder care—then they will struggle to overcome an ascendent New Right that acknowledges the abundant failures of the free market even as it advances a regressive social agenda. Americans can’t live on joy alone.