Project 2025 is a Rorschach Test

I recently asked my husband how he would describe my political leanings. He looked at me thoughtfully before responding, “Oh I don’t know—center right? Moderate?”

It was kind of a bizarre realization for me. When I lived in western Washington, the easy answer was always “conservative.” I voted straight down the ticket on party lines. Pro-life, pro-liberty. Big freedom. Small government. To my recollection, I’ve never voted for a Democrat a single time in my life, and in an aggressively blue state, my red leanings were readily apparent to most people.

Then I moved to Idaho, and everything changed. I found myself rolling my eyes at the rhetoric in the local Republican print publications that kept cluttering my mailbox. Suddenly, I began to see the word “MAGA” attached as a prefix to people’s political titles. I realized that if you weren’t a “MAGA Republican” around here, you were basically a RINO (Republican in name only), which, for political purposes, is about the same as a Democrat.

In Idaho, if you want to be taken seriously as a Republican, you need to believe (with gusto) that the last election was stolen and that Donald Trump was the rightful winner—God’s chosen instrument to restore righteousness to this nation. You need to believe in building walls and slashing spending. You need to believe in putting the 10 commandments back in schools and putting guns in the hands of every law-abiding citizen. DEI is bad. Tax cuts are good. But Trump. Mostly you need to believe in Donald Trump. That’s how they’ll know you’re a Christian.

Okay, okay. I might be exaggerating ever so slightly for effect, but not that much. American exceptionalism is quite literally written into the party platform. There’s not much room for nuance in this milieu.

And I’m a nuance gal. I recoil against extremism on either side of the divide, so the current flood of messaging around The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is a bit overwhelming to me. Before we go any further, I realize that some people reading this may not have even heard of Project 2025, so it may be useful to at least define it before proceeding. I’ll borrow a succinct definition from a CBS article with the important disclaimer that the project is overtly right wing:

“Project 2025 is a proposed presidential transition project that is composed of four pillars: a policy guide for the next presidential administration; a LinkedIn-style database of personnel who could serve in the next administration; training for that pool of candidates dubbed the ‘Presidential Administration Academy;’ and a playbook of actions to be taken within the first 180 days in office.”

Half my social media friends are warning me that it’s the beginning of an authoritarian christofascist takeover designed with the ultimate goal of exiling gay people and executing post-abortive women, and the other half are praising it as some sort of divinely inspired playbook to restore America’s soul before we’re overtaken by communists and “Muslim illegals.”

It can be VERY hard to untether the truth from the rhetoric, and let’s be honest: Project 2025 is more than 900 pages long. Who has time to weed through every sentence with a fine tooth comb, and which of us can truly claim to understand every implication of every policy proposal within it? Certainly not me. I’m not a policy wonk, and I’m not about to sit here and claim any kind of legal expertise about any of it.

I refuse to condemn it based on the notion that the folks at The Heritage Foundation are inherently dangerous. You have to remember that I’ve personally worked alongside a number of the people at Heritage, and I think they’re wonderful humans. Less than a decade ago, literally no one would listen to radical feminists voice their concerns about the trans lobby, and the Heritage Foundation stepped up and gave them a microphone and a platform. Here we are on a panel they hosted for us. We were all called rightwing extremists then, too- including my friend Miriam, who was a lifelong leftist lesbian activist. It was absurd.

People aren’t Nazis just because they believe different things than you do. We have to do better than this. If you want to convince me that this initiative is dangerous, you’re going to have to specifically identify the policy proposals that concern you and explain to me why you think they’re harmful. I’ve invited people to do this, and I think I’m pretty open-minded in this regard. But so far, no one has been able to show me much within the content of Project 2025 that leaves me clutching my pearls or feeling the sky is about to fall.

I keep hearing the word “authoritarian” used to describe it, but I’m finding that most of the people warning of authoritarianism are perfectly fine with it as long as it aligns with their political ideology. This is true for both the left and the right. I would argue that our current system is appallingly authoritarian. Anyone else remember lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine passports? Washington State even had a website where you could report your neighbors for quarantine violations. Just yikes.

From preferred pronoun mandates in classrooms to bans on the sale of gas-powered cars, Democrats consistently ask for more government intervention in peoples’ lives, not less. They already have authoritarians in control; it’s just that they approve of the objectives, so they believe the ends justify the means. They aren’t worried about a tyrant takeover; they’re largely worried about the exchange of power from a tyrant they like to one they don’t. The fact of the matter is that people with ideologies are going to inhabit positions of power. There’s no way around that. The question is “Which people?” and “Which ideologies?” And from there, the question becomes, “How will those ideologies affect public policy to either liberate or subjugate Americans?”

And listen, don’t hear me saying that I think any kind of authoritarianism is good. I don’t. I have been and continue to be leery of it in any direction. Power corrupts, and I have consistently warned about the pockets of the right that want to usher in Christian nationalism, bring back blasphemy laws, execute post-abortive women, and repeal the 19th amendment. The second I see Project 2025 being used to increase these idiots’ power, you had best believe I will be the very first to loudly protest. It’s just not what I see in the available literature. At least not yet.

And the things my friends keep warning me about are actually things I think would be great for the country.

I’m totally at peace with the prospect of dismantling the Departments of Education and Homeland Security and returning decision making powers to the states. This isn’t a catastrophe to me. They are relatively recent departments whose responsibilities can easily be redistributed to other departments. I say, “Yes, please!” to an official bill of parents’ rights. “Yes, please” to school choice. And can I get an “hallelujah” for the prospect of scrapping Biden’s hack job on Title IX? How is this a bad thing? I don’t think it is.

I am now and will always be vocally opposed to abortion, so I don’t have a problem with the initiative’s goal of aggressively protecting the unborn. I don’t believe anyone has a human “right” to kill an innocent human, so I don’t see this as an infringement on rights at all. Rather, I see it as a defense of the basic human right to life. So is the choice to stop requiring tax payer money to fund it. That is decidedly NOT something I want my hard earned dollars to finance.

Do I think passing laws forbidding abortion are ultimately going to solve the problems of crisis pregnancy? Of course not. Abolishing slavery didn’t solve the problem of racism either, but the legal framework to protect the innocent was still a necessary step in solving the problem. So if it were up to me, heck yes, I would ban mifepristone for use in inducing abortions. I would offer the caveat that it would be pretty stinking important to make important distinctions that would allow the sale of related drugs like misoprostol for use in treating miscarriages etc, and I readily admit this can be tricky territory, a space where I would want to see physicians err on the side of women’s safety, but if I have to choose between a law that allows millions of unborn people to be killed and one that doesn’t, you know which one I’m picking. And Project 2025 specifically addresses this, too: “Moreover, abortion should be clearly defined as only those procedures that intentionally end an unborn child’s life. Miscarriage management or standard ectopic pregnancy treatments should never be conflated with abortion.”

Do I think any of the concerns about Project 2025 are legitimate? Absolutely. On the topic of abortion, I think one of the very best ways to defend the unborn is to create a society where moms in crisis pregnancy are well-supported. This is going to be really hard to do if we are simultaneously eliminating funding from welfare programs. Ideally, the church should step up and fill the gaps, and to be fair, the thousands of church sponsored pregnancy centers around the country are doing a great job of filling needs like diapers, baby clothes, etc. But it’s not enough. Moms still need to eat, bills still need to be paid, and women in crisis need help sometimes. I’m not eager to eliminate that help, and I am worried some of the proposals in Project 2025 may have that effect.

There is also heavy emphasis on two-parent families and prioritizing the needs of the children above the desires of the parents. I understand that this comes from a place of good intentions. It’s objectively true that kids do best in a flourishing home where both their biological parents are present. That’s the ideal. But I’m concerned some of this language may serve as the basis for waging war against no-fault divorce, and I’ve already written extensively about how harmful I think that would be. I do not want to cheerlead an America that puts more men like Dusty Deevers in office.

There is also some concern about the reclassification of federal employees, which would allow Trump to fire thousands of career employees and replace them with his own “yes” men. Let’s be honest; we all know that’s exactly how Trump rolls. It’s potentially problematic. Then again, just last week, trying to save face, Trump posted that he knew absolutely nothing about Project 2025 and that he was not on board with a lot of it, so who knows? The man will do precisely what he wishes to do no matter what, so you get what you pay for if you put him in office.

And I don’t know about getting rid of the FBI altogether. That may be overkill. Reform it maybe. Ensure that it remains apolitical somehow. But I think it might be a bit reckless to completely eliminate federal oversight for law enforcement, especially for violations of federal law. So yeah, concerns there.

Overcorrection is always a problem. It’s always something that should concern us. But I think it’s a bit melodramatic and premature to act like Project 2025 is the beginning of the end or some sort of covert theocratic takeover operative. It’s definitely imperfect, and so much of its merit would be determined through the way it is implemented, but like I said, I just don’t think the sky is falling. Project 2025 is something of a Rorschach test; maybe my test results indicate I’m a bit more right of center than I initially thought?

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