Cheap Thoughts: Kevin Roberts, Conservative Incoherence, and Project 2025’s “Promise to America” Part 1

The preface and opening salvo of the Heritage Foundation’s landmark policy document, entitled “A Promise to America”, is so inadequate it ought to be thoroughly embarrassing for every single person who signed on to Project 2025. Written as an ideological cornerstone by Dr. Kevin Roberts, the current president of Heritage, you might hope that it would offer a shred of persuasive inspiration or theoretical defense of this entire personnel and policy project. Instead we are met with a mishmash of off the wall and frequently disturbing policy ideas and arguments, tired clichés, and prose that reads like an idealistic (or humorously ironic) undergrad typed this out during a rushed all nighter. My primary thought was that it reads like something I may have written as a student, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

It turns out the promise the entire GOP establishment has signed onto is actually four separate promises to our nation: 1) “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children.”; 2) “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.”; 3) “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.”; and 4) “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls “the Blessings of Liberty.””

So let’s take them one at a time to break down what that all means.

Promise one involves looking after what Roberts calls: “the true priority of politics—the well-being of the American family”. The reason they are concerned about the state of the American family is because “the entire point of centralizing political power is to subvert the family” ergo the very existence and expansion of the federal government is in conflict with the wellbeing of the family.

To them, the purpose of the Federal government and all their many programs and departments “is to replace people’s natural loves and loyalties with unnatural ones.” So right from the beginning we see how they will justify promise 2 by claiming that dismantling the administrative state is a natural fulfillment of promise 1, the protection of the family and the triumph over all the bureaucratic evils that intrinsically exist to destroy American family life.

Which evils exist in the American family must be addressed? Well first they point to fatherless families:

“There is no government program that can replace the hole in a child’s soul cut out by the absence of a father. Fatherlessness is one of the principal sources of American poverty, crime, mental illness, teen suicide, substance abuse, rejection of the church, and high school dropouts. So many of the problems government programs are designed to solve—but can’t—are ultimately problems created by the crisis of marriage and the family. The world has never seen a thriving, healthy, free, and prosperous society where most children grow up without their married parents. If current trends continue, we are heading toward social implosion.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

You and I might have some similar questions in response to all that. For example, wouldn’t the current GOP position on abortion lead to another massive wave of fatherless families? How do they intend to reconcile that? Also, why in the world is the rejection of “the church” on this list? What business is it of the federal government, or any government for that matter, which religious beliefs people choose to accept or reject? How does getting involved with any of these questions help to shrink the role of the government and not unjustly expand it?

Robert’s offers some overview suggestions for how they might try to address these concerns. For example, “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 restore the American family.” Or, “Today the Left is threatening the tax-exempt status of churches and charities that reject woke progressivism. They will soon turn to Christian schools and clubs with the same totalitarian intent. The next conservative President must make the institutions of American civil society hard targets for woke culture warriors.”

What in the world do they mean by protecting institutions against “woke cultural warriors”? Well, according to Roberts, “This starts with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, and any other term used to deprive Americans of their First Amendment rights out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists.”

So it’s just about changing some language on websites or curriculum, right? Oh no. There is so much more. Because their great big plan is to argue that “pornography” is *not* protected by the first amendment – a position that defies decades of judicial precedent – and then they intend to define any *ideology* they believe to be inherently destructive as pornography. So, they argue that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance”. It is so crucial to see how pornography in this new definition shifts from merely a physical item of media and turns it instead into the manifestation of an ideology they disagree with. Also note that transgender ideology is listed as an “instance” of this type of ideological pornography, implying there will be more labeled as such to come.

So what policy response do they propose to counter any proliferation of this new expanded definition of constitutionality unprotected expressions of ideological pornography? Well, “The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”

Ok then. The federal government is an inherently evil and corrosive force for the American family, but that same power of the federal government should be used to imprison school teachers and librarians merely for sharing *ideology* they disagree with, as well as to force major companies to close down operations for the crime of being used by others as a tool or medium of communication to distribute said objectionable *ideology*.

You might want to reread all that and then take a moment, because that’s exactly as bad it sounds.

And what’s so wrong with tech firms anyway? Well:

“Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones. They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Don’t know about you but right now I have hives and shivers all at the same time. Because using the federal government to redefine pornography and child abuse so that it conveniently attacks and shuts down both their ideological opposition and the mediums their critics use to communicate should be of deep and immeasurable concern to all of us. Suddenly their critics aren’t just culpable for “thought crimes” against the regime, but rather they and every company that allows for them to communicate also becomes legally redefined and culpable as drug dealers, pedophiles, sexual criminals, and child abusers. Roberts has laid out here exactly *how* they plan to use the immense power of the federal government to censor millions of people who disagree with their worldview. This is a five alarm fire and we are only in the middle of the first promise, one crafted and endorsed by “more than 400 scholars and policy experts” from within the Republican movement.

And that’s not all!

Universal school choice is named as an ultimate goal, but not the temporary focus. Rather, “even before we achieve that long-term goal, parents’ rights as their children’s primary educators should be non-negotiable in American schools. States, cities and counties, school boards, union bosses, principals, and teachers who disagree should be immediately cut off from federal funds.” Seems like that zero sum understanding on the dangers of federal overreach is more than a little one sided, isn’t it?

Promise one concludes by addressing Roe v Wade with the following call to action, “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion.” Yes, this would seem to indicate support for a federal abortion ban.

Now we come to promise two, where they plan to “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people”, and let me assure you that the ramifications here are no less comforting.

Lest you think that any of this posturing is about selfish gain or the retention of personal or institutional power, Roberts begins by assuring us that “Conservatives desire a smaller government not for its own sake, but for the sake of human flourishing.” So this is clearly their gift to all of humanity and don’t you forget it.

To them, the budget process is “corrupt”. And as if you couldn’t roll your eyes far back enough, note that “unaccountable federal spending is the secret lifeblood of the Great Awokening.” But “the federal budget is not even close to the worst example of this corruption. That distinction belongs to the “Administrative State,” the dismantling of which must a top priority for the next conservative President. The term Administrative State refers to the policymaking work done by the bureaucracies of all the federal government’s departments, agencies, and millions of employees.”

So the worst example of federal corruption is the daily work output of “millions” of federal government employees, and they are supposedly unaccountable and bad because they are servants of woke ideology. The only solution then is to more directly politicize the federal workforce through heavy handed oversight and ideological policing from within the executive branch:

“Nearly every power center held by the Left is funded or supported, one way or another, through the bureaucracy by Congress. Colleges and school districts are funded by tax dollars. The Administrative State holds 100 percent of its power at the sufferance of Congress, and its insulation from presidential discipline is an unconstitutional fairy tale spun by the Washington Establishment to protect its turf. Members of Congress shield themselves from constitutional accountability often when the White House allows them to get away with it. Cultural institutions like public libraries and public health agencies are only as “independent” from public accountability as elected officials and voters permit…

The Administrative State is not going anywhere until Congress acts to retrieve its own power from bureaucrats and the White House. But in the meantime, there are many executive tools a courageous conservative President can use to handcuff the bureaucracy, push Congress to return to its constitutional responsibility, restore power over Washington to the American people, bring the Administrative State to heel, and in the process defang and defund the woke culture warriors who have infiltrated every last institution in America.

The Conservative Promise lays out how to use many of these tools including: how to fire supposedly “un-fireable” federal bureaucrats; how to shutter wasteful and corrupt bureaus and offices; how to muzzle woke propaganda at every level of government; how to restore the American people’s constitutional authority over the Administrative State; and how to save untold taxpayer dollars in the process.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Now listen. Those are all their words. It’s not a parody, this is exactly how they see their mission re: reshaping the federal government. 

Promise 2 is shorter than the first one but no less important. Because the implication here is that while they tepidly acknowledge the role that the legislature is meant to have in changing the shape and mission of agencies within the federal government, they outright believe it is the duty of a future conservative president to enforce his will upon the ideological beliefs of the federal workforce. Their primary justification is that these employees have already been acting as agents of “the left” for decades, and therefore only solution they can envision is through mass firings and the subsequent hiring of openly politically motivated partisan ideologues. That’s exactly how they intend to fix what ails us.

The section ends by insisting that the military will not be left out of these grand visions of ideological warfare through forced personnel changes: “The next conservative President must end the Left’s social experimentation with the military, restore warfighting as its sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority.” Put aside the mention of China, we will circle back around to that one next week, but you have to wonder what policy specifics they are taking aim at here. A resumption of don’t ask don’t tell? A crackdown on recent attempts to address racism, abuse, and sexual assault within the branches of the military? Which modern initiatives might they rule are too soft or a distraction? What ideologies will they be policing within those ranks? The list of questions these statements raise is as long as they are concerning.

On to promise 3: “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, borders, and bounty against global threats.”

Roberts is very concerned that the lofty ideology and kind words of the “progressive elites” “are just rhetorical Trojan horses concealing their true intention—stripping “we the people” of our constitutional authority over our country’s future.”

If only he’d taken the time to introspectively examine the hidden dangers of his own words in a like manner perhaps we wouldn’t need to be slogging through all this together. Alas he did not and so here we are wading through some really turgid prose.

“America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated—self-governance, the rule of law, and ordered liberty. They certainly do not trust the American people, and they disdain the Constitution’s restrictions on their ambitions. Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the “enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call “fly-over country.”

He goes on (and on, and on) claiming, “Intellectual sophistication, advanced degrees, financial success, and all other markers of elite status have no bearing on a person’s knowledge of the one thing most necessary for governance: what it means to live well. That knowledge is available to each of us, no matter how humble our backgrounds or how unpretentious our attainments. It is open to us to read in the book of human nature, to which we are all offered the key just by merit of our shared humanity. One of the great premises of American political life is that everyone who can read in that book must have a voice in deciding the course and fate of our Republic.”

Of course the GOP historically has been (and still is) the political party of the wealthy, and often decently well educated. The donors, the academics, and most of the politicians themselves represent the very demographic described here which they pretend to hate. And their personal knowledge of an idealized country life is just as robust as the average suburban resident. Not to mention that there is very little room in this vision for any form of coexistence with the Americans that disagree with them. So far they seem to be referenced only as threats to fire, imprison, and degrade.

According to Roberts, as speaking for the modern GOP movement: “the woke Left today seeks a world, bound by global treaties they write, in which they exercise dictatorial powers over all nations without being subject to democratic accountability.” And of course this why he believes they support “open borders” (a political position hardly anyone in the entire world actually supports but everyone loves to use as a fear mongering accusation). In this imaginary advocacy “they”, “seek to purge the very concept of the nation-state from the American ethos, no matter how much crime increases or resources drop for schools and hospitals or wages decrease for the working class.”

And this is where is gets personal because Roberts goes on to say:

“Open-borders activism is a classic example of what the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—publicly promoting one’s own virtue without risking any personal inconvenience. Indeed, the only direct impact of open borders on pro-open borders elites is that the constant flow of illegal immigration suppresses the wages of their housekeepers, landscapers, and busboys.

“Cheap grace” aptly describes the Left’s love affair with environmental extremism. Those who suffer most from the policies environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue.”

https://thf_media.s3.amazonaws.com/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Now one thing I am not going to do is let Bonhoeffer slander go unanswered. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about “cheap grace” in his pre WWII booklet The Cost of Discipleship, published in 1937, as he tried to set forth a peaceful Christian lifestyle that sought refuge from the turbulent cultural pressures of 1930’s Germany. It is a classic work about an aspirational, apolitical, Christian community written while Bonhoeffer was a leader of the subversive Confessing Church, which was formed in resistance to state led pressure to merge the work of the church with the work of the Nazi regime. One of the lasting passages of that work is found in the opening chapters where he contrasts a vision of cheap grace with costly grace:

“Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our Church. We are fighting today for costly grace. Cheap grace means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. The sacraments, the forgiveness of sin, and the consolations of religion are thrown away at cut prices. Grace is represented as the Church’s inexhaustible treasury, from which she showers blessings with generous hands, without asking questions or fixing limits. Grace without price; grace without cost! The essence of grace, we suppose, is that the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing….

Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian ‘conception’ of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins…. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God…

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession…. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate…

Costly grace is the gospel which must be sought again and again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a man must knock. Such grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life. It is costly because it condemns sin, and grace because it justifies the sinner. Above all, it is costly because it cost God the life of his Son: “ye were bought at a price,” and what has cost God much cannot be cheap for us. Above all, it is grace because God did not reckon his Son too dear a price to pay for our life, but delivered him up for us. Costly grace is the Incarnation of God.

Cost of Discipleship, p. 45-49

So in Robert’s analogy, is legal residence in any specific country akin to salvation and it must therefore be earned alongside the permission of a conservative president (or I suppose the collective “will of the people”) who serve as Jesus Christ? Or is the act of reducing carbon emissions or recycling too harsh a sacrifice to ask for people around the world, rather they ought to be coddled and left unbothered by collective threats to our environmental wellbeing as that is the virtue God has asked of us?

Why the assumption that the migrant hasn’t sacrificed already and that it is the responsibility of the wealthier nation to freely take them in? Why not believe that if the average person is so noble and worthy of dignity that they too should be asked to help address major civilizational threats like climate change, even if it comes along with discomfort? Just who does he think isn’t willing to sacrifice their own comforts right now for the good of their community?

I also have to wonder what Kevin Roberts thinks about other passages in Bonhoeffer’s Discipleship. For example, what might he make of the observation that, “From now on there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.” He certainly would disagree that “Jesus, however, tell us that it is just because we live in the world, and just because the world is evil, that the precept of non-resistance must be put into practice.”

It is just so nonsensical to try and apply a context free theological distinction like cheap vs costly grace to the specifics of something like immigration or environmental policy. Especially when one could easily turn it on its head and say, for example, that the Christian act of service required from us is to unquestionably take in the tired, poor, and huddled masses and sacrificially give to them despite any personal or national cost.

But this sort of thoughtless and selfish application of well known conservative aphorisms is the whole problem with Robert’s endeavor to offer a philosophical foundation for their power hungry and very extreme public policy ambitions.

He is throwing these references and phrases out so carelessly that the justifications he offers are frequently contradictory, confusing, and often downright irrational. This entire preface was either the work of great haste or incredible stupidity. Either way it converges again and again upon offering cheaply crafted rationales for incredibly horrible and frightening public policies.