It is not often that a volume of policy recommendations makes national news. Yet this is what happened during the 2024 election cycle in the United States, when the innocuously named Project 2025, a set of ultra-right-wing proposals assembled by the Heritage Foundation, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, and roughly a dozen like-minded groups, became the topic of conversation on the internet, and in barber shops, beauty salons, churches, synagogues and mosques across the land. The brainchild of Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Project 2025 outlines a series of measures that conservative groups felt the second Trump administration should implement to restructure the federal government and consolidate executive power.
Since the dossier’s release in 2022, Democrats have cited its key points to argue that a second Trump administration would be an unmitigated disaster for most Americans. In the face of backlash, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and his vice-presidential nominee, JD Vance, distanced themselves from the manifesto on the campaign trail. Following Trump’s victory, several Project 2025 contributors are slated to join the Trump administration. Roberts crowed that Trump’s initial rejection of Project 2025 was within expectation.
“Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America,” (the original subtitle read “Burning Down”) was published just days after Trump’s reelection. It is Roberts’ first book and Vice President Vance wrote the foreword. In light of Trump’s victory, Roberts’ book could be read as both a valedictory statement and treatise describing the future that we may soon come to inhabit. In addition, since this book was authored by a self-styled intellectual leader of the ascendant MAGA movement, one would be justified in expecting a book that describes the philosophical underpinnings of Project 2025’s expansive rejection of the status quo.
“Dawn’s Early Light” is all these things, but what is most surprising about this book is the intellectual and cultural hubris that suffuses it. Roberts oscillates between two approaches in his book — either he advances supposedly commonsensical ideas that are ill-defined and unsupported by analysis or, more perniciously, he articulates a vision of an ideal America that excludes most Americans.
Roberts’ message is, in the end, resolutely anti-American. According to him there is but one way to structure your household, one way to pray (and one God to worship), only one way to live. The result is a book that reads less like an intellectual argument for the necessity of Trump’s MAGA movement, and more like an instructional manual for the already converted.
Roberts begins his book with a labored analogy about fire. He argues that in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, “our country went up in flames,” as protesters committed acts of “intentional arson.” He then describes the tragedy of the 2020 wildfires in California, which torched “more than 4 million acres of our most beautiful forests.” Afterward, he describes the people who benefit from these fires:
“In fact, all those fires were connected. They spring from a conspiracy against nature—against ordered, civilized societies, against common sense and normal people—orchestrated by a network of political, corporate and cultural elites who share a set of interests quite apart from those of ordinary Americans.”
Much of the book proceeds in this manner, with prejudiced statements sheathed in appeals to normalcy. It’s the kind of book that works only if you read it very quickly without pausing to take in the meaning of the words.
Yet if you do, the runaway train derails.
For example: who exactly is opposed to “ordered, civilized societies”? What precisely does “common sense” mean? Who are the “normal people”? Doesn’t Roberts himself qualify as a member of the political and cultural elite? After all, he is an academic with a Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas who heads a prominent right-wing think tank who, if this book is any indication, has a keen fondness for Greek mythology, Aristotle, Mahler, and and various other Western thinkers and artists who are constantly referenced on college syllabi. Also, who, exactly, are the “ordinary Americans” (and, most importantly, who are the “abnormal” ones)?
It is not hard to guess who Roberts believes qualifies as “normal” and “ordinary,” and he eventually makes it clear — essentially, those who hold the same views as him. His justification for this idea amounts to nothing more than an inelegant feat of faux theological reasoning: these people are normal because God says they are. Hard to argue with that! This idea is dubious and troubling, but at least he has the temerity to state it. However, Roberts often hints at his most incendiary views rather than asserting them outright.
He demonstrates this insidious sleight of hand when he compares a young heterosexual couple to a similar couple in 1980. He rightly notes that it was far easier back then to afford college, a house, car, child care and health care. Yet his proposed remedies — a grab bag of policy tweaks like “supply-side housing,” more drilling, and easing FDA rules on importing European baby formula, barely address the scope of the crisis.
Meanwhile, Democrats under President Joe Biden advanced more comprehensive policy solutions. Biden’s signature Build Back Better plan would have capped child care costs, made free prekindergarten universal, standardized 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, made community college free, and expanded health care access. Republicans — and Roberts’ own Heritage Foundation — fought against this until it failed.
At first blush, it is hard to square Roberts’ evident concern for struggling young families with his seeming unwillingness to support federal legislation that would make their lives easier.
Roberts isn’t necessarily opposed to these policies; two years ago the Heritage Foundation even expanded their own parental leave offer for staffers. Still, he refuses to endorse sweeping legislation, and instead insists that communities should care for those in crisis. This is Roberts’ gambit — he is not opposed to government assistance, but rather ensuring that it does not extend to the wrong people. According to Roberts, the right people are those who attend church, get married early (in heterosexual partnerships, of course), have many children, refuse to divorce and conform to conservative gender roles. Roberts’ prejudiced and blinkered perspective is even more galling when placed in the context of his own life.
In the chapter titled “Family-First Fusionism” he recounts that when he was 4 his parents divorced; afterward, he and his siblings lived with his mother, who struggled to make ends meet. Eventually, they “moved into subsidized housing and started getting free lunches at school.” Roberts and his family benefited from these programs though his mom was a divorcee, and his family are Cajuns (Roberts writes at length about how Cajuns have been mistreated and marginalized throughout their time in America). In other words, Roberts did not come from the right kind of family that would qualify for the “normal” and “ordinary” labels he so uses so liberally throughout his book.
Roberts’ message is, in the end, resolutely anti-American. According to him there is but one way to structure your household, one way to pray (and one God to worship), only one way to live.
Roberts also wages a stealth battle against cultural pluralism and American cultural triumphs. Throughout “Dawn’s Early Light” he liberally references Greek and Roman philosophy and literature. We hear a great deal about Virgil, Homer, The Aeneid and “The Iliad,” and the many lessons these writers and works can impart to us now. Roberts, like many contemporary conservative thinkers, is explicit about his love of “classical education”:
“Classical education steeps students in the great works of literature, philosophy, history and science—what the poet Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” Instead of the Critical Race Theory and Marxist claptrap, children learn about Greece and Rome, William Shakespere and the Renaissance, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson and the glory of the American founding.”
Roberts omits a vast and quintessentially American corpus of knowledge in his description of “the best which was thought and said.” Roberts never explicitly says that he does not value the contributions of American writers of color, for example, but his exclusion of these artists is notable. As usual, Roberts constructs a facile binary that includes his favored cultural ideas and products on one side, and everything else on the other.
In this case, he creates a catchall category of Roberts-disapproved cultural products that he labels “Critical Race Theory and Marxist claptrap” — presumably this category includes many works (by people of color and others) that have shaped how many Americans think of themselves and their place in this country. Roberts also pointedly ignores landmark American cultural innovations in the arts. He waxes poetic about Austrian composer Mahler, but says nothing about America’s startling run of musical innovation, including gospel, the blues, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and hip-hop. It’s not surprising that Roberts doesn’t address these cultural breakthroughs. All of these genres were developed by Black Americans and could have only happened in America precisely because of its diversity and because everyday Americans reached beyond the rigid binary dictates of thinkers like Roberts to create art that merged discordant styles.
“Dawn’s Early Light” makes clear the most important distinction between the way that the right and left perceive the American project. Roberts and his ilk believe that “true Americans” are a God-appointed monoculture — possessing the same cultural beliefs, speaking the same language, and, most importantly, praying to the same Almighty.
The left, despite its various problems and capitulations, still believes in the idea of America as the greatest experiment in all of human history, a place where people from every corner of the globe — who pray to every god imaginable — can live and attempt to forge a common culture that is capacious enough to contain all of us. Roberts wants a country filled with Christian automatons, despite his personal history with the authoritarian imperatives of leaders who wish to punish and erase differences. If we truly value what this country can be — if we cherish a future where difference is celebrated, not smothered — then we must stand and defeat his ideas at every turn. Our greatest experiment deserves nothing less.
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