Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at a Trump campaign rally in Warren, Michigan, November 1, 2024.
I had expected to write more columns in the run-up to the election on the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. I wanted to explore its complexities and contradictions. But guilt got in the way. Democratic campaigners were having so much success scaring voters with the thing by depicting it as simple—a book of spells the next Republican administration could cast to make democracy disappear—that I went another way.
The election results, alas, have mooted my reticence.
Project 2025, as I’ve been saying, remains a contradictory thing. The incoming administration does hope to cast parts of it like magic spells—for instance, Trump’s announcement that he’ll bring universities to heel by threatening their accreditations (read all about that on pp. 320, 332, 351, and 486). On the other hand, the Heritage Foundation’s dreams of their plan serving as Trump 2.0’s playbook seem to have proven hubristic, with another, more politically supple outfit (the appropriately named America First Policy Institute) slipping into the role Heritage imagined for itself, even if the project and the Svengalis who compiled it are too valuable to do entirely without.
Which all leaves my original judgment pretty much intact: Project 2025, in all its complexity, is a useful catalog of what conservative tactics and policy plans look like now. Something we ought to take advantage of—as a tool for informing our resistance, and as a textbook about how conservatism in 2025 works. And so, class, gather around. I’m about to tease out one of its more subtle lessons.
GEORGE ORWELL ONCE WROTE AN ESSAY ABOUT CHARLES DICKENS that contains an important insight into one of the strangest paradoxes of politics: Why does conservatism so often clothe itself in the language of liberalism?
Orwell’s insight starts with the question of why do the people atop England’s class structure like Charles Dickens so much. Why is he buried in the church where the British monarchy performs its sacred rites? The argument Dickens struggled to convey in all his work, after all, was the fundamentally dehumanizing nature of Victorian England’s rigid system of social hierarchies. So why would those who were most passionate about preserving them want to have anything to do with his books?
Orwell answered, “All through the Christian ages, and especially since the French Revolution, the Western world has been haunted by the idea of freedom and equality; it is only an idea, but it has penetrated to all ranks of society … Even the millionaire suffers from a vague sense of guilt, like a dog eating a stolen leg of mutton. Nearly everyone, whatever his actual conduct may be, responds emotionally to the idea of human brotherhood.”
Apply that to today’s conservatives. The ideal of freedom and equality is something like the modern world’s official ideology—so much so that conservatives are always pretending that they’re the ones who honor that ideal best, even as they work assiduously to undo freedom and equality. Think of the way they’re endeavoring to give an authoritarian-run federal government control over university curricula, which is the most illiberal goal imaginable. That is explained, in the pages of Project 2025, as a fight against universities’ alleged “illiberal chill.”
Or, as I’ve written here, think of how they label efforts to loosen American incumbent racial hierarchy—the project we call “civil rights”—a conspiracy against civil rights (for the people on the top of that racial hierarchy).
Sure, some people just come out and say that they think some kinds of people are superior to other kinds of people, proudly devoting their lives to keeping the inferior orders in their place. But that only proves Orwell’s point: Those people tend to do so under pseudonyms.
I CALL THIS CONSERVATISM’S DOG-AND-MUTTON PRINCIPLE: They are like the hound Orwell describes who shows an adorably guilty face when he’s caught with meat in his mouth. When right-wingers show the public a face that hides their ugliness, it is sometimes, like that pup, out of guilty conscience: They know at some level that conservatism is not moral. Other times, they just do it because it works: Making their ugly aims harder to see makes it easier to get away them.
One example of the dog-and-mutton principle is the delight right-wingers derive from recruiting figures formerly identified with the left. The claim that the left used to be open-minded and humane, but now they’re a bunch of reactionary scolds, used to be Ronald Reagan’s old schtick: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.” Now it belongs to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his minions.
My colleague Emma Janssen has ably demonstrated how the liberal-left tropes in Kennedy’s trick bag—his language about unaccountably greedy agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations—can only end up being wrenched to reactionary ends. If there are still any RFK-curious out there among liberals, consider an even deeper foundation to the insight: Whatever Kennedy’s previous ideological identification, his project now is rightist at its essence.
The goal of right-wing politics, aka “conservatism,” is a society defined by authority and hierarchy, full stop. There is no particular inherent policy content to this, as it has taken on a remarkable elasticity of forms across history. For instance, though Americans typically think of conservatives as idealizing “small government,” it was Germany’s conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck who invented the modern welfare state, in order to secure the loyalty of the German working class for his internal project of “Kulturkampf,” and his external project of colonialization. In America, in the 1920s, many in the Ku Klux Klan called for a fully socialized medical system—for the same psychological reason that Donald Trump keeps around a retainer to squirt sanitizer on his tiny hands: They were obsessed with germs, frantic to make sure the filthy rabble invading our shores did not spread their cooties to them.
This obsession about pure bodies that RFK plugs into is a continuous tradition on the American right, especially the far right, though today it is a relatively obscure one. I once listened, baffled, as Phyllis Schlafly for some reason launched into a lecture to me about how pristine were the comestibles she put into the mouths of her children. Before “living clean” became a woo-woo thing, it was something people laughed about when it came to the right.
Remember the classic scene from Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)? The loony general Jack D. Ripper is explaining why he’s launched a nuke to take out the Soviet Union—because they are just this evil: “A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core commie works.”
That foreign substance was fluoride, introduced into America’s water supply after World War II, generally considered responsible for causing as much as 40 percent fewer dental cavities in children. Now Robert F. Kennedy wants it gone, just like General Jack D. Ripper. Kennedy is a scion of that old-line right-wing purity of essence obsession. But he couches it in the language of the left-winger he used to be. “The Republican Party is now the party of labor unions, the party of working people, of the American poor,” as he put it in the same interview in which he announced his intention to do away with fluoridated water, and also to make vaccine-taking optional and potentially bring back to life some of the most dread diseases in modern history.
Whatever the original tributaries of his ideas, they have etched a mind that is right-wing in its deepest structures. It is almost Nazi-like. Everything Kennedy says about health presumes the existence of two kinds of human beings—one pure and superior, the other impure and inferior. Two kinds of governments, too: one that protects the purity of its superior subjects with things like “vaccine choice,” the other that forces impure foreign substances into everyone’s bodies, even the superior people who don’t want them, because those substances are just agents of control. Superior people consume their own, superior agents of health, which is actually expensive, requiring special foods, special supplements, special exercises. Sorry about that, working people and the American poor.
Note how often vax-deniers say they don’t need to be inoculated because they are inherently strong. For someone like Kennedy, the boss who appointed him, and the followers who venerate them both, truly public health—policies that aim at equal outcomes for everyone—is the health of the rabble, looked upon as something disgusting.
What they consider to be “healthy” has nothing to do with the democratic but inherently messy practice of peer-reviewed science. The rhetoric of Kennedy’s cockamamie public-health populism talks about liberty. But ultimately, it is “health” imposed, top-down, by the charismatic leader—or those who manage to cozy up to him as his clients.
TOO MANY PEOPLE ARE FOOLED. Jake Tapper of CNN, for example: “The new focus on Americans’ unhealthy diets (and the roles of Big Ag and Big Food) is absolutely overdue and welcome,” he tweeted upon Trump’s announcement that he would make Kennedy his secretary of health and human services.
Of course, were someone like Jake Tapper serious about his concern for our food system, he could have featured heroic critics like Marion Nestle on his shows all these years. But, as Kamala Harris used to say, these pundits not serious people. Even if the consequences of their clownishness are all too serious.
Calling reaction “liberal,” because the people espousing it used to be liberal, or bear some vestigial liberal position—for now—is something the study of Project 2025 can help us with. It can help, for example, those simple folk over at Axios, Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, who breathlessly report on how “Trump’s liberal cabinet … captures the dramatic ideological transformation of the Republican Party.”
Tulsi Gabbard used to be a Democrat, you see. RFK Jr. is cool with abortion, supposedly (though it actually depends on what day it is). The hedge fund billionaire appointed Treasury secretary used to work for George Soros, though working for Soros in a financial role has zero to do with Soros’s liberal activism.
But talking about Trump’s cabinet like this sure makes them sound less threatening, just like a dog’s surface adorableness, caught by his master in the act of raiding the larder, shouldn’t distract from the viciousness that will be visited upon a stranger who gets in his way.
The phantasmagorical vision of Kennedy’s pretense to making the public healthy by decimating existing institutions of public health is all over Project 2025. A grimly humorous example is in the Department of Homeland Security chapter, which recommends the Coast Guard readmit all personnel “dismissed from service for refusing to take the COVID-19 ‘vaccine’”; the scare quotes are theirs. The reason: It will make for “improvements in the recruiting process.” Because nothing makes normal people more thrilled to spend weeks inside an ocean-borne tin can than sharing it with hosts for a deadly pathogen.
So it is that, as so often with the craziest right-wing ideas, they’ve dressed up their attempts to eviscerate any reasonable public-health measures to fight the next global pandemic in the language of humanitarian uplift.
In the State Department chapter, for example, the pandemic is described as something that was exploited by “international organizations” to “trample human rights in the name of public health.” Later in Project 2025, COVID is a case study in the violation of “transparent, scientifically grounded, and more nimble, efficient, transparent, and targeted response that respects the unique needs and input of patient populations and providers.”
And I mean, yes, pandemic public-health measures were far from transparent, far from perfectly conceived and executed. But the language, straight out of a Harvard School of Public Health textbook, is the tell that something other than tender concern for the vulnerable is afoot. I mean, do you really think anyone at the Heritage Foundation really cares about the “unique needs and input of patient populations and providers”?
The HHS chapter includes this line: “We must shut and lock the revolving door between government and Big Pharma.” It sounds like something Bernie Sanders would say. Read the whole chapter, and you recognize it as part of a saga meant to frame all COVID-era public-health measures as an elite conspiracy to enrich what it calls “a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders.” Calls to ban pharmaceutical advertising, for which RFK has also received praise from some on the left, sound great, too—but in context, they come off as a Trump-style vengeance play against a rival power center: something to use as a bargaining chip to bend Big Pharma to their will.
It’s terribly dangerous, and the danger goes far beyond RFK. Authority and hierarchy are what it comes down to: just one more way that Donald Trump shall be as God. Even if he has to make RFK choke down a Big Mac to prove it.
