A lot has been written about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation project to turn the Federal government inside out and make it subservient to Donald Trump. Most of Project 2025 consists of detailed critiques of government agencies and suggestions for ‘reform.’ But ProPublica recently got its hands on training videos for Project 2025 that go beyond this to try and offer general principles for conservative activists. The first two of these in particular are overviews of conservative thought that seem meant to give a veneer of depth and principle to the MAGA movement. They reveal some important things about the worldview of influential intellectual defenders of MAGA. Trump himself has no discernible ideology, but a variety of ideas are competing for primacy and these videos give us clues as well as possible avenues of attack.
The first thing one notices is that both lectures are delivered by administrators of Hillsdale College, Matthew Spalding and Christopher Malagisi. Hillsdale is a private Michigan school that purports to offer a deep education in the Western tradition, but in practice serves as a finishing school for reactionary culture warriors. Hillsdale has successfully entrenched itself in conservative circles as an educational model; Florida governor DeSantis, for instance, said when he decided to blow up and remake the progressive New School, that he wanted instead to have a ‘little Hillsdale.’ Hillsdale and its supporters see themselves as engaged in a longterm project to change American culture, using higher education as the vehicle to create a cadre of conservative thought leaders and activists. [1]
Matthew Spalding, who delivers the opening lecture, has a picture perfect resume for his role as articulator of MAGA thought. He got his education, all three degrees, in the Claremont system. He is a fellow of the Claremont Institute, publisher of the reactionary Claremont Review, and was also a Vice-President at the Heritage Foundation. In short, he has spent his entire adult life ensconced in the Hillsdale-Claremont axis, which is the epicenter of ‘serious’ conservative philosophizing. Its members see themselves as the defenders of Western culture against the circling hordes of multiculturalists, relativists, and secularists. (The President of Hillsdale since 2000, Larry Arnn, was previously the President of the Claremont Institute).
In his presentation, Spalding paints a flattened and selective picture of the ideas and institutions of the American Founding. It is central to the Hillsdale-Claremont ideology that America’s unchanging essence was, and should still be, adherence to a view of human rights derived from natural law, that is, from permanent and unchanging truths discoverable by reason. As his co-conspirator Mr. Malagisi tells us, the point of conservatism is to defend ‘American exceptionalism,’ meaning adherence to the truths discovered in 1776.
Essentially, according to Spalding and Malagisi, all was well in America for its first 125 years as we maintained our devotion to these timeless verities. The evidence of our faithfulness was that during this time we kept the central government small and weak. But then we Fell. For reactionary thinkers there is always a fatal turning point, a moment of eating the apple, that has to be discovered and remedied to put humanity back on the correct path.
Spalding and Malagisi tell us exactly what caused the United States to fall: the Progressive Movement. Starting in the late 1800s American elites abandoned the True Faith and, influenced by foreign ideas (those damn immigrants!), began to have heretical thoughts. They began to imagine that some of America’s wealth should be taxed and used by government to solve social problems. They began to imagine that women could take part in public life. They began to imagine that the dominance of the economy and politics by titanic corporations should be challenged.
Hillsdale’s enemies are Theodore Roosevelt and, especially, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson is impugned for wanting to expand government and make decisions based on science and expertise. He was, after all, an academic and a political scientist. Social scientists are, in the Hillsdale-Claremont vision, the snakes in the garden, the tempters offering knowledge of good and evil.
In the Hillsdale-Claremont account, the Progressives were not just Americans who advocated for reforms to meet the new challenges of the industrial age. They were traitors to America’s founding ideas and the Constitution. They did not believe in unchanging Natural Rights. Instead, influenced by new scientific approaches to the study of man and society, they embraced a view of human beings as more malleable, shaped in key respects by their upbringing and environment, and hence capable of changing for the better. But many of the obstacles to a better life were beyond the ability of individuals to deal with. Rugged individualism was not going to clear the slums, improve factory working conditions, educate the poor, challenge Jim Crow, or do away with corrupt political machines. Government intervention was needed to help people help themselves.
Hillsdale’s hero is—Calvin Coolidge. Coolidge and his Republican cohorts of the 1920s tried to put the genie back in the bottle. Less government, and less expectation from the public that government would intervene to help them. Lower taxes. High tariffs. Silent Cal whispering ‘no’ to government programs.
Unfortunately, a la Spalding and Malagisi, the Depression came along, Franklin Roosevelt got elected, and America went whole-hog down the Progressive path. The modern conservative movement is largely a noble attempt to undo the New Deal and the assumptions about the role of the state that go with it.
This view of our history surfaced during the Trump administration, when Trump commissioned a report to counter the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project was a historical analysis sponsored by the New York Times that placed slavery at the center of the American story. The Trump response was the “1776 Report”, a historical study executed by a group that didn’t include any actual historians, but did include Charles Kesler of the Claremont Institute, and Larry Arnn from Hillsdale. Their report made similar arguments about Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives, who were astonishingly singled out as threats to democracy on a par with fascism and slavery.
What do we get from this, other than a good laugh at the idea of chiseling out Teddy Roosevelt’s face from Mt. Rushmore and replacing him with Calvin Coolidge? What we learn is how truly reactionary, how truly at odds with the modern world, the MAGA worldview is—and also how much this vision informs today’s conservative practice.
The America before progressivism was a country where property rights were king, the businesses and trusts and financial powers of the industrial age dominated public life, and courts and politicians deferred to their interests. Conservative legal scholars look wistfully back to the era exemplified by the 1905 Lochner Supreme Court decision, which struck down a state law that limited working hours on the grounds that it violated the ‘freedom’ of employers and workers to engage in contracts. Today’s originalist-dominated Supreme Court has been busy doing away with government powers to regulate the economy, while declaring that corporations are people and elevating property rights at the expense of the rights of workers and citizens.
Before progressivism, states in the South, and not just the South, freely and unabashedly denied basic rights to African-Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans, and women. MAGA supporters today are up to their eyeballs in schemes to restrict voting access, criminalize abortion, demonize immigrants, and undermine all forms of affirmative action.
Before progressivism, government jobs were filled by patronage rather than merit. Today, Trump and his supporters declare proudly they will stack the federal system with political loyalists.
The irony is that conservatives despise progressivism as equivalent to socialism (Trump and his supporters now routinely call even standard-issue liberals ‘communists’), when it was the Progressive movement and its New Deal and Fair Deal successors that saved us from socialism. The ability of American progressives to recognize and, however imperfectly, remedy some of the injustices of modern capitalism and ‘rugged individualism’ helped convince the majority to support reform rather than revolution. It fended off the extremism that overwhelmed many European states in the first half of the 20th century.
The Eisenhower-era Republican party seemingly accepted the basic parameters of the New Deal, promising a future of political and economic harmony, or at least civil disagreement. Government, business, labor, and civil society would work together for the common good. It is this ‘capitulation’ that Goldwater, Reagan and now Trump reject. No compromise, they say. It’s war to the death.
By rewriting history to declare Progressivism un-American, a threat equivalent to fascism, MAGA’s ideological explainers want to justify sweeping steps to undo 125 years of the expansion of government power, in the name of restoring freedom to American citizens. Even if this expansion has been broadly popular and resulted in dramatic improvements in people’s lives, including the expansion of the basic human rights the Hillsdale conservatives say they want to protect.
Since America has strayed so far from its true self, we might need a strongman to make things right. We might need to intervene to ensure elections don’t give us the wrong result. We might need to use the military to put down protests. We might need to fire all the bureaucrats and dismantle government agencies and use the Justice Department to go after our enemies. Whatever it takes.
Don’t be fooled by the seemingly reasonable presentations by Hillsdale professors in their book-lined studies. The Hillsdale-Claremont axis is, after all, the home of Michael Anton, the author of the infamous “Flight 93” essay in 2016, which argued that voting for Trump was comparable to passengers choosing to swarm the cockpit against al-Qaida hijackers, even if it meant certain death. It is the home of John Eastman, the lawyer who masterminded the fake electors scheme designed to overturn Biden’s win in 2020.
This claim, that the existing liberal order is hopelessly corrupt and failed, is an essential part of the fascist mentality. It justifies any action in response, however illegal or immoral. Trump’s drumbeat of pessimism and lies about the terrible state of our country, about how crime and immigration and woke liberals are destroying America, provides the counterpoint to the arguments of Hillsdale’s ideologues. Never mind that the United States is the richest, most powerful state in human history, a magnet for millions around the world, for 250 years a functioning if flawed democracy, an engine of new jobs and opportunity. These realities must be ignored to justify dismantling existing institutions and substituting the rule of a Leader who embodies the popular will.
We should be aware that Hillsdale’s “American Exceptionalism” is not the only set of ideas circling around the MAGAverse. There are white nationalists and outright fascists; religious zealots who look to Victor Orban’s Hungary as a model for the use of government power to advance a Christian state; and Silicon Valley libertarians who find democracy contemptible and outdated. Professor Spalding gently rebukes them and tries to claim all these ideas need to be grounded in American natural law principles. But they are allies, working together against their common liberal enemies.
Project 2025 is, however, not a standard-issue conservative plan to shrink the state. It is a plan to take over the state and use state power to implement sweeping change in culture and governance. The relatively moderate professors in these videos who celebrate decentralization and individual rights can be seen as ‘useful idiots’—the Mensheviks to MAGA’s Bolsheviks, destined to be ignored and, come the revolution, sent quickly to the gulag.
[1] I am a graduate of St. John’s College, which really does offer the education in Western thought that Hillsdale pretends to provide. The Hillsdale approach is a distortion of genuine liberal education—Hillsdale is to St. John’s what the Upside Down in “Stranger Things” is to the real world. To have a school that purports to defend Western civilization shill for Donald Trump is of course hilarious, but also threatens those who are serious about genuine engagement with our best traditions. Hillsdale wants to weaponize the study of Western thought by making it seem that it supports one side in today’s political debates. This is false and a betrayal of the tradition that Hillsdale claims to defend.
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