The American right wants to raze the present to restore the past. This apparent paradox is core to a rising strain of conservatism that has condemned America’s institutions as irredeemably corrupt, and believes that a woke professional global elite that is untethered from the nation needs to be excised in order to protect the interests of working-class Americans. Now Donald Trump has returned to Washington, this programme could soon become reality.
There is no more explicit account of these ideas than a new book from Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation think tank that is behind the Project 2025 document, a manual for Trump’s presidency published in 2023. Roberts’s book was originally called Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America but the subtitle was changed to Taking Back Washington to Save America to tone down the violent imagery. The bad press Trump received for Project 2025 meant publication was delayed, withholding a key Trumpian text until after votes were cast.
Despite the title change, Roberts’s argument remains incendiary. “Decadent and rootless, these institutions serve only as a shelter for our corrupt elite,” he writes. “For America to flourish again, they don’t need to be reformed; they need to be burned.” The long list of institutions Roberts wants to gut shows the extent of the revolt he hopes to unleash. His kill list includes: every Ivy League university, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party and the National Endowment for Democracy.
The vehemence with which Roberts writes – now is the time to “circle the wagons and load the muskets”; these institutions must be “defanged, defunded and destroyed for the good of the overall ecosystem” – is rooted in his view that the US faces spiritual oblivion. The nation, he believes, must be cleansed of a failed liberal decadence that has led to an impotent government solely focused on guarding the interests of the elite. Strong families, the dignity of work, respect for the working class, an America First foreign policy, community spirit: all has been destroyed, Roberts argues, by what he labels the Uniparty. The right must respond with creative destruction. It must recognise, he writes, quoting Gustav Mahler, that tradition is “the preservation of fire, not the worship of ashes”.
The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973, was an incubator for Reaganism but Roberts represents a departure from those he scorns as “wax-museum conservatives”. As he writes: “The old conservative movement held that if you just got government out of the way, the free market, civil society, individual liberty, the nuclear family, and more would take care of themselves. Forty years ago, it might have had the right idea. But in today’s America, a conservative movement that limits itself to this stale program is cosigning the Uniparty’s euthanasia of the nation.”
To re-spiritualise America, Roberts wants to impose religion on a porn-addled, lazy, feckless nation whose education system has abandoned the Western canon. Roberts, a former president of a Catholic school, does not think America can be saved without the revival of religion; the alternative is so dangerous that Roberts flirts with theocracy. “We have in this country a glorious tradition of religious freedom, but it is not freedom from religion but freedom for religion.” America is rooted in Christianity, he writes, and so “institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals”. He goes so far as to say that any institution merely “contemptuous of public prayer” should probably “be burned down”. This is a prescription hard to reconcile with a free press, the separation of church and state and the right not to partake in forced worship.
Throughout Dawn’s Early Light, the enormity of the ends – the preservation of America – is used to justify extraordinary means. Roberts thinks the fight against China – which he suggests is funnelling the opioid fentanyl into America to break the country’s spirit as the British used opium to trigger China’s century of humiliation – cannot be won without “widespread and prominent public prayer”. Such celestial petitions should, he writes, be accompanied by the restoration of the McCarthyite House of Un-American Activities Committee to purge elites who are colluding with the Chinese Communist Party.
Other parts of his programme, however, would not be out of place in a left-wing think tank report. He references the economist Mariana Mazzucato, who inspired Labour’s programme for government. He holds the housing crisis, low wages and insecure work partly responsible for low family formation rates, and wants supply-side reform to build more houses, infrastructure and schools.
Roberts advocates parental school-choice and classical education, alongside removing the automatic privilege which a university degree confers in order to hand power to those who went to work after high school. The objective is an economy of self-reliant Americans providing for their communities.
Notwithstanding his attack on “cultural Marxism” – a conspiracy theory, popular on the right, describing the progressive capture of institutions – Roberts could benefit from a chunk of Marxist analysis. The two key levers for taking economic power away from the elites – unionism and the anti-trust movement, which opposes monopolistic corporations – are peripheral in Roberts’ worldview. Trade unions are dismissed as sympathetic to the ruling class. Roberts does tick the anti-trust box, but in a perfunctory manner.
Whatever the flaws in his argument, what should worry the left is Roberts’ moral certainty. Gone are the flaccid paeans to the supremacy of the free market; in their place is a conviction to march through America’s institutions with a flamethrower. The right is intellectually insurgent while the Democratic Party is mired in a muddled post-mortem.
Roberts was sidelined within the Maga movement during the election, so that Trump could distance himself from Project 2025. (After Democrat attacks on the proposal, Trump posted on X in July that he had “no idea who is behind it” and “some of the things they are saying are ridiculous and abysmal”.) But the election is over, the Republicans have won and Roberts has emerged as a leading thinker of the incoming administration. He does not stand alone. Trump’s proposed team contains fellow believers, including the nominee for attorney general, Matt Gaetz. In 2023 Gaetz said that “we either get this government back on our side, or we defund and get rid of, abolish the FBI, the CDC, ATF, DoJ, every last one of them if they do not come to heel”.
The vice-president-elect JD Vance writes in Dawn’s Early Light’s foreword that “never before has a figure with Roberts’s depth and stature within the American Right tried to articulate a genuinely new future for conservatism”. This new future is a populist Christian nationalism, a destructive, fire-breathing conservatism – something Vance calls an “offensive conservatism”. At his book launch in New York on 13 November, Kevin Roberts remarked that he was expecting to speak with president-elect Trump “pretty soon”.
Dawn’s Early Light: Burning Down Washington to Save America
Kevin Roberts
HarperCollins, 304pp, $32
[See also: How to survive the age of anger]
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