In “A Note On ‘Project 2025’” in the Mandate for Leadership, Dans writes: “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.” What does “cultural Marxism” mean to the Heritage Foundation? One page on its site describes “cultural Marxism” as a “totalitarian, soul-destroying ideology.” Further, “Cloaking their goals under the pretense of social justice, these cultural Marxists want to distort America’s history and dismantle its very foundations.”
Very well, it seems cultural Marxism is quite bad indeed, but what is its definition according to the Heritage Foundation? Another page on its site gets closer to a definition: cultural Marxism “emerged in Europe in the middle of last century, combined with some deeply contemporary American pathogens, such as community organizing, the manipulation of queer and gender theory and, above all, racial grievances, and the use of international networks and social media.” (The right also uses international networks and social media.)
Note the loaded language, for example the “pathogen” of community organizing (?). Perhaps community organizing is a pathogen because Barack Obama is well-known for being a community organizer. What did Obama do as a community organizer? According to his web site, he established “a job training program, a college-prep tutoring program, and a tenants’ rights organization.” By implication, therefore, such activities are Marxist, have something to do with culture, and threaten the “very foundations” of America. How is setting up a job training program totalitarian and soul-destroying? Is the totalitarian and soul-destroying form of community organizing what involves the grass-roots at the neighborhood level, while it is not totalitarian and soul-destroying when a community of well-funded conservative groups organize to produce Project 2025?
(Regarding the term “long march,” that harkens back to the history of China—Dans is implying that our institutions have been infiltrated by communists.)
As for “manipulation of queer and gender theory,” an obvious question is: isn’t anyone free to offer their own theories regarding queerness and gender? Is it not impossible in a free society for such theorizing to be manipulated, presumably by a select group of gatekeepers? (Perhaps these shadowy gatekeepers are academics who are not conservative, even though there is no shortage of conservative institutions of higher learning?) Perhaps such gatekeeping is possible because “freedom and liberty” are “under siege,” even though conservatives, liberals, leftists, feminists, anti-feminists, alt-rightists, racists, anti-racists, communists, fascists, theists, atheists, gender theorists of all stripes, and so on are all able to engage in free and open debate in the United States? It seems that to the Heritage Foundation and its affiliates, “freedom and liberty” are under threat when people who have views that are not aligned with those of the Heritage Foundation are free to express themselves and influence thought.
(As an aside, what is the difference between “deeply contemporary” and “contemporary?” Is it possible to be barely contemporary?)
A hint of what the Heritage Foundation considers “cultural Marxism” is found in the words “emerged in Europe in the middle of last century.” This is presumably a reference to the Frankfurt School, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “a tiny group of Jewish philosophers who fled Germany in the 1930s and set up shop at Columbia University in New York City” and “devised an unorthodox form of ‘Marxism’ that took aim at American society’s culture, rather than its economic system.” According to many on the right, this small group of philosophers has had influence far beyond what is normally ascribed to schools of thought. (Structuralism, post-structuralism, existentialism, logical positivism, language philosophy, and other schools of twentieth-century thought presumably are not so totalitarian and soul-destroying as cultural Marxism.) Note that the Frankfurt school adopted an unorthodox form of Marxism. Marxism typically concerns itself with class and economics, not so much culture. In other words, the Frankfurt school took some ideas and ran with them rather than become some insidious (and highly influential) infiltrators bent on distorting (aka interpreting) history and dismantling America’s very foundations.
As for racial grievances, how are they manifestations of cultural Marxism, when America’s racial issues go back further in history than the twentieth century, and when racial issues involve much more than one school of philosophy that is little known outside the philosophy departments of universities?
The Southern Poverty Law Center calls cultural Marxism “the newest intellectual bugaboo on the radical right.” The Heritage Foundation seems to think that this little-known group of philosophers has some sort of vast influence through our institutions.
As for the federal government’s being weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, this is presumably in reference to the government’s pursuit of January 6 criminals, anti-abortion activists, and Donald Trump for having violated the law. Another possibility of what Dans means by a weaponized government is that the federal government has made some modest efforts to challenge some speech on social media. Dans is presumably not referring to the time when President Trump asked Twitter to take down a tweet by Chrissy Teigen in which she called Trump a “pussy ass bitch.” (For more background on the right’s grievance with those who would fight disinformation, see, for example, two articles from the Washington Post: “How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts” and “A deeply ironic reinforcement of right-wing misinformation.”)
Arguably, the federal government bureaucracy is a behemoth, but it should be noted that Project 2025 does not exactly seek to “deconstruct the Administrative State,” as Dans claims. Rather, Project 2025 seeks to remake the federal government via mass firings of federal employees and to “flood the zone with conservatives” whose main qualification is adherence to an ideology rather than experience or expertise.
Note that so far it has taken approximately 900 words to examine the strange, often paranoid assumptions underlying just a few words found in Dan’s note and the Heritage Society’s web pages. It can take longer to explain propagandistic content than it takes to purvey it.
As for who Paul Dans is, the Heritage Foundation has a bio that states that he is “an attorney” who “has extensive experience in high-stakes commercial litigation. His 20 years of practice include work at several large international law firms in New York City from 1997-2012, prior to founding his own law firm.” Presumably those international firms were not globalist, a term that Heritage uses as a negative.
On a bio page provided by the Republican National Lawyers Association web site, Dans claims that he was the “intellectual architect of the Chevron outtakes case, a landmark litigation wherein Chevron subpoenaed documentary movie outtakes as evidence to unravel a $27 billion fraud being perpetrated against the company and its executives in Ecuador.” The outtakes case is long and complicated. As the Stanford Journal of Complex Litigation puts it: “The dispute is now considered one of the nastiest legal contests in memory, a spectacle almost as ugly as the pollution that prompted it.” A lawyer who played a prominent role in a win in Ecuador against Chevron for pollution-related damages is Steven Donziger, who was subject to an aggressive legal counterattack by Chevron’s lawyers. Donzinger ended up facing a prison sentence and disbarment after outtakes of a documentary film about the case showed him engaged in what has been characterized as unethical conduct. For example, as Reuters puts it, the outtakes show him “discussing tactics to pressure a local judge into ruling in…favor” of the plaintiffs and against Chevron.
The Stanford journal article recounts that “Donziger has maintained that Chevron is motivated not merely by fear of an adverse judgment but by a desire ‘to destroy the very idea that indigenous people can bring an environmental lawsuit against an oil company.’ In 2008, a Chevron lobbyist in Washington told Newsweek, ‘We can’t let little countries screw around with big companies like this.’” Where Dans and a multinational corporation such as Chevron stand in regards to the “globalism bad” claim is a matter for conjecture.
In his Republican National Lawyers Association bio, Dans also states that he has long been involved in conservative politics, going back as far as his involvement in law school with the Federalist Society, which is led by Leonard Leo.
Dans has a long history of conservative advocacy, including on behalf of Chevron, so it is not surprising that he has played such a central role in Project 2025.
