The Ideological Engine: Project 2025's Inversion of 'Values' for Authoritarian Ends

The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

— George Orwell, 1984

1.1 Introduction: The War on Meaning

The ideological tenets of Project 2025 (hereafter P2025), and by direct proxy the broader far right, function less as a catalog of extreme policy beliefs than as a systematic effort to redefine core societal concepts to create a permission structure for autocratic governance, a phenomenon well-documented in contemporary scholarship on propaganda and democratic backsliding.¹

This is a structure that is often unwittingly endorsed by a populace increasingly susceptible to misinformation and distraction, and crucially, emerging not always from a central design but often through ad hoc interventions by self-interested actors exploiting systemic vulnerabilities.

As Jason Stanley argues, propaganda operates not only by distorting facts but by manipulating foundational values themselves to undermine citizens’ capacity for critical judgment.² Similarly, Jennifer Mercieca identifies the deliberate use of repetition, emotional appeals (fear, resentment), scapegoating, and “in-group vs out-group” dynamics as classic demagogic tools employed to activate grievance narratives and erode pluralistic norms.³

While much of America’s democratic backsliding has been driven by incremental opportunism and elite drift, the aftermath of 2016 marked a decisive inflection point. Trump’s ascent, and the open demonstration of institutional fragility, did not instantly produce a monolithic authoritarian bloc, but it did reveal unprecedented opportunities for more systematic intervention. Where previously oligarchic actors and far-right factions acted largely in parallel or by happenstance, convergence since 2016 has emboldened some among them to pursue concerted projects aimed at fundamentally altering American government. What began as opportunistic adaptation has, in crucial domains, matured into more deliberate campaigns for regime change, though these remain contested, internally fractured, and unevenly executed across the wider cryptoplutocracy. P2025 is a formidable and deliberate spearhead in that larger, more complex assault; understanding its specific architecture is vital to confronting the overall threat.

This work contends that what we are witnessing is beyond the erosion of democratic norms or an unintentional drift toward authoritarianism. Rather, through both intentional action by regime architects and cumulative opportunism among aligned elites, we see the partial construction of what might be called a cryptoplutocratic oligarchy: a concealed system of elite rule in which concentrated wealth and private networks exercise outsized influence over public institutions, often cloaked in legality or technocratic rationales.

Importantly, and contrary to conspiracy narratives, this new order does not require coordination among all beneficiaries. Instead, it arises from targeted interventions by select actors with direct regime ties or ideological agendas whose actions reshape rules and institutions in ways that systematically channel power upward. Many others profit incidentally or adaptively; as guardrails are dismantled and regulatory capacity eroded, even rivals find themselves benefiting from changed structures originally intended for narrower purposes.

It would be analytically unsound to attribute this transformation solely to top-down design or unified planning. Rather than describing an orchestrated cabal with singular purpose or foresight, it is more accurate, and more alarming, to see an ecosystem where opportunists seize levers left unguarded; where factions with divergent worldviews (plutocrats seeking deregulation; Christian Nationalists seeking cultural dominance; techno-libertarians seeking state retreat) nonetheless find their efforts converging around institutional erosion that benefits all who possess proximity to power.

1.1.1 The Drift–Design Feedback Loop: How Accident Becomes Architecture

One of the central arguments of this analysis is that P2025, and the broader authoritarian threat, cannot be reduced either to pure opportunism or to a master-planned conspiracy. Instead, this analysis reveals a hybrid causal model, in which opportunistic drift among elites creates vulnerabilities and precedents, while deliberate design by more ambitious actors seizes these openings to lock in advantage.

This recursive relationship forms a feedback loop: each instance of unchecked drift (a regulatory rollback here, a rhetorical escalation there) lowers institutional guardrails, making it easier for subsequent actors to convert ad hoc advantage into intentional architecture. As these interventions accumulate and reinforce each other, they enable more systematic campaigns—sometimes loosely coordinated, sometimes simply convergent—that begin to look like grand strategy at scale.

By explicitly theorizing this drift–design dynamic, we avoid both naïve conspiracy theorizing (in which everything is top-down) and wishful thinking about self-correcting “normal politics.” What we see instead is a process in which accident breeds ambition, and ambition hardens accident into new institutional realities.

This feedback model helps explain how apparent instability within the coalition, alliances marked as much by rivalry as by cooperation, has nonetheless produced functional integration and escalating systemic vulnerability over time. To understand why these dynamics persist despite their internal contradictions, we must examine how this coalition actually operates on the ground. The resilience of this coalition thus lies not in ideological unity but in its shared antagonism toward pluralistic democracy and public accountability, a convergence that enables cumulative institutional erosion. Yet beneath this functional alliance, unresolved frictions remain.

1.2 The Opportunistic Coalition: Factions, Frictions, and Functional Convergence

These underlying tensions, the fault lines within the cryptoplutocratic coalition, are often masked by surface-level cooperation but persist as sources of instability and potential reversal. This analysis rejects any claim of universal conspiracy among elites; rather, it traces how targeted interventions by key actors can generate systemic outcomes whose benefits radiate far beyond their original architects. The architecture yields an emergent cryptoplutocracy, neither an accident nor historical inevitability but neither always attributable to centralized planning. It emerges at the intersection where deliberate design meets convergent self-interest, a zone where chaos can serve elite ambitions as effectively as order.

Despite these deep frictions and divergent endgames, the coalition’s functional convergence is undeniable. In practice, each faction finds short-term benefit in eroding institutional guardrails, even when their ultimate visions for society are incompatible. For instance, deregulatory plutocrats may accept culture-war assaults on public education so long as it clears the way for privatization; Christian Nationalists may tolerate corporate self-dealing so long as their moral priorities are advanced through executive action. This ecosystem of mutual tolerance, sometimes coordinated but often simply parallel, explains how broad assaults on independent institutions can proceed even in the absence of unified strategy.

This process yields an opportunistic ecosystem, not an orchestrated grand design, in which each group pushes its preferred levers while benefiting from weakened resistance across the board. In other words, prior to 2016, America’s slide toward oligarchic governance was largely an emergent property of unchecked self-interest and institutional drift, a politics of accident more than design. After 2016, however, convergence among key actors produced new opportunities for bolder intervention: not a unified conspiracy, but a strategic escalation, a willingness among certain factions to pursue regime change with greater intent and tactical focus than ever before.

1.2.1 Fault Lines in the Cryptoplutocratic Coalition

While P2025’s ascendancy is often portrayed (and may be perceived) as the product of an unstoppable right-wing juggernaut, the reality beneath the surface is more unstable and internally conflicted. The coalition that advances authoritarian capture in the U.S. is a marriage of convenience among factions whose ultimate goals and core values are often at odds.

On one side stand plutocrats and economic elites, whose principal objective is to dismantle regulatory and redistributive structures that impede capital accumulation. Their interest in government is largely negative: to shrink its scope, defang oversight, and secure favorable conditions for private enrichment. On another side are Christian Nationalists and cultural reactionaries, who seek to repurpose state power to enforce their regressive vision of moral and social order, regardless of the expense to market freedoms or individual autonomy. Techno-libertarians, meanwhile, are motivated by a faith in disruption and a suspicion of bureaucracy; they crave state retrenchment but are wary of sectarian or reactionary social control.

Each faction sees short-term advantage in weakening institutional guardrails, even if their long-term projects may diverge or even conflict; a problem they are willing to defer. As a result, moments of functional convergence often mask deep frictions beneath the surface.

These contradictions manifest in policy debates over surveillance, reproductive rights, education, or corporate subsidies—any area where one faction’s priorities threaten another’s red lines. For example, plutocrats may bristle at culture war crusades that risk alienating global markets or skilled labor; Christian Nationalists may resent deregulatory moves that undercut their preferred forms of social control; techno-libertarians may recoil from surveillance expansions or populist economic interventions.

The coalition’s greatest strength, its ability to coordinate opportunistic assaults on democratic institutions, is also its Achilles’ heel. As authoritarian capture advances and governing becomes more than an oppositional project, these fault lines are likely to widen. Scandals, policy overreach, or effective resistance can exacerbate internal mistrust and expose vulnerabilities for democratic actors to exploit.

Understanding these fracture points does not diminish the threat posed by the coalition; rather, it reveals that its current dominance is contingent and reversible. Recognizing, and strategically exploiting, these contradictions is essential for any project aiming not just to resist authoritarian capture but to build a more resilient democratic order.

1.3 The Semiotics of Inversion: Language as Architecture

P2025 is a masterclass of inversion, doublespeak, and projection. The document itself, often cloaked in bureaucratic or pseudo-academic prose that can appear ponderous, is nonetheless strategically potent in its radical intent. It is not aimed at convincing those operating with high levels of critical thinking, nuanced understanding of history, or commitment to pluralistic democratic norms, because, simply, it would fail to convince under any level of intellectual scrutiny. The effect of this rhetoric is to activate and solidify a base that already shares or is susceptible to its pervasive grievance narrative and simplistic enemy-construction and at seducing those disillusioned by perceived institutional failures with simplistic, authoritarian “solutions” disguised as pragmatic common sense.

The semiotic framework deployed by the extreme right functions explicitly to render the unacceptable legitimate, even virtuous, by twisting the language of shared values into a semantic smokescreen that serves their singular purpose of ideological capture. Their language is revealed as objectively deceptive through its demonstrable internal contradictions, its stark deviation from established semantic norms, and its consistent employment of logical fallacies, all serving to mask an agenda at odds with its proclaimed intentions. Each subsequent section will show how these rhetorical inversions are not mere semantic flourishes but serve as blueprints for concrete institutional capture.

1.3.1 The Perversion of “Freedom” and “Liberty”: From Self-Governance to Unfettered Elite Power

The terms “liberty” and “freedom” have long served as symbolic pillars of American democracy, a direct repudiation of monarchy and aristocracy while championing pluralism. Yet in the opportunistic hands of P2025’s coalition, particularly as post-2016 alliances have grown more assertive, to frame these revered concepts as misunderstood is to miss their strategic function as tools of selective reengineering. They are deliberately and selectively reengineered to serve disparate elite interests; appropriated and weaponized rhetorically so that their operational meaning diverges sharply from their historical roots.⁵ Here again, the distortion is less the work of unified doctrine than the product of competing factions repurposing foundational language to rationalize self-serving policy aims.

Under P2025’s opportunistic logic, “freedom” becomes license for preferred groups while justifying expanded state power against others, a dual move that reveals not ideological coherence but an adaptive strategy: each faction bends the language to serve its own priorities (whether corporate or moral deregulation), even when those priorities are fundamentally at odds. This is a classic case where language is retooled to mask anti-democratic ends behind constitutional rhetoric,⁶ betraying the actual and intended meanings of these foundational concepts. This redefinition is crucial for the oligarchic project. “Freedom from government interference” becomes a bludgeon against the very agencies (the EPA, the SEC, the CFPB) that place checks on corporate power and protect the public from predatory behavior. It is freedom for polluters, for financial speculators, and for monopolies, achieved at the cost of the public’s freedom to live in a safe and fair society.

For example, actions taken under the banner of restoring “freedom,” such as mass detentions with minimal due process, echo what Stanley identifies as propaganda’s power to distort shared values so thoroughly that objectively anti-democratic policies appear legitimate or even virtuous.⁷

Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely—what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.'

P2025, p. 3

For the far right, “liberty” is framed as freedom from government interference for their preferred activities and groups, while at the same time advocating for government power to enforce their vision of what people “ought” to do (e.g. in family structure, education, speech) and limiting individual autonomy for others (e.g. reproductive rights, voting rights).

This rhetorical inversion is now operationalized at scale. In April 2025 alone, ICE, with expanded powers granted by Trump executive order,⁸ conducted a six-day sweep in Florida resulting in over 1,100 arrests.⁹ These actions were justified under the banner of restoring “freedom” for Americans, but in practice mean unchecked state power deployed against immigrant communities. This model is being rapidly scaled nationwide through over 400 new agreements empowering local law enforcement to act as federal immigration agents.¹⁰ The language of liberty now masks mass detentions and removals with minimal due process, a far cry from its historical meaning.

This selective deployment is not evidence of philosophical consistency but of ad hoc coalition-building: what appears as principle is more often a shifting patchwork, with each component group appropriating “freedom” as needed, to shield capital from oversight here, to justify coercion over disfavored minorities there.

Simultaneously, new DOJ regulations restore federal authority to subpoena journalists’ records,¹¹ rolling back Biden-era press protections under the guise of fighting leaks that “undermine President Trump’s policies.” This weaponizes state power against critical journalism while claiming to defend constitutional freedom, in a troubling reversal of decades-old First Amendment norms.

The intense focus on “dismantling the administrative state” (P2025, Promise #2, p. 6) is framed as returning “self-governance,” but the specific targets of this “promise” are regulatory agencies that protect public goods or constrain corporate power. This is “freedom” for certain economic actors, effectively granting unfettered power to corporate and monied interests by dismantling the very structures designed for public oversight and accountability.

Concrete impacts include eliminating climate science programs,¹² shutting down Energy Star,¹³ and gutting environmental/consumer protections, all under rhetoric of ending bureaucratic tyranny but delivering windfalls for aligned corporate interests in the fossil fuel, finance, technology, and private equity sectors, which form the economic core of the new oligarchy.

Our Constitution grants each of us the liberty to do not what we want, but what we ought.

P2025, p. 13

This imposed “ought” emanates directly from their specific, narrow, and self-serving ideological lens, standing in stark contrast to the historical understanding of liberty, espoused by the founders and developed through democratic tradition, as intrinsically tied to self-determination, broad democratic participation, and freedom from arbitrary power, whether wielded by the state, corporations, or any unaccountable entity. This P2025 invocation of “ought” lays bare their agenda: “liberty” is thus redefined not as universal freedom, but as a license for their adherents and a tool to impose conformity upon all others.

While P2025’s deployment of “freedom” and “liberty” may superficially echo core American ideals, the chasm between their operational intent and the foundational democratic meaning of these terms is vast.

1.3.2 “Judeo-Christian Values” as Political Weapon: The Idolatry of Power Over Principle

P2025 frequently invokes “Judeo-Christian values,” positioning itself (and its coalition partners) as the guardian of national morality, even as its actual agenda reflects the priorities not only of Christian Nationalists but also secular plutocrats whose interest in religious rhetoric is often transactional or instrumental. This alliance is less a meeting of shared faith than a pragmatic fusion, a fusion that has become more overt since Trump’s ascendancy revealed how much could be achieved through even partial cooperation: each faction gains cover for its ambitions by appropriating religious language to legitimize disparate (and sometimes conflicting) goals. As Whitehead and Perry demonstrate empirically, Christian Nationalism functions less as broad religious sentiment than as an exclusionary cultural framework idealizing fusion between a narrowly defined interpretation of Christianity and American civic life which excludes other interpretations and faiths.¹⁴

Far from elevating universal ethics or faith traditions broadly understood, this instrumentalization serves what Stewart calls an “idolatry of power over principle,” subordinating foundational constitutional commitments such as church-state separation.¹⁵

The very moral foundations of our society are in peril.

P2025, p. 1

Religious devotion and spirituality are the greatest sources of happiness

P2025, pp. 13-14

P2025’s ideological engine draws directly from decades-old Christian Nationalist blueprints. As ProPublica documents,¹⁶ Heritage Foundation figures behind P2025 have long partnered with dominionist leaders seeking to “rebuild civilization on the principles of the Bible” through policy blueprints like the Seven Mountain Mandate,¹⁷ which aim explicitly at capturing government, education, media, and law for a sectarian project, an ambition now openly reflected in P2025’s agenda.¹⁸

Yet even within this alliance, friction abounds: some techno-libertarians privately bristle at sectarian policy demands; certain business elites regard moralizing rhetoric as useful window dressing for deregulatory aims; Christian dominionists see market fundamentalism as subordinate to their vision for social order. What binds them is less theological consensus than mutual tolerance for whatever narratives best erode pluralistic constraint.

Despite these pronouncements of moral guardianship, and despite superficial displays of unity, a stark dichotomy emerges when rhetoric collides with policy reality. Far from demonstrating durable agreement among coalition partners, this dynamic exposes how claims to universal ethics mask a series of contingent bargains: religious language provides cover for exclusionary policies that primarily benefit factional insiders or economic patrons. The gap between proclaimed “Judeo-Christian values” and actual policy is conspicuous. While P2025 invokes religious language to justify its agenda, the policies it advances, such as dismantling public education in favor of Christian schooling,¹⁹ restricting reproductive rights, and criminalizing LGBTQ+ existence, reflect not universal compassion but a deliberate imposition of sectarian dogma.

The campaign to dismantle public education is not incidental; it echoes Christian Reconstructionist manuals calling to “eliminate public education by slowly dismantling it.”²⁰ Their push for religious charter schools seeks state funding for explicitly sectarian institutions, undermining both Establishment Clause precedent and pluralistic norms.²¹ Policies criminalizing LGBTQ+ existence or restricting reproductive rights are justified as upholding biblical morality but serve to impose a single sectarian, theological worldview through state power.

Their proclaimed values (compassion, justice, humility) stand in direct contradiction to policy outcomes and rhetoric manifesting as cruelty, retribution, consolidation of power, and demonization of out-groups, actions that clearly defy true Judeo-Christian principles such as equality, diversity, forgiveness, and grace. Their policies enshrine institutionalized corruption, hate, division, personal gain, and idolatry (of money, Trump). This instrumentalization, where allegiance to a political agenda, specific leaders, or material gain appears to supersede foundational religious ethics, aligns with the theological concept of idolatry: effectively prioritizing worldly power over foundational ethics.

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.

P2025, p. 4

This assertion performs a dual function: it casts their specific religious-political faction as the sole authentic voice of faith, uniquely besieged, while conveniently ignoring the foundational American principle of separation of church and state. Furthermore, it deflects scrutiny from the actual reason their agenda faces opposition: not because of unjust “persecution” (a gross exaggeration when facing legitimate democratic rejection of an imposed orthodoxy), but because the theocratic tendencies inherent in their project are antithetical to the pluralistic vision of America and lack universal ethical appeal. Such rhetoric intentionally blurs the foundational American principle of church-state separation, now threatened by Supreme Court moves to permit religious charter schools,²³ and reframes democratic resistance as persecution rather than legitimate pluralistic dissent.

Ultimately, P2025’s co-opting of religious language serves not to elevate genuine faith or universal ethics, but to provide a veneer of divine sanction for a divisive political agenda, thereby corroding authentic moral discourse and justifying policies rooted in power rather than principle.

1.3.3 “Merit” as a Smokescreen: Entrenching Privilege and Erasing History

P2025 leverages a pervasive anti-elite narrative, casting established institutions and expertise as corrupt or “woke,” implicitly positioning its own agenda (and that of its backers) as a return to “common sense” and meritocracy. In practice, especially since emboldened actors began leveraging post-2016 openings, the consequence is less meritocratic reform than an opportunistic purging apparatus: different factions target different forms of expertise for elimination according to their immediate interests (from regulatory science to higher education), producing outcomes that entrench privilege rather than distribute opportunity. This invocation of “merit” is profoundly deceptive as they serve less to promote genuine competence than, as Lewis’s research makes clear, to justify purges based on ideological loyalty rather than neutral expertise.²⁴ This tactic aligns with Moe’s findings that presidents often seek mechanisms like Schedule F specifically to override traditional merit protections in favor of personal or partisan control over federal agencies.²⁵ Academic analyses warn that such moves represent a regression toward spoils systems long discredited by reforms like the Pendleton Act, inviting patronage-driven appointments at the expense of effective governance.²⁶

Crucially, there is no master design at work here, just overlapping moves by actors motivated by different grievances or ambitions who find tactical advantage in attacking independent centers of knowledge or pathways into public service not already captured by their networks.

This attack on “merit” thus functions dually: it is both an assault on any pathway to influence outside oligarchic networks and a means for various internal factions—plutocratic donors here, culture warriors there—to eliminate pipelines whose loyalties might run counter to their respective agendas. The resulting system looks coherent only in hindsight; in fact it emerges through repeated interventions by actors who share little beyond hostility toward independent expertise and oversight.

Attacks on DEI initiatives under this rubric function primarily to preserve existing hierarchies under cover stories about fairness, a pattern consistent with both historical spoils systems and contemporary critiques about weaponized definitions of “merit” serving elite interests.

This redefinition of “merit“ is enforced through specific mechanisms designed to purge the civil service. The most significant of these is the proposed Schedule F, a reclassification designed to facilitate the mass removal of career professionals and their replacement with vetted loyalists based on ideological conformity rather than expertise. By redefining dissent as “abuse” of public trust, Schedule F provides the administrative tool to install a new counter-elite loyal to the authoritarian playbook. A full deconstruction of this mechanism follows in § 2.3.

A President who refuses to do so and uses his or her office to reimpose constitutional authority over federal policymaking can begin to correct decades of corruption and remove thousands of bureaucrats from the positions of public trust they have so long abused.

P2025, p. 9

Within this framework, “abuse” becomes synonymous with non-alignment. This loyalty-defined “merit” then serves as the primary rationale for aggressively attacking initiatives, affirmative action, and any historical education deemed “unpatriotic” or “divisive.” By dismantling DEI under the banner of “merit,” P2025 seeks to eliminate tools designed to counteract systemic biases, thereby protecting and reinforcing existing structures of privilege. Simultaneously, censoring accurate historical accounts serves to erase the context of inequality and injustice, undermining the very basis for equity-focused policy and preserving a sanitized narrative conducive to their worldview.

The attack on academic institutions has been especially aggressive and revealing. Nowhere is the “merit” smokescreen more evident than in the Trump administration’s multifaceted pressure campaign against Harvard University. At least eight federal investigations have targeted Harvard since March, 2025 spanning: DOJ civil rights probes into admissions/hiring practices; threats from DHS to revoke international student visas; HHS investigations into graduation ceremonies; and funding freezes totaling nearly $4 billion across NIH/CDC/DOD grants.²⁷

After initially capitulating under pressure, Harvard ultimately sued rather than accept demands that went far beyond legitimate civil rights enforcement, including banning students “hostile to American values,” quarterly audits on viewpoint diversity by department heads, mandatory abolition of all DEI offices/programs, and onerous annual compliance certifications enforced by threat of further financial ruin or loss of tax-exempt status, calling for structural changes that would effectively subordinate university governance to ongoing federal review. The threat was clear: comply or lose billions in research grants.²⁸

This is not about upholding genuine standards or promoting meritocratic excellence; it is about purging dissent and cementing loyalty to an imposed ideological order. That this assault focused on one of America’s oldest and wealthiest universities only underscores its broader goal of intimidating all independent centers of expertise into submission, a hallmark strategy for the cryptoplutocracy.

The pattern recurs across civil service hiring insofar as applicants must now submit statements demonstrating their alignment with Trump administration priorities (“patriotic Americans” who can explain which executive orders they support), making ideological conformity a precondition even for non-political roles.²⁹ Senior officials are required to be trained specifically on White House executive orders, not neutral public service. This yields not a return to meritocracy but its systematic inversion, a loyalty-based spoils system cloaked in meritocratic rhetoric yet antithetical both to expertise and constitutional governance.

Overt in its inherent contradiction, P2025 champions a supposed meritocracy while demanding absolute ideological conformity and loyalty tests, the very antithesis of genuine merit-based evaluation. The envisioned outcome is the installation of a new counter-elite, characterized not by diverse expertise or commitment to public service, but by ideological fealty, transactional ambition, and a readiness to execute the authoritarian playbook without question. Ultimately, the language of “merit” functions solely as a smokescreen, providing rhetorical cover for the project’s actual objectives: to entrench existing hierarchies of privilege and power, and to erase historical truths that challenge their ideological supremacy.

Across each ideological front (inverted liberty, weaponized religiosity, hollowed-out merit) the pattern repeats: coalition partners exploit moments when institutional guardrails have been weakened (often by prior opportunistic interventions), ratcheting up control through feedback loops rather than coordinated command. Their alliance persists only so long as mutual antagonism toward pluralism outweighs their divergent endgames.

This architecture should be understood not simply as the product of planning but also, and perhaps more dangerously, as the unintended consequence of compounding opportunisms within America’s fractured elite class.

1.3.4 “Individual Responsibility” as Abdication: Dismantling Collective Well-Being

This invocation of “individual responsibility,” like so many features of the post-2016 moment, reflects both opportunistic adaptation by disparate factions and a new willingness among some elites to systematically pursue privatization on an unprecedented scale. What was once a diffuse anti-government rhetoric has become a concerted strategy in certain domains: not through wholesale unity, but via converging efforts by libertarian ideologues, deregulatory capitalists, and social conservatives whose interests now overlap in their desire to roll back collective obligations.

While P2025 extols “individual responsibility,” frequently contrasting it favorably with perceived “government dependence” or “bureaucracy” to portray its vision as empowering and aligned with core American values of self-reliance, this rhetoric serves primarily, as classic social contract theorists would note, to justify dismantling collective frameworks essential for addressing systemic challenges beyond individual reach. Public administration scholars emphasize that robust state capacity is indispensable for confronting problems such as public health crises or environmental threats, issues demonstrably ill-suited to atomized solutions alone.³⁰ P2025’s view offers a false choice not just to divide, but to privatize. By framing healthcare, retirement, and education as purely individual concerns, it creates vast new markets for for-profit providers aligned with the regime. The dismantling of the public good is simultaneously the construction of new opportunities for private extraction.

By framing structural inequities or failures purely in terms of personal choice or family structure, while dismissing governmental responsibility, the project advances an abdication model antithetical both to empirical evidence about policy efficacy and foundational principles underpinning modern democracies.

They assert that all their nebulous, catastrophizing “problems…[are]…created by the crisis of marriage and the family” (P2025, p. 4), a problem of government policies supporting “’LGBTQ+ equity,’ subsidizing single-motherhood, disincentivizing work, and penalizing marriage” (P2025, p. 451) reframing systemic issues as individual or familial failings, and thereby absolving the state of any responsibility. The ideological contempt is plain, stating that these “policies should be repealed and replaced by policies that support the formation of stable, married, nuclear families” (P2025, p. 451). This complete abdication of state responsibility has real consequences: increased precarity for ordinary citizens, exacerbated inequalities, reduced accountability for corporate or systemic harms, and the erosion of the concept of public good.

Consider their approach to Title X, a federal program that provides reproductive health services to low-income families, serving nearly 4 million people annually (87% women) at reduced or no cost. In response, P2025 positions that “The Title X family planning program should be reframed with a focus on better education around fertility awareness and holistic family planning … [and] eliminate religious discrimination in grant selections and guarantee the right of conscience and religious freedom of health care workers and participants in the Title X program” (P2025, p. 491). The centrality of their “pro-life” ideology directly translates to greater restrictions on reproductive choice while permitting health care workers to effectively choose for whom they will withhold care based on their conformance to right wing religious ideology.

This ties directly back to their orchestrated agenda to hollow-out and reduce government to a shell, primarily serving the interests of the powerful.

Contrary to the false dichotomy P2025 seeks to impose, individual responsibility and collective governmental action are not mutually exclusive. Individual responsibility, in fact, coexists with, and is often enabled by, collective responsibility and effective governance that provides a foundation for individual and societal flourishing.

This perversion of “individual responsibility” ultimately undermines collective well-being and democratic solidarity by atomizing society and leaving individuals to face systemic challenges alone. P2025’s view offers a false choice to further divide, prevaricate, and advance their agenda.

1.3.5 “Heritage” and “Western Civilization” as Code: The Veneer for White Nationalism

P2025 frequently invokes terms such as “heritage,” “tradition,” and “Western civilization,” presenting these appeals as virtuous calls to preserve valuable cultural legacies and the nation’s “unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom” (P2025, p. 1). This seemingly innocuous language, however, functions as thinly veiled coded language—dog whistles—designed to activate racial anxieties and mobilize support for an exclusionary, ethno-nationalist agenda, a natural outcome of which is a growing, tacit acceptance of overt bias against out-groups.

The rhetorical turn toward “heritage” has deep roots in American politics but acquires new potency in an environment where factional opportunism post-2016 has encouraged more open appeals to exclusionary identity. Here again we see not a unified doctrine but parallel efforts by nativist groups and oligarchic actors, sometimes at odds elsewhere, to reengineer civic identity along lines that secure their respective forms of power.

Close examination reveals that the “heritage” championed by P2025 is not a comprehensive embrace of America’s complex and multicultural history at all, as they aim to portray. Instead, it is a highly selective, often mythologized narrative centered primarily on European, Anglo-Protestant origins, while systematically minimizing, distorting, or erasing the contributions and experiences of other groups, as well as inconvenient truths about historical injustice such as slavery, genocide, and systemic discrimination. Their vision of “Western civilization” is similarly narrow, presented as a monolithic, besieged entity rather than a diverse, evolving tradition marked by both triumphs and profound failures.

This selective historical framing is not accidental; it is essential for maintaining the coded message. To protect this sanitized narrative, P2025 advocates for aggressive censorship and control over education, attacking any curriculum or scholarship, often labeled “critical race theory” or “anti-American, ahistorical propaganda” (P2025, p. 8), that introduces complexity, acknowledges systemic inequities, or challenges the desired mythos of inherent national virtue tied to a specific cultural lineage.

This coded appeal to “heritage” provides a respectable veneer for ideologies rooted in white nationalism and supremacy. It allows proponents to advance discriminatory policies, such as draconian immigration restrictions, the dismantling of diversity initiatives (reframed as attacks on “merit”), and the imposition of nationalist educational mandates, under the seemingly neutral guise of cultural preservation or patriotism.

The harm inflicted by this rhetorical strategy, unchecked, is incalculable. It intentionally fosters division and racial resentment, undermines national unity grounded in shared democratic principles rather than ethnic identity, legitimizes exclusionary policies, and provides cover for ideologies fundamentally hostile to a pluralistic democracy. By weaponizing “heritage,” P2025 seeks to redefine Americanness along narrow ethno-cultural lines, betraying the nation’s stated ideals of equality and inclusion.

1.3.6 “Patriotism” Inverted: Loyalty to Ideology over Country and Constitution

In its most significant inversion yet, and one flagged repeatedly by Levitsky & Ziblatt, P2025 redefines patriotism itself not around shared constitutional principles but around unwavering allegiance specifically toward its own programmatic tenets/leaders.³¹ Dissenters are thus branded existential threats (“anti-American”), echoing Mercieca’s analysis wherein demagogic leadership demands personal/factional loyalty above all else, even above fidelity to law or country writ large.

The evolution of this inversion, from coded rhetoric about national greatness before 2016 to explicit demands for personal loyalty thereafter, underscores how convergence among key actors has emboldened more systematic attempts at symbolic capture. What once emerged from opportunistic drift has become a recurring feature of post-2016 right-wing coalition politics: selective unity when it comes to policing dissent or consolidating factional power under nationalist banners.

P2025’s appropriation of patriotism is immediate and brazen, beginning with its very title: “A Promise to America.” This ostensibly broad, inclusive framing attempts to equate its hyper-partisan, regressive agenda with the collective well-being of the nation itself. Yet, as the preceding deconstructions make clear, this is no promise to the diverse reality of America, but rather a narrowly targeted pledge for an exclusionary faction, a commitment to advancing the interests and imposing the ideology of a specific segment aligned with its far-right worldview, fundamentally at odds with the principles of pluralistic democracy.

This rhetorical sleight-of-hand, equating factional interest with national interest, is central to P2025’s inversion of patriotism. Genuine civic patriotism involves allegiance to the Constitution, to democratic principles, to the rule of law, and to the well-being of the entire populace, even when challenging specific government actions or leaders. P2025, however, recasts patriotism as demanding unwavering loyalty to its specific political program, its ideological tenets, and implicitly, its designated leaders.

This inversion becomes starkly evident in P2025’s systematic demonization of any opposition. Those who dissent from its agenda, who uphold alternative interpretations of American values, or who champion policies aimed at broader inclusivity or social justice are more than political adversaries, they are frequently branded as “anti-American” or enemies of the state. For instance, the P2025 Foreword explicitly calls to “defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad” (P2025, p. 2).

The incongruity of these claims lies in their circular logic: “America” and “patriotism” are defined exclusively through the lens of P2025’s ideology. Therefore, any deviation from, or critique of, that ideology is, by their definition, “anti-American.” This effectively transforms patriotism from a shared civic commitment into a narrow ideological litmus test, where loyalty to the faction is paramount, and fealty to the Constitution or democratic norms becomes secondary or irrelevant if it conflicts with the agenda. The “promise to America” is thus uncovered as a demand for America to conform to their “promise,” with dissenters cast out as traitors to a vision they never shared.

The tangible and devastating outcomes of prioritizing such ideological loyalty over actual competence and genuine civic duty have been repeatedly demonstrated. When allegiance to a partisan agenda becomes the primary qualification for public office, critical government agencies suffer catastrophic failures of leadership. We have witnessed individuals demonstrably unqualified by any objective measure of experience, expertise, or temperament being installed at the helms of vital institutions, from the Department of Defense, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Justice to the intelligence community and regulatory bodies overseeing public safety. The consequence is not merely inefficient governance, but active harm: agencies are run without the necessary competence to fulfill their missions, without empathy for the real-world impact of their decisions, and seemingly without any guiding moral or authentic patriotic conscience beyond unwavering servitude to the prevailing ideology. This systematic degradation of expertise in favor of ideological purity is a direct fruit of P2025’s inverted patriotism.

Further solidifying this inverted patriotism is the deliberate co-opting—indeed, the theft—of national symbols and foundational narratives. The American flag, the Constitution, and the figures of the Founding Fathers are no longer treated as common heritage belonging to all citizens, subject to diverse interpretation and reverence within a pluralistic democracy. Instead, they are monopolized and brandished as exclusive property of the P2025 faction, their meanings rigidly fixed to align with its narrow ideological commitments. The flag becomes a backdrop not for national unity but for partisan rallies demanding conformity. The Constitution is selectively quoted and radically reinterpreted to sanction predetermined outcomes, while its protections for minorities or its framework for checks and balances are ignored or undermined when inconvenient. Reverence for the founders is invoked to legitimize an agenda many of them would likely have found antithetical to their vision of a republic capable of evolution and reasoned debate. This symbolic capture aims to create an environment where to question the P2025 agenda is to appear to question America itself.

Ultimately, the version of “patriotism” promoted by P2025 is not an affirmation of constitutional loyalty, but its negation: it demands fealty to an exclusionary ideological project rather than to country or Constitution itself. It transforms civic virtue into blind factionalism, providing justification for suppressing dissent, purging expertise, and dismantling the very institutions designed for collective benefit. Far from strengthening the nation, this inverted patriotism directly leads to outcomes that make life demonstrably worse for the vast majority of Americans. By prioritizing ideological purity over competence, division over unity, and elite power over shared prosperity, it ensures governance characterized by incompetence, corruption, and indifference to widespread harm, inflicting damage even upon the very people cynically manipulated by appeals to a “patriotism” designed solely to serve the powerful and secure authoritarian control.

1.3.7 Manufacturing Enemies: “Woke,” “Globalist,” “Elite” as Tools of Division and Control

Complementing its strategy of inverting foundational values, which Stanley identifies as classic scapegoating through vague enemy archetypes, which serve primarily not as descriptive but consolidatory functions, mobilizing supporters through manufactured siege mentalities while delegitimizing opposition without substantive engagement.³² The proliferation of such enemy archetypes exemplifies how loosely aligned factions, sometimes acting independently, sometimes in ad hoc coordination, have learned since 2016 that manufacturing siege narratives delivers reciprocal benefits across the coalition: mobilizing supporters with divergent priorities under shared banners while evading accountability for the project’s real architects.

P2025 relies heavily on the manufacturing and relentless targeting of these designated groups. Terms like “woke,” “globalist,” and “elite” are wielded not as descriptive labels but as potent rhetorical weapons, essential for consolidating its base, discrediting opposition, and creating a justification structure for its authoritarian project. These are the phantom villains against whom P2025 defines its crusade.

This dynamic is reinforced by psychological research showing how elastic enemy labeling heightens polarization and in-group cohesion at the expense of both rational debate and social trust. Lacking stable or precise definitions, they function as infinitely adaptable containers for channeling fear, resentment, and suspicion.

• “Woke” is deployed as a catch-all pejorative, designed to ridicule and pathologize any awareness of social injustice, systemic inequality, or historical complexity. It is used to attack everything, from diversity initiatives and climate science to accurate historical education and LGBTQ+ rights, funding of NIH/NSF research domains, dismissing substantive issues through caricature and contempt. Its function is to shut down critical thinking about power structures and enforce conformity to regressive social hierarchies.
• “Globalist,” often laden with antisemitic dog whistles targeting figures like George Soros, is used to demonize international cooperation, cosmopolitan perspectives, and engagement with the wider world. It fosters an insular, grievance-based nationalism, providing cover for isolationist foreign policies and attacks on institutions promoting international law or human rights.
• “Elite” is perhaps the most cynically deployed term, representing a profound act of projection. The “elite“ targeted by P2025 are not the billionaire donors or corporate lobbyists funding the project itself. A project conceived, funded, and promoted by powerful lobbying groups, wealthy donors, and established political figures paradoxically frames itself as the champion of “the people” against a shadowy “elite.” The enemy “elite“ are the holders of non-commercial authority: tenured professors, career scientists, independent journalists, and judges. These are the figures whose power derives from expertise and credibility, not capital, and who therefore pose a direct threat to an oligarchic order that cannot withstand independent scrutiny. It is a tool to invalidate legitimate authority and expertise that challenges their narrative.

The strategic function of manufacturing these enemies is manifold. It creates powerful in-group cohesion by fostering a shared sense of siege and persecution among supporters, uniting them against common adversaries. It short-circuits substantive debate, as labeling an idea or person “woke,” “globalist,” or “elite” serves as an ad hominem dismissal, relieving P2025 proponents of the need to engage with actual arguments or evidence. This tactic also serves as a massive distraction engine, focusing public animosity on these fabricated threats while the project pursues its real agenda of consolidating power and restructuring society. Finally, the alleged danger posed by these internal and external enemies provides the pretext for radical, often authoritarian “solutions” presented as necessary acts of self-defense.

The corrosive impact of this enemy-manufacturing strategy on democratic society is dire. It drives extreme polarization, deliberately deepening societal fractures and eroding social trust. It normalizes paranoid thinking and conspiracy theories, replacing reasoned discourse with suspicion and accusation. It systematically undermines expertise and rational policy-making, fostering contempt for science, scholarship, and journalism. Furthermore, by designating entire groups of people as illegitimate or dangerous based on these vague labels, it creates a permissive environment for harassment, discrimination, and potentially violence, ultimately poisoning the well of democratic deliberation and mutual respect.

1.4 Beyond “Cultural Backlash”: The Instrumental Use of Grievance

A common explanation for the rise of right-wing populism in America and elsewhere focuses on “cultural backlash,” a reaction by segments of society against rapid demographic, social, or moral change. While cultural anxieties are undeniably real, this framework risks mistaking symptom for cause.

This analysis contends that cultural grievances do not operate independently; rather, they are systematically mobilized by elite actors as tools for assembling and energizing political coalitions. P2025 demonstrates how economic and political elites amplify narratives around race, gender, religion, and national identity, not necessarily out of personal conviction, but because such narratives serve as effective cover for deregulatory agendas, privatization, and upward redistribution of wealth.

By treating culture as an instrument rather than an autonomous driver, we see that “backlash” is less a spontaneous eruption than a managed , instrumentally mobilized resource deployed to justify policies that erode public goods and entrench oligarchic power. The “cryptoplutocratic” framework thus locates cultural conflict within a larger architecture of elite capture.

1.5 Engaging Counterarguments

No serious analysis can proceed without addressing the most common alternative explanations for P2025’s rise, each of which captures a partial truth but ultimately fails to account for the systemic logic revealed in this manuscript.

1.5.1 The “Sincere Ideology” View

Some defenders assert that P2025 is simply a radical, but good-faith expression of conservative constitutionalism or Christian morality. But this position willfully ignores both the empirical record and internal contradictions of the movement’s leadership.

The claim to Christian morality, embodied in Christian nationalism, is less about universal ethics than about providing a religious veneer for white supremacy and exclusionary ethno-nationalism (see §1.3.2). As demonstrated throughout this chapter, the invocation of “Judeo-Christian values” functions primarily as an instrument for consolidating power and rationalizing exclusion; its proponents routinely violate foundational religious teachings in service of personal gain, retribution, or political loyalty.

Similarly, the constitutional rhetoric deployed by P2025 does not aim at restoring Madisonian checks or republican virtue, it is systematically inverted to justify executive overreach, regulatory demolition, and minority rule (see §1.3). At every turn, what is presented as principle dissolves under scrutiny into self-interest: policies that benefit only factional insiders and economic patrons are cloaked in appeals to liberty or tradition.

Empirically, these movements’ leaders have demonstrated time and again that ideology is subordinate to expediency. The revolving door between elite donors, business interests, and movement institutions; the eagerness to abandon principle when it threatens power; and their willingness to embrace any narrative, however contradictory, that advances exclusion all point not to sincerity but to opportunistic instrumentalization.

1.5.2 The “Incompetence/Chaos” View

A second interpretation is that P2025’s destructive impact results from incompetence or chaos rather than design, that Trump and his appointees are too unfit or inept to engineer capture intentionally.

While incompetence is real (and often spectacular), this reading mistakes visible disarray for structural effect. As documented in Chapter 2 and throughout our case files on agency decapitation (§2.4), apparent chaos serves as a smokescreen: it distracts from, and even enables, the decimation entrusted to these actors by elite interests behind the scenes.

Many key appointments are not selected despite their unfitness but precisely because their incapacity ensures loyalty and prevents resistance to oligarchic objectives; they function as shock troops rather than administrators. What appears as administrative malfunction often accelerates purges of expertise, disables oversight mechanisms (§2.9), and clears pathways for asset stripping or regulatory sabotage, outcomes consistently aligned with cryptoplutocratic consolidation rather than random blundering.

In short: incompetence is weaponized. The regime profits from chaos because chaos clears space for capture.

1.5.3 The “Populist Backlash” View

A third explanation foregrounds genuine populist revolt: that these phenomena are driven primarily by backlash against cultural elites, with economic factors being secondary.

As discussed in §1.4 (“Beyond ‘Cultural Backlash’”), this view confuses mobilization strategy with root cause. Cultural grievances are real, but they are systematically amplified and managed by elite actors who benefit most from policies of deregulation, privatization, and upward wealth transfer.

P2025 demonstrates how narratives around race, gender roles, religion, and national identity are deployed less out of authentic conviction than because they serve as effective tools for building coalitions that will defend oligarchic interests, even at significant cost to their own rank-and-file supporters (§1.3.4–§1.3.6).

Time after time (on voting rights (Chapter 4), regulatory policy (Chapter 2), economic redistribution (Chapter 8)) the winners are not ordinary citizens alienated by cultural change but those already atop America’s economic hierarchy. Populist rhetoric enables minority rule; it does not drive it.

1.5.4 The “Unenforceable Wish List” View

While P2025 is technically a private-sector document, its significance lies not in its formal legal status but in its function as a coordinating blueprint for aligned actors across government, advocacy, and industry. Its recommendations are not idle aspirations: they have been systematically operationalized through executive orders, regulatory changes, personnel decisions, and coordinated legislative campaigns. The document serves as both a permission structure and an implementation guide for those seeking to accelerate capture. The analysis here traces the concrete mechanisms—purges, agency closures, data centralization—that move these “wishes” from paper to practice.

1.5.5 The “Just Partisan Hardball” View

Aggressive partisanship is not new to American politics. What distinguishes the architecture described here is the systemic nature of the assault: it targets not only policies but the foundational rules and institutions that mediate power—civil service protections, judicial independence, voting rights enforcement, and public oversight. The scale and coordination of these attacks go far beyond “hardball” or policy reversals; they seek to permanently alter the terrain of democratic competition so that future opposition, even if majoritarian, cannot easily reverse or contest elite rule.

1.5.6 The “Just Good-Faith Federalism” View

The federalist argument has long been invoked as a shield for both legitimate local autonomy and for disenfranchisement or exclusionary control. P2025’s approach is neither principled nor consistent federalism; it is instrumental manipulation of governance structures to entrench exclusion. Where state control can be used to restrict access (through voter roll purges, ID requirements, gerrymandering), it is celebrated; where state resistance threatens regime objectives (as with recalcitrant election officials or robust direct-democracy provisions), federal coercion or preemption is deployed instead.

Taken together, these alternative narratives explain only fragments of the current crisis, or serve as convenient myths for those invested in denying its systemic character. Only by foregrounding the architecture of capture, the fusion of opportunistic drift with deliberate design, can we accurately diagnose both what has been lost and what must be rebuilt.

1.6 Conclusion: The Re-Engineered Moral Landscape and its Democratic Toll

This chapter has dissected the core components of P2025’s ideological engine: a systematic inversion of foundational American values and the relentless manufacturing of internal enemies. We have seen how “freedom” is perverted to mean license for elite power; how “Judeo-Christian values” are repurposed as a justification for exclusion and consolidating power, betraying core ethical principles; how “merit” becomes a smokescreen for entrenching privilege and loyalty; how “individual responsibility” serves as a pretext for dismantling collective well-being; how “heritage” is coded to advance ethno-nationalism; and how “patriotism” is twisted into blind allegiance to faction over country. Complementing these inversions, phantom enemies (the “woke,” the “globalist,” the “elite”) are conjured to fuel division, shut down debate, and justify authoritarian measures.

These are not isolated rhetorical stunts nor simply coincidental echoes; rather, they constitute interconnected elements forged through both longstanding elite opportunism and the more systematic campaigns enabled by post-2016 convergence among major factions. While this framework falls short of total coherence or command-and-control coordination, it nonetheless achieves functional integration, a playbook recognizable from other periods when accident gave way to ambition in democratic decline. Critically, this insidious engine does not operate in a vacuum. Its reach and normalizing effect are massively amplified by a specific, powerful ecosystem of right-wing media outlets, social media platforms driven by engagement-maximizing algorithms, and coordinated disinformation networks; mechanisms we will explore in detail later in this analysis. The constant repetition and saturation through these channels are essential to implanting these inversions into the public consciousness.

While the specific targets and language of P2025 are contemporary, this weaponization of meaning itself, this inversion of foundational values to serve autocratic ends, echoes a long and dark lineage of authoritarian movements throughout history, reminding us that the current threat, while acute, is a recognizable pattern of democratic subversion.

What distinguishes P2025’s assault beyond its content is its method: a deliberately Orwellian project of semiotic inversion, in which the very words “freedom,“ “merit,“ and “patriotism“ are systematically emptied of their traditional meaning and redeployed as instruments of exclusion and control. This is not accidental; it is the architecture by which consent is manufactured and dissent pathologized.

The ultimate goal extends far beyond mere policy shifts. It represents an attempt to fundamentally re-engineer America’s civic and moral landscape, to replace pluralism with enforced conformity, critical thinking with mandated belief, and democratic accountability with authoritarian control. This assault on shared values provides the rationale for the attacks on democratic institutions and processes detailed in the chapters that follow. The systematic inversion and weaponization of American values described here enable attacks on law, bureaucracy, information systems, civil society institutions, and ultimately democratic self-government itself. Understanding this engine is the first, essential step in recognizing and resisting the multifaceted capture strategy P2025 represents.

Having mapped P2025’s ideological engine, the warping of language into tools of capture, we now turn to its practical machinery: how these permission structures are embedded in law, bureaucracy, information control, and public-private enrichment schemes that threaten democracy at its root.

Achieving radical clarity on P2025’s architecture is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for democratic defense. While this deconstruction provides the analytical foundation, a comprehensive societal immunization will require translating these insights into diverse strategies—narrative, affective, educational, and community-based—that can engage citizens across all levels of society and rebuild a shared commitment to democratic values. This broader reconstructive effort forms the core mission of the subsequent work on “Constitutional Reconstruction.”