Keeping the faith in Project 2025
Behind-the-scenes Catholic conservatives and Marxist (?) administrators
This week at Public Seminar, Carl Landauer sits down to read the breathtaking volume that is Project 2025: “A vision of an executive branch run only by the fully vetted faithful.” And Chelsea Ebin digs up Project 2025’s intellectual roots in the Catholic New Right, a group whose behind-the-scenes activism in the 1970s continues to inform right-wing politics.
Project 2025 and Its Imaginative Hellscape
Carl Landauer
Although the main critique of the administrative state currently comes from the Right, we should remember previous critiques from the Left, which included worries about right-wing uses of administrative agencies and worries such as those expressed by sociologist C. Wright Mills regarding the dominance of a “power elite.” And there are recurrent concerns, certainly voiced today, about “regulatory capture,” the too-cozy relationship between regulators and the regulated that gives regulated industries excessive influence.
That did not stop the authors of Project 2025 from adopting the same language to express their own concerns about “regulatory capture.” For example, for the Department of Health and Human Services, “the next Administration should guard against the regulatory capture of our public health agencies by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, hospital conglomerates, and related economic interests that these agencies are meant to regulate.” The chapter on the Department of Education decries the “ever-growing cabal of special interests that thrive off federal largesse.” And the incoming CIA Director will have to “break the cabal of bureaucrats.”
In addition, the various leftist bureaucracies have spawned their own “industries.” USAID has created “the aid industry,” the “global abortion industry,” and, in a nod to Eisenhower’s cautionary “military-industrial complex,” the “industrial aid complex.” And the Office of Refugee Settlement has created an “abortion industry.”
The Legacy of the Catholic New Right in Project 2025
Chelsea Ebin
Between 1971 and 1975, New Right activists launched more than a dozen political organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, the Center for the Public Interest, the American Conservative Union, Americans for Constitutional Action, Committee for Responsible Youth Politics, Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, National Conservative Political Action Committee, the Conservative Caucus, the Conservative Caucus Research, Analysis, and Education Foundation, and the Committee for Responsible Youth Politics. [Paul] Weyrich’s dream of creating a right-wing think tank landscape succeeded.
These organizations were, in ways both direct and indirect, the predecessors to the current network of right-wing institutions that helped craft Project 2025. But the influence of Paul Weyrich and his fellow CNR activists was not only institutional; it was also ideological. The New Right left the indelible imprint of Catholic thought on not only the New Christian Right but right-wing politics writ large, and it was able to secure a place for Catholic intellectuals within the conservative movement that has held to the present. They did so largely through the adoption of “pro-family” political discourse, the election of “pro-family” politicians, and the promotion of “pro-family” policies.