Paul Weyrich at the Values Voters Conference in Washington, DC (2007) | c.berlit / CC BY-SA 3.0, color adjusted
For the past four decades, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has published policy proposals ahead of presidential elections. The most recent installment of the “Mandate for Leadership” series, published in 2023, is a 900-page collection of essays written by a host of right-wing thinkers and advised by more than fifty conservative organizations that has come to colloquially be known as Project 2025. Written with a future Trump presidency in mind, Project 2025 lays out a radical agenda to concretely reshape US political institutions and transform American social and political culture, and it has garnered considerable attention from the media, the Democratic Party establishment, pundits, and scholars for its overt Christian nationalism and authoritarian proposals.
At first blush, the vision laid out in Project 2025 may seem like a departure from what we have come to expect from conservative political thought or Republican Party politics. It is unabashedly revolutionary in its scope and vision, and it does not seek to conserve established institutions but, rather, to transform them. Moreover, it has decidedly anti-liberal and anti-democratic undertones, which are at odds with the foundational principles of the US Constitution. It is, in a nutshell, a radical set of proposals.
But when I first sat down to read Project 2025, I was most struck not by the newness of the proposals but by their deep familiarity. Half a century after its founding, Heritage Foundation has gone back to its roots and to the vision of one of its key founders, the right-wing political activist Paul Weyrich. To understand Project 2025 and its implications for the United States, we need to understand what it was Weyrich sought to create and what he hoped to accomplish.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Weyrich, then an aide to Republican Colorado senator Gordon Allott, set out to build think tanks that could support the emergence of a new right. Weyrich felt an acute institutional lack when it came to ideological support for right-wing policies and politicians. The establishment right did not have think tanks producing fast and ideologically coherent data, which meant that even when conservatives were elected, they had nowhere to turn for reliable information before voting on crucial policy decisions.
But to build a think tank, one needs money. Fortuitously, just as Weyrich was looking for someone to bankroll a new conservative think tank, the right-wing philanthropist Joseph Coors was trying to “find out where his money should be put to effectively aid the conservative cause.” Through happenstance, or “God’s providence” as Weyrich would have it, a letter from Coors ended up on Weyrich’s desk. A meeting between the men quickly followed, after which Coors gave $250,000 a year to start Analysis and Research Associates (ARA), beginning on January 1, 1971. In May 1973, ARA developed into the Heritage Foundation, the New Right’s most enduring institution.
This is not the place to recount the influence of the Heritage Foundation or detail its long and storied history; for that, one might consult the conservative academic and Heritage fellow Lee Edwards’s detailed and thorough history of the think tank, The Power of Ideas (Jameson Books, 1997). But it is worth noting what Weyrich hoped to accomplish through Heritage. In an untitled memorandum from 1973, Weyrich mused:
The social gospel tells us to change man’s environment and that will change the world. The real gospel tells us to reform man first, so that a reformed man can change the world. But the citizens of our Nation have few beacons of truth upon whom they can rely. Only the truth can make us free, and the truth must be based on the commandments and the moral law. So, even though we deal with “politics and issues,” our real task is a moral one …
For Weyrich, who was a devout traditionalist Catholic, conservative policy-making needed to adopt a new moralism that went far beyond the tenets of fiscal responsibility and small-government conservatism. It also had to embrace a conservative Christian worldview and seek to impose a narrow definition of the common good on society.
But Heritage was not going be the vehicle for advancing a new Christian-infused conservatism in the way Weyrich envisioned–at least not during the 1970s. Shortly after Heritage was founded, the Schuchman board decided that, beginning in 1974, two distinct nonprofit foundations would take shape: the Heritage Foundation and the Center for the Public Interest (CPI). Heritage was to take on “pure research directed at current issues” and CPI would become responsible for “public interest law and research.”
After the split, Weyrich remained at Heritage, but only for a few months. “I left there [Heritage] mainly because the board of directors had told me that I could not be involved in social issues,” Weyrich recounted in an interview with CSPAN in 2005. He continued, “They wanted Heritage to be strictly an economic think tank. And social issues were where my heart was.” Weyrich left to form the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress political action committee and the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation think tank.
As I explain in The Radical Mind: The Origins of Right-Wing Catholic and Protestant Coalition Building (University Press of Kansas, 2024), the New Right was an ostensibly secular movement aimed at promoting conservative political actors and advancing conservatism as a governing political ideology that was led by a behind-the-scenes cadre of devout Catholics who were conservative in both their politics and faith and deeply committed to so-called social issues. These Catholic New Right (CNR) activists were instrumental in shaping not just the political ideology and strategy of the New Right in the early 1970s, but also the New Christian Right later in the decade. They also helped transform the institutional landscape of right-wing politics in the United States.
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. 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.
Pro-family politics was, and continues to be, the central vehicle for organizing US politics on the principle of Christian supremacism. This was the central project of the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is the central aim of Project 2025. In the forward to the most recent Mandate for Leadership, Heritage president Kevin D. Roberts neatly summarizes the “four broad fronts that will decide America’s future.” First and foremost among them is a commitment to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life and protect our children. We have come full circle with “pro-family” politics.
The “pro-family” platform is not a liberal platform. For the Catholic New Right and New Christian Right, there is only one version of the good life and only one path to religious and political salvation. Therefore the role of government is not to preserve individual rights and manage competing interpretations of the good but to impose and enforce a singular conception of the good through the regulation of social relations. At the heart of the Catholic New Right project and of Project 2025 lies a desire to harness the coercive capacity of the state to impose a conservative Christian vision of the good not only on government but on all of society. Revisiting the history of the New Right helps us to understand that this is a radical project, but it is not a new one.
Produced in collaboration with University Press of Kansas.
